Chapter 1 #2
“Nadia’s trail went cold,” he says. “Marcellus pulled the trackers back.”
“I bet he’s not happy about it.”
“Marcellus is happy when the perimeter is airtight and nobody makes decisions without consulting him first.”
“So never.”
His chest moves against my back.
The chain sits in my pocket.
The light behind the shutters shifts from white to amber to nothing.
He leans over to press his mouth where he presses it every morning. Ritual. Cool lips tracing the line where the chain usually sits.
Oh, shit! He’s about to notice.
He goes very still. His mouth stays at my throat. Not moving. Then, slowly, he sits up.
His eyes go to the empty space where the chain used to lie.
“Celeste.”
“I’ve been going outside during the day. Every morning since the battle. Lying next to you, waiting for you to go under, then slipping out,” I say abruptly.
The best way through it is to do it.
He holds still.
“Dormancy can’t compel me anymore. It hasn’t been able to since before the last battle.”
Silence.
“My power changed. It’s not just moving things anymore.
I can feel inside things now, past the surface.
I can tell what they’re made of. Where they’d break.
” I stop. “Living things, too. I reached for a bird this morning without meaning to. Mapped the fault line before I could pull back. That’s why I’ve been going outside.
I didn’t want to practice in a building full of people I…
” I stop again. “I was going to tell you once I understood it.”
His jaw is set. His eyes are flat.
I reach into my pocket and set the chain on the sheets between us.
“This morning, Konstantin was there. He’d been watching me practice.
” I keep my eyes on his. “He was faster than anything I’ve trained against. I threw everything I had and he stepped to the side and took the ring before I could track the movement.
He said he’d been there all six mornings.
That he could have taken me on any of them. He wanted me to know he chose not to.”
Maximus stands up.
He reaches for the pants on the chair beside the bed. Steps into them. Pulls them up. Boots next, by the footboard.
A flash of emotion ripples through. Deeper than fury. Then the control slams back and he’s just still.
He crosses to the window and stands with his back to me.
A long silence.
“Six mornings,” he says, finally. “He was in those woods for six mornings.”
His voice is very quiet. The quietest I’ve heard it. “While you were out there alone. While every vampire in this compound was dormant, and there was no one to hear you and no way to reach me.”
I let that sit. The answer is on the sheets between us.
He turns from the window. Profile against the glass.
“You claim you were going to tell me.” His eyes slide just past mine. “When you understood it.”
“That was the plan.”
“After how many more mornings, Celeste? After what?”
I don’t answer that. I can’t.
“He was close enough to touch you, and you couldn’t stop him, and you were alone out there, and I had no idea.” His voice stays quiet. “What if he had taken you? Killed you?”
I stay silent.
“And the ring.” He turns fully. The muscle at his temple jumps. The crescent mark on his chest is dim. Barely pulsing. The two hearts that beat in sync between us faint in it. “You understand what that ring means to me.”
“I know.”
“I gave you that ring.” A pause. “I don’t give pieces of myself away lightly.” The flatness in his voice is worse than volume. “And now Konstantin has it. Because you were out there alone.”
“I know.”
“Do you?” He crosses back toward the bed but doesn’t sit. “Because from where I’m standing, you made a decision about what I could handle, and you made it alone. You kept it for six days, and the only reason you’re telling me now is that the choice was taken from you.”
“Yes,” I say. “That’s true.”
He picks up the chain from the sheets. Looks at it for a long time. Then he sets it on the nightstand.
He pulls his shirt from the back of the chair. Draws it over his head. The mark disappears under dark fabric.
He goes to the door.
“Maximus.”
He stops. He stays facing away.
“I’m sorry,” I say.
A pause. Long enough that I count it. His hand on the door frame.
“I am too,” he says.
He walks into the corridor.
I wait for his footsteps to turn toward the conference room. They don’t. They go the other direction, down the main hall toward the front entrance. I hear the main entrance opening, the wards parting, and then speed. Into the night.
He’s gone. I sit in the dark. He left. He actually left. The bond thins.
I feel it happen. The full connection reducing to thread.
He’s moving at speed. The direction of him pulls southwest, toward the city, and then the distance takes over and I stop being able to track him specifically.
What’s left is a thread instead of a connection.
The pulse still present, just smaller, the way a voice goes when the person speaking it moves away down a hallway and keeps moving.
I look at the gold on the nightstand.
I stand up.
The room feels too empty. I straighten the sheets. My hands need to be doing something. I pick it up off the nightstand and hold it in my palm.
I put it in my pocket.
The compound is waking around me. Footsteps in the east wing. Voices starting low and building.
I move through the corridor and out to the east garden.
I find the bench at the garden’s edge and sit.
The night passes. I don’t track it.
Dawn comes. The sky goes from dark to gray to amber.
I watch it with the awareness I’ve been trying not to think too hard about.
I could keep watching. The light won’t hurt me.
Dormancy can’t take me. I have this particular freedom and I’ve been using it to keep secrets from the man who gave me his father’s ring.
The compound goes quiet all at once. Dormancy sweeps through the building. Everyone under. The sun clears the tree line. Full daylight.
Congratulations. You’re the last vampire standing. Again.
His end of the thread stays lit. Faint, but conscious. The compound is silent, the sun is up, and he’s still awake somewhere across the city. He holds for a long time. Then the thread dims. He’s under.
I sit in the sunlight and think about six mornings.
Every one of them the same. Lying still while he went under, feeling his hand go slack at my throat, counting to sixty before I moved. The times I came back inside and lay down beside him and chose silence. I was going to tell him once I understood it. That moment kept not coming.
The only reason you’re telling me now is that the choice was taken from you. That’s what he said.
He wasn’t wrong.
The city noise drifts over the compound walls. Traffic. The low mechanical hum of Atlanta going about its daylight business, completely indifferent to the fact that I’m sitting in a garden cataloging my own failures.
Get it together.
I take the chain out of my pocket again. Hold it.
He’s been the one who stays. Every time. Feet planted, hands open, standing exactly where I left him. He kept choosing me every time I gave him a reason not to.
And I kept letting him do that work because it felt safer than doing it myself.
He put his father’s ring on a chain at my throat and asked me to carry it. He claimed me. In front of a room full of vampires.
I haven’t done the same thing back. Not once.
I need to fix this.
Not as an apology or atonement, but because it’s true and it’s overdue.
The afternoon turns. The light shifts west.
Hours before dusk, I feel him surface.
Specific and unmistakable. His end brightens. The thread thickens but doesn’t complete. He’s awake. Several miles away, but awake.
I wonder how long he will be gone. I stay on the bench and wait.