6. Posy
— ? —
Posy
I can’t stop thinking about the portrait.
My grandmother painted him. Decades ago, maybe longer, she sat down with oils and captured the face of the vampire sleeping in her hidden study. She labeled it FOR POSY and tucked it into a journal, waiting for a granddaughter she’d barely been allowed to meet.
How did she know what he looked like? Dreams, Valerian said. Echoes that bled through the seal to those sensitive enough to receive them.
My grandmother dreamed of him for years. And then she painted him for me.
I’m alone in the library with the portrait in my lap, tracing the brushstrokes with a fingertip, when I notice a detail in the corner of the painting.
A symbol, worked into the shadowy background.
The same symbol from the black iron box.
The same one that appears in my grandmother’s notes, circled and annotated with questions she never got to answer.
The seal’s anchor point. If damaged, the binding weakens.
I flip through the journal, hunting for more, but the relevant pages run in circles, referencing things she clearly understood and never explained. She was writing for herself, not for the granddaughter who’d one day need a manual.
One passage stops me cold.
V. showed me the anchor point in a dream last night.
He didn’t mean to. I could feel his surprise when I appeared in his memory.
But I saw it clearly: a mark on his body, just over his heart.
The seal is tied to him physically. That’s why the box holds him.
That’s why the binding can’t be broken from the outside.
A mark on his body. Over his heart.
I think about the glimpses I’ve gotten of him, and the fact that I have never once seen his chest clearly, because I was always too busy fleeing or on fire.
If there’s a mark, if my grandmother saw the thing that anchors this whole curse, I need to see it.
The thought sends heat flooding through me, and I shove it down ruthlessly. This is research. If the information happens to be located on Valerian’s bare chest, that’s an unfortunate necessity. I’m a professional. I can handle this.
I gather the journal and go looking for him.
The manor is quiet in the late afternoon, dust drifting through the sunbeams. The kitchen is empty, though the pantry has been organized with military precision, cans in ranks, which answers the question of what a banned king does with his time. The foyer, the parlor, the dining room. Empty.
I find him on the second floor, in a bedroom I haven’t explored.
The door is ajar, and water is running somewhere beyond it.
I step inside, past heavy furniture and a four-poster draped in dusty velvet, toward a door on the far side of the room that’s open a crack, steam curling through the gap, candlelight moving beyond it.
He found candles somewhere. The electricity in this wing is a rumor at best.
I should knock. I should call out. That’s what a reasonable person does.
I drift closer instead, and I go, and I know exactly what’s towing me and decline to name it, and raise my hand to knock, and the door swings open under my knuckles.
I freeze.
The bathroom is old-world elegance, marble floor, pedestal sink, a massive claw-foot tub beneath a window full of dying afternoon light. Candles line every surface, their flames swaying in the steam.
And in the tub, in all that gold light, is Valerian.
He’s leaning back against the curved porcelain, eyes closed, head tilted to rest on the rim. Water laps at his chest. His bare chest, finally, fully visible, and oh god, my grandmother’s notes did not prepare me for this.
Marble. That’s the first useless word my brain supplies, pale skin over muscle that looks quarried rather than grown, and it’s wrong, because marble doesn’t have water sliding over it in slow silver lines, and marble doesn’t breathe.
His shoulders are broad. His arms are roped with lean strength where they rest along the tub’s edge.
And his chest is a landscape I want to explore with my hands, and then with my mouth, and I am holding a dead woman’s journal while I think it.
There’s a scar over his heart. The anchor. It’s there, a starburst of silver-white just left of his sternum, and I should be cataloging it for research purposes.
I am not cataloging it for research purposes.
I’m staring at the candlelight moving on his wet skin.
At the water caught in the dark hair that trails down his stomach and vanishes under the surface.
At his throat, bared by the tilt of his head, and his hair clinging to his neck in wet waves, and the small, unbearable fact that he looks peaceful, this man who apologizes for wanting things.
He’s beautiful. Not handsome. Beautiful, museum-grade, the sort that belongs in fever dreams and the paperbacks I hide under my mattress. My mouth has gone dry. My thighs press together, and I hate them for it, and I don’t stop them.
His eyes open.
Silver finds amber across the steam, and I watch surprise become recognition become heat. He doesn’t move to cover himself. Doesn’t startle, doesn’t look away.
