Chapter 27
Chapter
Twenty-Seven
Iwake slowly.
That's unusual. Since I was turned, waking has been instant. One moment dormant, the next alert. No transition. No gradual drift toward consciousness.
But tonight is different. Tonight I surface in stages, awareness seeping in like water through sand. First, the weight of blankets. Then the coolness of sheets against my bare skin. Then the solid presence of a body pressed against my back, an arm draped over my waist, breath stirring my hair.
Maximus.
The memories flood back. His mouth on mine. His hands everywhere. The desperate, consuming need that drove us both past the point of control. The things we did to each other, the sounds we made, the way he looked at me like I was the only thing in the universe that mattered.
I'm in his bed. In his arms. Naked and sore in ways that make me want to smile.
I don't move. Don't want to break whatever spell is holding this moment together.
Outside the blackout curtains, evening has fallen.
I can feel it in my bones, that vampire awareness of the sun's position.
We slept through the entire day, tangled together, dead to the world in the most literal sense.
His arm tightens around my waist. He's awake. I can tell by the shift in his breathing, the subtle tension in his muscles.
"Stop pretending to sleep," he murmurs against my hair.
"I wasn't pretending. I was savoring."
"Savoring what?"
"This." I press back against him, feeling every inch of his body against mine. "Waking up with you."
He makes a sound low in his throat. Something between a growl and a sigh. His hand splays across my stomach, pulling me closer, and I feel him hard against my lower back.
"Good evening," I say. "Or night. Whatever."
"Evening." His lips find the curve of my neck, press a soft kiss there. "How do you feel?"
"Like I was thoroughly wrecked by an ancient vampire lord."
"Wrecked." I can hear the smile in his voice. "That's the word you're going with?"
"Would you prefer ravished? Debauched? Absolutely ruined for anyone else?"
"I like that last one."
I turn in his arms, rolling to face him. The movement presses us together in new ways, and I watch his eyes darken.
He looks different in the dim light of evening. Softer, somehow. The hard edges that usually define him have blurred. His hair is mussed, falling across his forehead in a way I've never seen. There are scratches on his shoulders from my nails, already fading but still visible.
I did that. I marked him.
We stare at each other for a long moment. This close, I can see the gray of his eyes, the faint lines around them that suggest centuries of expression, even if his face hasn't aged. I can see the vulnerability he usually hides, the softness he buries under command and control.
"Last night was..." I trail off, not sure how to finish.
"Yes." He traces a finger along my jaw. "It was."
"Is it always like that?"
"No." His expression is serious now. "I've never had that."
"What was that?"
He considers the question. His thumb brushes across my lower lip, a gesture that's becoming familiar. "I think that was what happens when you stop holding back. When you let yourself feel everything instead of just the physical."
I understand what he means. Last night wasn't just bodies. It was everything we'd been denying, everything we'd been afraid of, finally given permission to exist.
"I want more," I tell him.
"More?"
"Not just..." I gesture vaguely between us. "I want to know you. Really know you. Everything you've been hiding behind those walls of yours."
Something flickers in his expression. Caution, maybe. Or hope. "That's a lot to ask."
"I know." I prop myself up on my elbow. "But I'm asking anyway."
He's quiet for a long moment. I watch him wrestle with something.
"There's a way," he says finally. "For you to know me. All of me. But it's... intimate. More intimate than what we did last night, in some ways."
"More intimate than sex?"
"For vampires, blood is..." He pauses, searching for words. "It's not just sustenance. It's connection. When you drink from someone, you taste everything they are. Their essence. Their history. Their emotions. Nothing is hidden."
I remember the way he bit me last night. The flood of sensation, the pleasure that bordered on pain.
"You drank from me," I say slowly. "What did you taste?"
His expression softens. "I tasted your strength. Your fire. Your fear and your hope and that stubborn defiance that made me notice you in the first place." His thumb traces my lower lip again. "I tasted how much you want me. How much you trust me, despite everything. It was... intoxicating."
"I want that." The words come out before I can second-guess them. "I want to taste you. Know you the way you know me now."
"Celeste." He cups my face in both hands, making sure I'm looking at him.
