Chapter Three Lysander #2
“You’ll get over it.”
It comes out contentious, the way it always does—like she’s primed for a fight. Maybe that’s why he likes her so much. He knows what it’s like to move through life with his fists up.
She’s still in uniform, same as the first day she came to Mercy Lodge. Plain brown coat. Hideous pleated skirt. Her stockings ripped. He lifts her tie and lets it ribbon through his fingers. A thrill shoots through him when she shivers.
“I thought I told you not to come here in Hornbeam colors.”
He hears her heart kick into a trot. “I left in a hurry.”
She’s nervous. He can smell it on her, pheromone thick. Her gaze has drifted back to the trees. He closes her tie in his fist and gives it a single firm tug. Caught off-balance, she teeters a step toward him.
“You’re distracted,” he accuses her.
“I’m cold. It’s freezing out here.”
He clocks the lie instantly. She’s prettiest when she’s lying.
All her tells come screaming to the surface.
Her toes twist in. She worries at her fingers.
Sometimes—if it’s a particularly terrible lie—the tips of her ears turn pink.
It’s so perfectly human of her it makes his whole chest hurt.
Makes him think about carving open a vein and drinking the color from her cheeks.
“Invite me inside,” she says. “You’re being rude.”
He can’t help grinning. “Am I?”
“Yes.”
She’s an eternal paradox, her heart thundering even as she doles out orders. Pushing him so he’ll push back. Provoking him the way he provokes her.
They’ve been doing this dance for months.
Knowing it’ll infuriate her, he makes a deliberate show of offering her his arm, like they’re members of the English ton. Dallying in the gardens. Flirting with scandal. Tempting fate. All he does is tempt fate whenever she’s around.
“Would you do me the honor of accompanying me indoors?”
“Is that supposed to be a British accent?”
“There’s no pleasing you,” he says, dropping the affect. “Come inside. There’s dancing.”
She makes a face. “I can’t picture you dancing.”
He likes that—the idea that she pictures him. Back home in Little Hill. Under a broad yellow sun. Dragging thoughts of him around like her own personal thundercloud.
“You should,” he says. “I’m very good at it.”
A quiet snap draws his attention away. The sound came from the woods. He listens, and there it is again—not the quiet pad of a wolf, nor the heavy snuff of a bear, but the crack of a twig giving way beneath a boot.
There’s someone else out there.
“You were followed.”
Or she brought someone , says a voice in his head. But she wouldn’t. The rules are clear, and neither one of them has ever crossed the lines.
“You’re right,” says Shea, and her voice has gone thin. “Dancing sounds perfect.”
She pivots on a dime, making her way toward a wide-open door on the lower level. His hand snaps out and he captures her by the elbow, halting her escape.
“Not yet.”
His eyes remain trained on the woods. He’d been sure— so sure —that something in the trees had been staring back at him just then.
But the heartbeat is gone. He’s not worried.
Whoever it is, the Gravewood will take care of them.
Slowly, he slides his gaze toward Shea. The slow-healing arch of his most recent bite peeks out from beneath her sleeve.
His hunger salivates inside him. He chokes it down.
“You’re shaking.”
“It’s cold,” she lies. Her ears are crimson.
He releases her, lifting his chin toward the door. “After you, then.”
The lower level of Mercy Lodge is thronged in bodies.
Lysander and Shea enter through the pool room, enveloped at once in the thump of bass and the smack of chlorine.
The air is thick and warm. It gathers in drips along the stone as they weave out into the exterior hall, past the old pinball arcade and through the crowded salon.
As usual, some of tonight’s attendees are Mercy, some aren’t.
The smell of blood stings the air, freely given.
Mercy hopefuls, paying due, or else blood bunnies, offering up a vein.
He doesn’t like it down here. He can’t tolerate the lights, the crowd, the noise. He allows it because it keeps his inferiors happy, and he needs them happy. Needs them loyal. Needs them true. Still, it was better outside, when it was just the two of them.
Just the two of them, and the watcher in the woods.
With his thoughts on the Gravewood, he veers out into the smoke-stung hall. Shea tails after him, sticking close. The hallway is low and thin, the stone archway pressing low as a dungeon. Shea ducks in nearer as they head up the stairs and back out into the great hall, veering toward the ballroom.
Here, the walls are lined in vast Grecian columns.
The tables have been pushed out to the sides, chairs stacked alongside them.
A set of wide double doors hang open, letting the night air slip in off the veranda.
Leaves scuttle across the carpet, nudged on by the wind.
Once, the room was used for weddings. Now it sits empty.
A husk, like everything else in the Gravewood.
“You liar,” Shea accuses him the moment they’re alone. “You didn’t even want to dance.”
“I did.” He makes a show of looking all around. “I do. A ballroom is the perfect place.”
“We can’t even hear the music.”
It isn’t true—he can hear it just fine. A heavy rock song thuds in the air like a heartbeat.
Directly in front of him, Shea’s nervousness hasn’t gone away.
She toys with the edge of her sleeve, the scabbed-over mark of an incisor peeking out at him.
That hard whip of hunger lashes him anew. He does what he can to ignore it.
“Something happened today,” he says. “You’re upset.”
She blinks up at him, surprised. This isn’t a part of their game. They don’t ask personal questions. They don’t dig . It’s a business transaction, this thing between them. Quid pro quo. Something for something. They’re not supposed to think of each other after. In the daylight.
He thinks about Shea Parker all the time.
“What do you care?” she asks, wary.
“You’re no fun when you’re distracted.”
“And you’re not nice when you’re hungry.”
