Chapter 8
Cristian
Isat stiffly, hands clasped in my lap, doing everything in my power not to panic.
Her blood sang inside me.
I had drunk from queens, warriors, witches—but nothing like her. Nadia’s blood was life distilled. It burned with warmth, color, and something I could not name. Magic, perhaps. Or madness.
The nectar of the gods, I thought grimly. And I am no god.
It was intoxicating. Her scent still clung to me—soap, sugar, and the faint trace of iron beneath her skin. The bond between us pulsed like a second heartbeat, humming through my veins.
I shifted on the couch, trying to adjust the very mortal reaction she had provoked in me. Centuries of self-control, undone by a woman in miniscule pantaloons covered with fruit.
And then she walked back in.
Her cheeks were flushed, her hair a little wild, her heartbeat a steady rhythm I could hear from across the room.
I shifted again, crossing one leg over the other in what I hoped passed for composure. The sweet scent of her arousal still lingered, impossible to ignore in its headiness. My fangs ached in response, and my borrowed trousers were becoming entirely too tight.
She avoided my eyes, marched to the far end of the couch, and turned the talking box on again without a word. The light gleamed across her face, softening it, making her look younger. Vulnerable, even.
We sat in silence, watching the strange moving picture unfold.
Within minutes, her head tilted, her eyelids fluttered, and she fell asleep, remote still in hand, breathing evenly and unguarded.
I turned my head slowly, unable to stop looking at her.
Asleep, she was softer. The tension that usually animated her melted away, revealing something delicate beneath all the intensity.
She was, without contest, the most beautiful creature I had ever seen in all my years.
Her breathing filled the quiet room, steady and soothing. The bond between us settled into perfect calm. My body, already relaxed from the feeding, went still in a way I hadn’t experienced in centuries.
Carefully, I eased closer and guided her down so her head rested in my lap. She murmured faintly but didn’t wake.
I forced myself to focus on the moving picture.
At first, I despised it. It was absurd. The humans were lying, blundering, falling in love by accident. But the longer I watched, the more I found myself invested. The heroine’s loneliness, her quiet hope for belonging… it was familiar. Painfully so.
By the time the final act unfolded, something in my chest cracked open. A single tear escaped. I wiped it away immediately, scowling at my own weakness.
“Emotionally unstable,” I muttered. “Is this what breaks Lord Cristian D’Archeval? Sandra Bullock?”
When the credits rolled, I glanced down at Nadia again. Her breathing was still slow and steady. Her hand had drifted close to my knee, fingers curled as if she was reaching for me in sleep.
Her scent hit me again—salt and skin and summer—and I clenched my jaw, forcing restraint.
The bond pulled at me with a steady pressure.
It reacted to the smallest shift in her body.
It told me she was sinking deeper into rest, unguarded in a way that made something inside me tighten.
Leaving her there felt wrong. The couch offered no support for her neck.
Her head rested at an angle that strained the muscles along her shoulder. Her pulse beat an uneven rhythm.
She should not remain here.
Exhaling quietly, I slipped one arm under her knees and another behind her back. She stirred but did not wake as I lifted her. Her body relaxed against mine in a way that caught me off guard. Her warmth pressed against my chest.
Her scent reached me again. Salt and skin and summer. I clenched my jaw and held my control.
I carried her to her room. Each step was a deliberate acknowledgment of a shift I did not want to examine yet. The bond steadied with every movement, as if it approved. As if this was the correct place for her.
I laid her gently on the bed, pulling the blanket over her shoulders. She sighed, turning toward the sound of my breath.
“Cristian,” she murmured, half-asleep.
I froze. The sound of my name in her voice undid me completely.
For a heartbeat, I hovered there—close enough to brush a strand of hair from her cheek, close enough to betray myself. My hand lifted of its own accord… then stopped, suspended in the air between us.
No.
I withdrew, every muscle tight with denial.
She deserved safety, not hunger masquerading as devotion. Not these chains disguised as a bond that she’d unknowingly thrown herself into. I knew what it was to not be able to make my own choices, to live my life by the rules of others. I would not do that to her.
Still, as I stood in the doorway, watching her chest rise and fall, I could feel the hum of the tether promising ruin.
I didn’t want to want her. I shouldn’t need her.
But the truth pressed against my ribs.
She had no idea what she’d done when she woke me.
