Chapter 6
Cristian
The bed Nadia had assigned me was all wrong.
Too soft. Too forgiving. A contraption made for a man who’d never slept through a siege. I sat on the edge, the mattress sinking beneath my weight, the white walls pressing in on all sides. No stone. No shadows. This was simply a room that smelled like soap and fruit.
I was still unclothed. What else was I supposed to be wearing?
The newness of this century irritated me. It hummed and clicked and whispered to itself through small, blinking devices. Even the air smelled artificial. The quiet wasn’t quiet at all—it was filled with invisible noise, as though the world itself had become mechanical. I hated it already.
I did not sleep.
I waited until Nadia’s presence settled into stillness down the hall. The bond softened when she slept, loosening just enough for me to move without dragging the pull behind me. That was when I rose and began to search the house.
I moved room to room in silence. I checked doors.
Walls. Corners. Thresholds. Anything that might conceal a ward, a passage, a fail point.
I tested the windows. I followed the spine of the house upward into the attic, past trunks filled with nonsense and relics that held no power.
Nothing but old furniture, broken frames, and dust. Nothing that could free me.
I found a locked room.
The door was sealed with more than iron and wood. Magic threaded through it, old and deliberate. Court-adjacent, but not theirs. Defensive. I tested it carefully and withdrew. Whatever was inside had been intentionally kept from me. From everyone.
I searched for gold. Vaults. False panels. Anything my brother might have hidden in arrogance or haste.
I found nothing.
He had not left my fortune lying about to be found.
When dawn approached, I returned to the bedroom I had been assigned. Still trapped. Still bound. Still without answers.
I had spent too long mired in conflict I never wanted. First as a human soldier, forced into a war that consumed half of Europe. Then as a vampire in that same war, turned without consent and used for my strength until my body no longer felt like my own.
After the war, when I refused the Sovereign Court, they hunted me. They saw my endurance as theirs to control. They tried to strip me of choice. When I resisted, they trapped me in stasis and called it justice.
My entire adulthood had been a prison. Human armies. Vampire masters. The court. The coffin. Every chapter of my life followed the same pattern. Bound. Controlled. Contained.
And now I was awake in another confinement, linked to a mortal woman, who had opened the lid of my prison and unknowingly placed me in a new one.
The awareness of her pressed against my mind even now. A quiet pull in a constant direction. It told me she had moved down the hall. It told me she was upset. It told me I would go to her if she called.
I hated how familiar that loss of control felt.
I was trying to determine which mechanical hum around me was the least offensive when Nadia bustled in and threw a bundle of fabric at my chest.
“You can’t just exist in the house with your dick out,” she said. “I should have put that in the rules.”
I caught the pile and stared at it, baffled. The first piece was a gray garment. I held it up between my fingers. “What is this?”
“A hoodie,” she said. “You put it on your torso.”
It smelled faintly of an unfamiliar male—artificial fragrance and peppermint candy.
“Whose is it?”
“My ex’s.”
I raised a quizzical eyebrow.
“Ex?”
She sighed. “Yeah. Someone I was with. A boyfriend. Significant other.”
Her ex. The word sat wrong in my head. I didn’t care, obviously. But the idea of another man’s scent on my skin made my jaw tighten. Ridiculous reaction. She was mortal. A complication I had not chosen.
“Why are you no longer together?” I asked, more curious than I meant to sound.
She hesitated, then shrugged. “Same old story. I can be… a lot.”
I frowned. “A lot?”
“Too much,” she said simply. “Too talkative. Too sensitive. Too… me. People like me until they realize I don’t come with an off switch.”
I studied her for a moment. She wasn’t making a jest. There was no bitterness in her tone—just quiet certainty, the kind that came from being told the same thing too many times. But although I didn’t want to be bound to her—to anyone—there was nothing wrong with her.
“Perhaps they were insufficient,” I said.
Her head jerked up, surprised. “Insufficient?”
“For you,” I clarified. “Not everyone is built to keep pace with… abundance.”
Her lips twitched, but she looked away.
I examined the next garment. It was made of soft, gray cotton. Pink letters sprawled across the backside: JUICY.
I frowned. Then, against my better judgment, grinned. “Juicy,” I repeated slowly. “Intimidating. Powerful. Likely a title of status.”
She blinked. “You’re insufferable.”
“And yet, clothed I shall be.”
I muttered to myself as I dressed, trying to make sense of the fabric.
