5. Chapter 5
Serenity
The guard doesn’t tell me where we’re going. He doesn’t need to. The corridor changes; concrete gives way to carpet, fluorescent to low amber, and the air shifts from harsh chemicals to something warmer and older. Wood polish. Leather. The faint sweetness of real candles burning somewhere close.
My wolf takes note.
The cuffs on my wrists hum steadily, the runes glowing faint blue against my skin. My arms are heavy, the vein in my elbow tender. My bare feet sink into carpet that feels obscene. My body notices the warmth before my mind does.
I shut that down. Feeling good in this place is a trap.
Feeling anything in this place is a trap.
The guard stops at a door—heavy, dark wood, a handle that looks like real brass—and swipes his card. The lock clicks. He opens it without going in and jerks his chin.
I step through. The door closes behind me.
The room is wrong. . A fireplace, burning.
A deep, leather armchair, beside a table that holds a crystal decanter and a glass.
A rug that my feet want to curl into. Bookshelves lining one wall.
The light is low and gold, and the warmth gets into me before I can refuse it.
For one horrible second, my body sags toward it before I catch myself and lock my spine.
He’s standing by the fire. As I walk in, he turns to me.
My wolf drops against my ribs and goes silent. Not the conserving quiet of the ward. Silent. She’s seen something she can’t explain.
He’s tall. Taller than I remembered. And still. The stillness of something that has no heartbeat and no need to shift its weight. Dark hair, fine-boned face, everything about him precise except his mouth. His mouth is the only soft thing about him, and I hate that I noticed it.
His eyes are the same strange violet from the corridor, watching me across the room with an attention that has no heat in it and no urgency.
He smells like nothing.
That’s what freezes me. Everything in this world smells like something: blood, sweat, fear, bleach, the green-stem scent of the hedge-witch boy.
This man smells like cold air. Like stone.
Something old underneath both, and then nothing.
No pulse in it, no warmth. My wolf can’t read him.
She goes quiet, and I lose the feel of her entirely.
“Sit,” he says. His voice is low and unhurried. He gestures at the chair.
“I’d rather stand.”
“Your hands are shaking. No doubt the rest of you too.” He says it without judgment, without sympathy. Just the observation. “Sit.”
My hands are shaking. I hadn’t noticed. Blood loss, or cold, or something else. It doesn’t matter which. I sit because my knees make the decision before I do, because the chair is deep and warm and my legs have already stopped listening to me.
He crosses toward me. Each step is quiet and precise, and I watch him: distance, angle, the reach of his arms. He stops three feet from the chair and looks down at me. Up close, his hair is thicker than I realized, dark curls brushing his collar. And I don’t know why I notice that.
“You know what I am,” he says.
I do. God help me, I do.
“Vampire.” The word comes out steady. I make sure of it.
“Then you know what happens next.”
I don’t. Not personally. But I’ve heard the stories. Teeth in the throat. The tearing. The draining. The cold.
“Get it over with,” I say. My fingers tighten on the arms of the chair.
He moves closer. One step. His hand reaches for me, and I flinch. I hate myself for it, but I can’t stop myself. This man is here to feed on my blood, and there’s not a damn thing I can do about it.
Stay calm. Just stay calm. It’ll be over soon.
I just pray that “over” doesn’t mean the end of me.
His fingers brush the hair back from my neck. The touch is cool and light, and gooseflesh rises down my chest, tightening my nipples against the gray silk. Can’t be helped. His touch is icy.
“Breathe,” he says. Close now. His breath is cool against my throat.
I don’t breathe. I brace.
Oh God… Oh God!
Every muscle in my body is rigid, my nails dragging into the leather. He’s over the chair, and he’s all I can see. I squeeze my eyes shut and wish there were rivets I could count.
“Shhh,” he breathes. I’m making a sound. I didn’t know I was. His mouth touches my neck. Lips first—dry, cool, finding the pulse point with a precision that tells me he can hear my heart hammering through my skin.
Don’t…don’t, don’t, don’t…
I don’t bother saying it, because it won’t make a difference. I’m in the chair, and he’s over it, and there’s nowhere to go. Then his teeth press, sharp and sudden, and the pain is white and total—
And then it isn’t.
Something floods through me from the bite, warm, spreading fast, rushing outward from the point where his teeth are buried in my throat.
Into my chest. Down into my belly. Lower, spreading between my legs with a heat so sudden my thighs clench together, and what comes out of my throat is half moan, half curse, before I can stop either.
