Nikolai
The Sanguine Tower felt like a mausoleum without Max.
I’d held the base while the other three heirs rode to Greyhold with Max. I understood the necessity—one heir always stayed behind, standard protocol. That didn’t stop me from wearing a track between my desk, the window, and a chess board I’d set up against myself.
Then the dispatch arrived. Demons on the train. An archdemon leading the assault. And Max had climbed to the roof against orders and put herself between Aelindor and two Coldiron-tipped arrows.
I knocked the chess board off the table. The pieces scattered across the marble, and I hadn’t picked them up.
She’d caught the arrow between her palms and thrown it back at the archdemon. I didn’t know how to hold that image without my cock going painfully hard and my chest cracking open at the same time.
I hadn’t fed from a warm vein since she left.
I’d promised her—one mouthful per week, from her alone—and I’d kept it, even as bottled stock turned every meal into endurance.
I’d mixed in wine, whiskey, anything to cut the flatness.
Nothing helped. Every source tasted like ash after hers.
Nectar and flame and midnight sun—that was what ran in Max Morning’s veins. Everything else was counterfeit.
I’d worried so much that I’d decided: if they hadn’t returned in another week, protocol be damned, I was going to Greyhold myself.
At the station, I’d seen her through the glass before the train stopped. She’d filled out since she arrived at the fortress. The gauntness was gone, and her height, her sharpness, a particular quality of presence about her drew the eye.
Her midnight-blue hair with its streak of glowing white fell past her shoulders.
High cheekbones, full lips, long lashes that still looked absurd on a face that hard.
Even in plain first-year fatigues, she looked like something the world had been trying to make for a very long time and had finally gotten right.
Give my girl a pair of heels and she’d be the tallest person on the continent.
The sight of her soothed something feral in me.
I strode to the exit of the cabin before the train fully stopped. Nodded at the commanders as they descended. Nodded at Aelindor, who returned it with his usual coolness.
And then Max stepped out.
She took my hand. Her face flushed, her palm warm against my cool skin. She didn’t love the spotlight, but she didn’t flinch from it.
Every officer on that platform was taken aback by my discard of protocol. I didn’t give a fuck. Max Morning was mine in every way I hadn’t yet been able to make official, and I was done performing indifference in front of an assembly.
Then Caspian’s arm went around her shoulders. He undermined me as he always did, and every word I’d prepared to say to her dissolved.
That fucking wolf.
Max went back to her barracks. We’d told her to take the day off, as she’d earned it ten times over.
I returned to the Sanguine Tower and resumed the chess game, righting the pieces I’d knocked over days ago, willing myself to stay in the chair.
I needed to give her space, even though I was so hungry for her that I’d thrown protocol out the window just to stand at the platform.
And I hadn’t sent for her. I hadn’t even hinted.
I stood at the window, staring at the compound without seeing it, my glass of wine gone warm in my hand.
The other heirs had had her for days.
Tonight should be mine. My time with Max.
I heard her before I sensed her, the light footfall of her boots in the hallway, hurried yet hesitant. She wasn’t sure.
My heart rate climbed. A vampire’s heart doesn’t race. It’s one of the few reliable facts about my kind: even in pitched battle, even draining an enemy dry in seconds, our pulse stays low. Controlled. Dead, some called it.
I’d never corrected them.
Until now.
My heart climbed with every step she took toward my door.
The ward recognized her and disengaged before she knocked. The door swung inward, and she walked through it without breaking stride, scanning the room the way she always did—exits, threats, distance to each. A slave’s habit. A soldier’s training.
She pulled up when she spotted me by the window, and for a moment neither of us spoke. The glee sparking in those midnight eyes delighted me more than anything.
She looked stunning even in a plain shirt and dark trousers. There wasn’t a trace of the journey left on her now, just her own scent, clean like sunlight and dark like a secret. She’d showered in the women’s common bath.
Poise, Nikolai. Poise.
I kept my position at the window. Put the wine glass down on a side table. Gave myself a generous count of seven.
If I rushed this, I wouldn’t be able to stop myself from carrying her to my bed and burying my cock deep inside her, my fangs sinking into her throat. That had been the fantasy when she wasn’t around, the one I replayed in the dark, the one that left me hard and restless and furious with want.
I strolled toward her with the best smile I could come up with.
“There you are.”
“Nikolai. Hello.” She smiled back.
The space between us hummed with chemistry.
I stretched my hand toward her. “Come. Sit. There’s food.”