He regards her through a watery slant of moonlight. She stares back, her toes turned in. Off in the distance, the music stops. The crowd jeers. The sound is muted, punched through by the wind.
When they speak, they do so at the same time.
“Dance with me—”
“You should feed.”
An abrupt silence follows, interrupted only by the far-off call of an owl. He feels, curiously, as if he’s been pierced with a dart. The sting sets in as Shea presses on, her face all the way red.
“It’s just that we’re going to waste hours beating around the bush like this.”
“Like this ,” he echoes.
“Pretending like we don’t both know what I’m here for.”
He stuffs his fists into his pockets and traces a slow arc around her. She turns with him, her heart hammering hard. He knows better than to give in to his more basic urges. It makes something inside him coil up tight, pacing like this. It wakens something predatory. Something fanged.
It would be so easy to lunge.
“I have no batteries for you tonight,” he says. “You weren’t due back until next weekend. Our supply runner doesn’t come through until Friday.”
“That’s okay.” The sound of her swallow is devastating. “I don’t need anything from you.”
“That’s not the game we play.”
“We can play a new one.” She pushes up her sleeve, letting the moonlight slip over her wrist. An unbroken patch of skin gleams up at him. “Just for tonight.”
“Don’t push me,” he growls.
“I’m not pushing you, Lys. I’m offering.”
Deep inside his head, he feels a door click shut. He’s all instinct—primal and on edge, hunger lancing through him. He moves without thinking, pinning her until her wrist is the only thing left between them.
“Don’t,” he repeats through gritted teeth, “push me.”
She ignores him. “Drink.”
“I don’t want to.” He wanted to dance. He wanted starlight and moonglow.
He wanted a single fucking moment of make-believe.
What good is she if she won’t play along?
What purpose does she serve, if all she does is make a monster out of him?
She’s no better than Paris, pushing and pushing and pushing until he snaps.
“Screw your twisted rules, Oliver,” she whispers. “Bite me.”
Oliver. He hates it when she calls him that. It’s not the name he gave her. It’s a family name. It brings up things he’d rather it didn’t. The smell of blood, the smack of a backhand, the bite of rings into his cheek. Get back up, Oliver. Stop sniveling and fight.
This, in the end, is what snaps his resolve.
There’s a blackout rush. A final, brutal lash of hunger.
Her skin breaks so beautifully beneath his bite.
Her blood is nectar in his throat. The night hums. He is drunk on the taste of her, inebriated by the sounds she makes.
Her fractured breathing. Her racing heart. Her soft, dreamlike sigh.
He pulls away before he’s ready, exerting control. Pretending he had any to begin with. Pressing his tongue to a last trickle of blood at his lip, he lifts his eyes to Shea’s. The change in her is palpable. It guts him every time, though he’d never admit it. Not even under pain of torture.
Her eyes are liquid, pupils blown. Beneath her ribs, her heart beats languorously. She looks as though she’s underwater—out of reach. She is always just out of reach. He wonders if that’s what makes the poets write. If they’re all composing sonnets to the things they can’t touch.
She’s watching him, too, riveted.
“You’re beautiful,” she whispers, reaching for his cheek.
He catches her wrist before she can touch him, holding her at bay. He knows what she sees right after a feed. He knows what he looks like to her. A boy, clear-eyed and rosy-cheeked, all traces of atrocity chased away by the fleeting succor of her blood.
It won’t last.
By the time she comes to her senses, he’ll be a monster again.
Sometimes, in his worst moments, he wishes she’d stop coming to see him—wishes she’d vanish without a trace. Nothing at all would be easier than this. Having her in parasitic swallows, in desperate half measures. Thinking of her in the daytime.
“It’s so pretty in here,” she murmurs, unblinking. “You were right, this is the perfect place to dance.”
“I don’t want to dance anymore.”
“Why not?”
“I changed my mind.”
Down in the belly of the hotel, there’s a disturbance. A ripple in the current. The chaos ebbs. The music cuts out, replaced by shouting. Shea doesn’t take any notice of it, and so neither does he. Fights break out all the time at Mercy Ridge. Cyrus will handle it.
“You’re no fun like this,” Shea tells him.
“Fed?”
“All moral and overthink-y.”
“Overthink-y.”
“Yes, see?” She reaches for him with her free hand, blood still trickling red and wet down her wrist. Gently, she presses a thumb between his brow. “You’ve got thunderclouds, right here.”
“I don’t know what that means.”
She lets her hand drop. “It’s something my mom used to tell my dad.”
She looks sad, suddenly, and he doesn’t know how to undo it. Gently—like he’s catching a butterfly—he crooks a finger under her chin. Her breath hitches as he draws her face up to his. Not for the first time, he thinks about kissing her.
He’s not given the chance.
“Would you do something for me,” she whispers, “if I asked you a favor?”
It’s a dangerous question. Not because she’s asking—not because it’s a violation of their agreement—but because of the answer, already on his tongue. Anything.
“Lysander!” Cyrus appears in the doorway, looking harassed. His eyes flick disapprovingly over Shea. “Well, that’s one mystery solved. No one knew where you went.”
“You’re a regular detective,” Lysander snaps. “Leave.”
“Wish I could. Choi and I took care of your envoy issue, but we caught a watchdog snooping around the property on our way back in.”
Lysander is still looking at Shea as Cyrus says it, which is the only reason he sees the flicker of guilt on her face. It’s gone as soon as it appeared.
The problem isn’t that he sees it—the problem is Cyrus does, too.
“It’s her,” he says. “She brought a soldier to Mercy Ridge.”