“Oh!” My hands grip the chair arms so hard my knuckles ache.
The warmth keeps building, climbing, my hips shifting without my permission, a slow roll I don’t order and can’t stop.
His mouth works at my throat, drawing on the vein, steady and controlled, until one pull lands harder than the rest, breaking his own rhythm for half a second.
Then it evens out again. Each pull sends another wave through me.
Deep. Rhythmic. Pulsing in places I do not want him to be the reason for.
No. No, no, no—
My jaw is clenched so tight my teeth hurt. My eyes are wide open now, fixed on the ceiling, on a crack in the plaster that I memorize in desperate detail while my body arches toward a man I hate.
His hand rests on the arm of my chair, near my wrist but not touching it. Then his fingers close over the wood, grip tightening. He doesn’t hold me down. He doesn’t need to. My own body is holding me here, chasing the sensation, and that’s worse. That’s so much worse than force.
Another pull, and the ache between my legs sharpens instead of easing.
“Oh, God!” My nipples are hard and aching.
The slick heat between my thighs is soaking through everything between me and the silk.
My body finds his rhythm and keeps it, tightening every time he pulls.
A sound, thin and high, breaks through my clenched teeth.
I swallow the rest of it. Not fast enough.
The crack in the plaster doubles as my vision blurs. My fingers release the chair and grip it again. Release. Grip. I’m shaking everywhere. My thighs are trembling. Everything low in me pulls tighter. Tighter than it should.
I can’t! I don’t—
I come.
My back bows off the chair. Whatever sound I make, I don’t recognize it.
Low, and it doesn’t stop when I close my mouth.
My hips thrust up, chasing the rhythm of his mouth, matching the pull of him at my throat, and it doesn’t stop when I think it will.
It keeps going in time with him, one more pull, then another, until his mouth finally stills against my skin and I’m left gasping in a chair I can’t feel my legs under.
His teeth retract. His tongue flicks once over the punctures, and the ache there seals shut before I understand why it stopped hurting. One more small throb of pleasure follows the movement, involuntary, and then it’s over.
Stop. Just stop it!
It should not have felt like that.
He lifts his head.
His mouth is dark with my blood. His eyes haven’t changed; still that wrong violet, still watching me with that measured attention. He reaches into his jacket, produces a square of white cloth, and wipes my throat clean, the blood already cooling, nothing left to stop.
I’m panting. My thighs are wet. My face is wet too, sweat on my brow, dampening the curls clinging to my cheeks. Something colder moves in behind everything else, slower, filling in wherever the heat just was, until there’s nowhere left in me that feels clean.
I wipe my face with the back of my hand. It’s shaking.
“What the hell was that?” My voice comes out raw. I don’t care.
He folds the cloth along the same creases and holds it out. I take it without thinking. His fingers never touch mine. There’s blood on his bottom lip. He doesn’t wipe it.
“Consider it a gift.”
“A… A gift?” I shake my head. “You did that on purpose? That… that…” I can’t say the words. “Is that supposed to make me grateful?”
“It’s supposed to keep you sane.” He straightens his sleeve. “Gratitude is your problem.”
I stare at him. My wolf is so deep I can barely feel her breathing.
“You’re a pig!”
“Would you have preferred it if it hurt?” he says, completely unfazed.
“I’d have preferred it if you’d asked.”
He doesn’t answer that one.
I lift a hand to my throat. The skin is smooth. No mark left at all.
“You’ll be taken back to your ward.”
“That’s it?”
“That’s it.”
“You feed on me, and then you send me back as if nothing happened?”
He looks at me. For the first time, something in his expression isn’t flat.
“Something happened,” he says. “Whether you and I agree on what it was is your problem. Not mine.”
He turns and walks to the door. Opens it. The guard is waiting outside.
I stand. My legs barely hold. The wetness between my thighs is cooling, and the echo of his teeth in my throat throbs in time with my heartbeat. Every step back down the corridor takes me away from the carpet and the warmth, back toward the concrete and the chemicals.
The guard doesn’t look at me. He’s seen enough in this place to make this just another day to him.
My wolf doesn’t stir until I’m back in my cell. When she does, she settles low and stays there, quiet, the only steady thing in me right now.
It won’t happen again. I will never let that happen again.
I tell my wolf that. I tell myself too.
My hand closes into a fist.
His handkerchief is clutched inside it.