And I wasn’t sure I wanted her to.
For a moment, I simply watched her sleep.
Nadia lay tangled in her blanket, one hand tucked under her cheek, her hair a wild halo against the pillow. She looked nothing like the tempest she was when awake. No sarcasm. No nervous chatter. Just utterly human.
I did not understand how anyone could have been cruel to her. The thought of it made my chest twist—an unfamiliar, unwelcome ache.
I had the absurd impulse to crawl into the bed beside her. To pull her close, feel that warmth against me, and pretend—just for a few hours—that the world was simple. That I was a man instead of the monster she’d accidentally revived.
I forced myself to leave the room, shutting the door softly behind me.
The bond tugged immediately, a physical ache under my sternum. I could feel her presence like gravity itself, pulling, reminding me where she was. I resisted. Barely.
I needed distance. Air. Anything familiar. I should be strong enough to stretch the limits of the bond now that I had eaten, and Nadia wouldn’t feel the effects as strongly while she was asleep.
Nearly four hundred years had passed while I slept, and I still hadn’t seen the world I’d awakened to—not beyond the sterile, humming confines of that house. I longed for something that smelled of earth and woodsmoke, not soap and glowing rectangles.
The air was cooler when I stepped through the door, thick with the scent of foreign chemicals. The night should have felt like freedom, but everything looked wrong. Too many lights. Too many sounds.
I stepped carefully down the front path and eventually made my way onto the street, keeping to the shadows.
That’s when I saw them—metal beasts roaring past, eyes burning white and red. They moved with alarming speed, growling like demons bound to invisible reins.
“Good Lord,” I whispered. “What sorcery—”
One passed so close that the air slapped my face. I stumbled back, clutching the fence. The contraption blared at me—a monstrous, blaring trumpet—and a human head emerged from the side of it.
“Nice sweats, asshole!” the man shouted before disappearing back inside the roaring creature.
Stunned, I stared after it.
Nice sweats.
How peculiar. I glanced down at the gray trousers Nadia had given me. The ones with JUICY emblazoned across the back in pink.
Ah. Compliment. He must have admired them.
I straightened my spine, feeling oddly pleased. “The people of this century are surprisingly forthright to call out praise to strangers so freely.”
Another metal beast whooshed by, shrieking and glaring again. I bared my teeth. “And loudly passionate, it seems.”
I continued down the street, trying to memorize the landscape—the painted lines on the ground, the blinking lights, the endless rows of identical houses. I could feel the faint pull of the bond in my chest, tugging me back toward Nadia’s heartbeat. The distance between us felt wrong, unbalanced.
Still, I walked a few more blocks, inhaling the strange new scent of the world: oil, metal, sugar, rain.
It was not the world I’d known. The stars above looked smaller, dimmer somehow. And yet, for all my complaints, something inside me whispered that maybe this place held the only thing left worth belonging to.
A porch light flicked on nearby. I froze, half expecting another stranger to shout a compliment about my pants. When none came, I sighed and turned back toward the house. The bond pulled harder now, a steady thrum in my chest leading me home like a compass.
Home. The word startled me.
Perhaps not home yet. But close enough to hurt.
The night air suited me.
Cool. Still. At least the trees remained the same. Old sentinels, unchanged. I had always liked trees. They endured. They stayed rooted while everything else burned or betrayed.
Sometimes I felt like that. As if I’d simply… continued existing while the rest of the world reinvented itself.
I focused, separating the strange noises one by one. A skill learned long ago on battlefields: distinguish threat from benign chaos.
That’s when I heard it—something out of rhythm. A sound that didn’t belong.
Footsteps, light but deliberate, shadowing mine.
My body went still. My instincts tensed in warning.
When I inhaled, a scent hit me.
Not human. Something older, colder.
Vampire.
I turned sharply, vanishing from sight and reappearing several yards behind the sound. The figure froze, half-shrouded in shadow.
Then I saw her face.
Ambrosia.
She stepped into the thin spill of moonlight like it was a stage cue.
Her beauty was the same—too deliberate to be divine.
Skin pale as spoiled milk. Lips blood-red and cruelly curved.
Gold hair pinned in an intricate knot that dared gravity to intervene.
Her gown was black silk laced with mourning, every movement whispering vanity and threat.
“Ambrosia,” I said flatly. “You’re still alive. Marvelous.”