He watches me watching him.
“Posy. Did you need something?” My name in his mouth is a slow hand down my spine.
I should apologize. I should flee. What I do is stand there with the journal clutched to my chest and my face burning hotter than every candle in the room combined.
“The door was open,” I hear myself say.
“It was.”
“I didn’t mean to… I was looking for you, and I heard water, and…”
“You found me.”
His lips curve. Not quite a smile. A knowing, patient, infuriating almost-smile. He’s reading every thought I’m failing to suppress, and enjoying the text.
“The journal,” I manage, holding it up between us. “My grandmother wrote about a mark. On your chest. She said it’s the anchor point for the seal, and I needed to see…”
“You needed to see my chest.”
The way he says it pools low in my belly.
“For research,” I say weakly.
“Academically. I see.” He shifts in the water, and a hip bone surfaces briefly, and I lose my place in my own sentence. “Would you like a closer look?”
Yes. God, yes. I want to cross this bathroom and trace that scar with my fingertips and find out whether the rest of him is as cool as his hands.
“I should go,” I say instead.
“Should you?”
“Yes. You’re bathing. I’m intruding. I should…”
“You are not intruding.” He sits up, water streaming off his chest, and the sound I make will be denied under oath. “You are welcome to look, little bride. I am yours, after all.”
“You need to stop saying that.”
“Saying what?”
“That you’re mine. That I’m welcome to…” I gesture helplessly at his general existence. “It’s not helping.”
“Not helping with what?”
He knows exactly what. It’s all over the glint in his eyes, the suppressed amusement at the corners of his mouth. He’s enjoying this. The king of another world is enjoying watching me disintegrate in his bathroom doorway.
“Do you not have locks in your realm?” I demand, reaching for irritation because it’s the only rope left.
“We have doors.” He tilts his head. “We simply do not fear what’s on the other side.”
“Well, in this realm, we lock the bathroom door when we’re naked!”
“Why is that?”
“Because… privacy! Boundaries!”
“Because you are afraid of what might happen if someone walked in?”
I open my mouth. Close it. Open it again.
He rises from the water.
I should look away. Every instinct of self-preservation is screaming at me to look away and salvage a shred of dignity.
I don’t look away.
Water cascades off him as he stands, down his chest, over the ridges of his stomach.
The tub’s edge catches him mid-thigh and preserves the last technicality of modesty, and it doesn’t matter, because I can see enough.
The V of muscle arrowing down from his hips.
The dark trail leading to places I am absolutely not thinking about while thinking about them in high definition.
He’s built on a scale my library books would call mythological, and my library books would be underselling it.
“You’ve forgotten to look away,” he observes.
“I’m…” It comes out a croak. “Leaving. Right now. I’m leaving.”
My feet don’t move.
He steps out of the tub. Water pools on the marble. He makes no move toward a towel, just stands there, bare and unashamed, watching me.
“The mark you asked about,” he says, conversational, as if we’re discussing weather and not standing in a steam-filled room with all of him on display. “It’s here.”
He touches the scar over his heart, traces the starburst edges with two fingers, and I watch his hand move on his own skin and feel the heat of it slide straight through me.
“The seal is bound to my flesh. Carved into me when the curse was cast. Your grandmother understood. It’s why the box had to contain my physical form. The anchor exists within me, not outside.”
“That’s…” I swallow hard. “That’s useful information.”
“Is it?”
“Yes. For the research. The curse-breaking research. Which I’m doing. Academically.”
“Purely academically,” he echoes, and takes a step toward me, and I take a step back, and my shoulders hit the doorframe. “Is that why your heart is racing, little bride? Academia?”
“Don’t call me that.”
“Why not?”
“Because it makes me…” I stop. Because it makes me want things I have no business wanting. Because every time he says little bride in that voice, I feel it between my legs, as physical as a touch.
“It makes you what?” He’s closer now, close enough that I can smell clean water and beneath it that dark, warm note that is only him. “Tell me, Posy. What does it make you?”
“Uncomfortable. Deeply.”
“Little liar.” He isn’t touching me. He might as well be. “I can smell your want from here. I could smell it the moment you opened that door. You are not uncomfortable. You are starving, and you have decided not to eat, and you are calling that professionalism.”
My face flames. “You can’t just say things like…”