"I need you to understand what you're asking.
When you drink from me, you'll taste everything.
All of it. The good and the bad. Over six hundred years of pain and violence and loneliness.
I won't be able to hide any of it from you. "
"I don't want you to hide from me." I turn my head, press a kiss to his palm. "I want to know all of you. Even the parts you think I won't like."
He's quiet for a long moment.
Then he tilts his head back, baring his throat.
The gesture steals my breath.
I understand its significance without being told. For a vampire of his age and power, with his history of enslavement, offering his throat is an act of profound trust. He's making himself vulnerable in a way he probably hasn't since before Luciano took him.
"You're sure?" I whisper.
"I'm sure." His voice is steady, but I can feel the tension in his body. "I want you to know me. All of me. I'm tired of hiding."
I move over him, straddling his hips, feeling him stir beneath me. That can wait. This first.
I lower my mouth to his throat.
His skin is cool against my lips, smooth over the taut muscle beneath. I can smell him. My fangs extend without conscious thought, responding to proximity and desire.
I press a kiss to his pulse point. Another to the hollow of his throat. Another to the place where his jaw meets his neck.
"Whenever you're ready," he says. His voice is steady, but his hands have come up to grip my hips, fingers digging in.
I bite.
His blood fills my mouth, and the world explodes.
It's nothing like drinking from a blood bag. Nothing like the stolen sips of contaminated blood that kept me alive before Maximus found me. This is something else entirely. This is drinking lightning. Drinking fire. Drinking centuries of existence compressed into liquid form.
I taste his age first. The sheer weight of six hundred years, each one leaving its mark. Layer upon layer of experience, of memory, of emotion. More than any human could ever contain.
Then the emotions hit me.
Grief, old and deep, like a river that's been flowing so long it's carved canyons into stone.
Loneliness so profound it makes my chest ache, centuries of going through the motions of existence without ever truly living.
The cold patience of survival, of endurance, of continuing forward simply because the alternative is unthinkable.
I taste his human life. A boy in medieval Italy, learning to fight, learning to lead. The men he trained, the battles he survived, the family he left behind. Letters he never got to send. A mother he never saw again.
I taste Luciano. The taking. The century and a half of enslavement.
The violation of being used, controlled, broken down, and rebuilt into something he didn't recognize.
The hatred that kept him alive when everything else had been stripped away.
The moment he finally killed his maker and felt nothing but hollow silence where satisfaction should have been.
I taste Catherine. The first person he loved after Luciano.
The hope she represented, the future he'd started to imagine.
Then the horror of watching her go feral, of realizing he would have to kill her himself.
The blade through her heart. The centuries of guilt that followed, the vow to never let himself care that much again.
I taste the walls he built. Brick by brick, year by year. The careful distance he maintained from everyone. The way he convinced himself that power was enough, that control was safety, that love was just another word for vulnerability.
And beneath all of it, running through everything like veins of gold through dark rock: warmth. New warmth. Tentative and fragile and fierce.
The warmth has a name.
Me.
I taste how he felt when he first saw me in that alley. Irritation mixed with curiosity mixed with something he couldn't name. The moment he decided to save me. The moment he realized he wanted to keep me.
I taste the night he watched me on the security feeds during my first solo mission.
The way his chest tightened every time I moved out of frame.
The realization that he was compromised, that he cared, that all his centuries of walls had been breached by a fledgling with eight months of experience and a stubborn streak a mile wide.
I taste his fear. Fear of losing me. Fear of caring. Fear of opening himself up to pain after so long being numb.
I taste his desire. The way he's wanted me, fought against wanting me, surrendered to wanting me. The way every touch between us has burned itself into his memory.
And I taste, unmistakably, irrevocably, his love.
He loves me.
It's not just an emotion. It's a certainty. Bone-deep. Blood-deep. The truest thing he's felt in centuries. He loves me with a desperation that terrifies him and a tenderness that surprises him and a totality that has remade him from the inside out.
I pull back, licking the wound closed, and stare down at him.
My face is wet. Tears, I realize. I didn't know vampires could cry.