The hoodie swallowed my shoulders. The trousers—sweatpants, she called them—lacked any structural integrity.
I longed for tailored coats, brass buttons, the weight of a sword belt slung across my hip.
These garments were an insult to formality.
Once, nations had feared me. Now, I was standing in a mortal woman’s modern house, adjusting sweatpants.
But adaptation was survival. It always had been.
If I wanted to fix this—free her, free myself—I needed to learn this new world quickly.
The tether between us pulsed like a quiet drum, constant and unwelcome.
I couldn’t let it dictate me. I wouldn’t die here, playing house while my gold and my vengeance against the Sovereign Court lay buried beneath centuries of dust.
I left the bedroom and paused by a narrow mirror in the hall. I hadn’t looked in one since after I’d been turned. Old habit. Old superstition.
When I finally did, I startled.
My reflection blinked back at me—pale, leaner, hair longer than I remembered. My eyes glowed faintly in the dim light. But my jaw was still strong, my shoulders broad. The soldier still lived under the ruin.
“Still noble,” I muttered. “Still terrifying.”
Behind me, Nadia’s voice broke the moment. “You can see yourself?”
I turned. “Of course.”
“I thought vampires couldn’t see their reflection.”
“A myth,” I said. “Not true, at least for some. I’ve always been able to.”
I didn’t tell her that it was harder now—that the mirror showed too much. Time wasted. Ghosts unburied. The face of a man who should’ve been a legend, not a relic haunting a stranger’s spare room.
She studied me for a beat, her expression softening before she masked it. “Arrogant much?”
I let her think that. Let her see pride instead of the hollowness behind it. Pride was cleaner than grief.
And at that moment, it was the only thing keeping me from falling apart.
Hunger was the one companion I had not missed.
It began as a dull ache in my throat, then deepened to an animal’s pacing inside my ribs. The scent of her only worsened it. Warm skin. Soap. The faint sweetness of blood beneath the surface. She smelled alive in a way that made the entire house unsafe.
I told myself I would behave. She had been clear: no biting, no lurking, no “creepy vampire behavior.”
I was failing at all three.
She was making toast. I was observing.
She moved with quick, unthinking grace—hair tied up, singing something that sounded like a battle chant disguised as modern music. I found myself close enough to feel the heat from the contraption heating her bread, to feel the heat from her.
“You’re breathing on me,” she said without turning.
“I’m observing you,” I said. “You are… captivating. And I am… ravenous.”
The dish towel hit me squarely in the chest. “You said you wouldn’t follow me!”
“I apologize.” I took one polite step back. Then another half-step forward, because I could not help it. “But you are very… efficient with bread.” I licked my lips.
She glared, muttering something about restraining orders for undead men. I stared at the toaster, offended by how smug it seemed when it popped.
I forced myself to walk away and found myself fascinated by the cold box. It breathed like a living creature and smelled faintly of every sin.
Inside were countless sealed vessels, but one caught my attention—raw meat, minced into mush, still glistening, still red.
I lifted it, sniffed, and nearly sank my teeth into it before she shrieked and slapped it out of my hand.
“Do. Not. Eat. That!”
I blinked at her. “It smells of blood.”
“It’s raw turkey! You’ll die.”
I was unconvinced. Not much could kill me. “Perhaps I could drink from you instead.”
Her eyes widened. “Absolutely not! We just met!”
“True,” I said solemnly. “But our bond predates formal introductions.”
She looked like she might throw the cold box at me.
I followed her into the living quarters, where she proceeded to stare at a large, glowing box. She called it TV. I loathed it. Yet she was enthralled—legs tucked beneath her, a bowl of popcorn in her lap and “cheese toast” on the table in front of her.
I sat beside her, watching her instead. Her pulse beat visibly at her throat. The sound drowned out everything else.
I leaned closer, drawn by both instinct and starvation. My lips hovered near her neck.
She shoved me off the couch so hard I hit the floor.
“Bound doesn’t mean you get to nibble me like a snack whenever you want! Consent, Cristian!”
I rubbed the back of my neck. “You said only if I asked, and I asked… earlier. You did not specify whether your answer mattered.”
“It matters!”
“Noted.”
She’d fallen.
I heard the impact through two walls and the rush of water. My instincts overrode manners and thought. I tore the door from its latch and entered, ready to defend.
She screamed. Loudly.
And then I stopped breathing.