She didn’t move toward the table. Instead, she held out her wrist, the faint tracing of veins visible beneath the skin.
“You first,” she said.
“Max—”
“I know you’re hungry.” Her midnight eyes held mine. “You can’t hide it from me.”
“We bargained,” I said, “but I’m voiding the terms. I won’t burden you with this.
You’ve just come off a deployment that would have broken soldiers twice your rank.
” I kept my voice even, the way I had kept it even through a decade of diplomacy and intelligence work, though my eyes couldn’t leave her wrist. “I’m not a young vampire. I can rein it in.”
“You’ve been drinking from bottles,” she said. Not a question. “Bare minimum.”
“Yes.”
“And turned down everyone else.”
“Also yes. Unfortunately.”
She lowered her arm, but the offer hadn’t left her eyes.
“This isn’t just an arrangement for me anymore, Nikolai.
It’s…” She stopped. Color flooded her cheeks, and she looked away, jaw tightening the way it did when she’d said something she hadn’t planned to.
“I don’t want you taking it from anyone else.
” The words came out rough. “I… Forget it.”
She was embarrassed.
I took her hand. Her fingers were warm, calloused at the tips from a decade of pickaxes and tunnel walls.
“Look at me,” I said.
My heart stuttered at the way she gazed at me.
“I haven’t touched another woman since the night you came to my tower,” I said. “Not their blood, not their bodies, not their company. You aren’t an arrangement, Eirath. I’m yours, as long as you’ll have me.”
She smiled at me shyly.
I lifted her hand and pressed my lips to her knuckles. Her breath hitched. The blush didn’t fade. Her eyes brightened. This girl would be the death of me.
I led her through the archway into the inner room.
The drawing room faced south, its wide windows overlooking the dark plains beyond the wall and the mountains past them.
No view of the compound grounds, no Stormglass floodlights.
Just moonlight on the distant ridges. I’d chosen this room for a reason. It was the quietest place in the tower.
A low sofa sat in the center, flanked by bookshelves and a side table with a decanter. The Stormglass sconces were dimmed to an ember.
“No sex, Nikolai,” Max said, her voice rough, as if she’d rehearsed it. “Not even your mouth. This is feeding and nothing else.”
“Don’t you worry.” I settled onto the sofa and drew her down beside me, guiding her legs across my lap. “I’ll take whatever you give me. Never more. Between us, you will always be the one who calls the shots.”
“Then drink.”
“Not your wrist.” I traced the inside of her forearm with one finger, watching goosebumps rise in its wake. “The first time, I fed from your thigh. Tonight, your throat.”
Her pulse jumped. “You said I call the shots.”
“You can say no.” I held her gaze. “But the throat is a gift, Max. It means trust. It means you’re letting me close to the place that could kill you, and you’re choosing not to be afraid.”
She was quiet for a moment.
The sky was dark outside the window. A night bird flew by.
“Fine,” she said. “Throat.”
I shifted her in my arms, turning her so her back rested against my chest. Her spine pressed to my sternum, and her head tilted to expose the long line of her neck.
My arm wrapped around her waist. I could feel her heartbeat through her back, steady, steady, then a skip when my lips brushed the skin below her ear.
“Breathe, Eirath,” I murmured against her throat.
She relaxed against me, trusting me, which I knew didn’t come easily for her.
I pressed my mouth to the pulse point and held it there.
Let her feel my lips, the coolness of them, the deliberate pause before what came next.
I wanted her to feel the restraint before I allowed my fangs to descend.
Slowly. I pierced the vein with care, and her breath broke on a sound that went straight to my cock.
The first pull undid me.
Nectar. Flame. Midnight sun. The same devastating sweetness from my memory, but deeper now, richer. Something new had fused into her blood, something powerful. I drank, and the hunger that had been clawing at my insides for days finally went quiet.
My eyes closed. My arm tightened around her waist. She was mine, and I would never let her go.
The moment my venom entered her bloodstream, her body arched against mine—involuntary, beyond her control. Her head fell back against my shoulder, and her moan made my cock throb with raw need.
No one else had ever resisted the venom. Every donor I’d taken had surrendered completely, begging for more, weeping with pleasure, will and mind dissolved into euphoria.
Max fought it.
Her hand fisted the sofa cushion, knuckles white, fingernails cutting half-moons into the leather. A tremor started in her thighs and traveled up through her stomach, her chest, her shoulders. Her whole body vibrated with the effort of holding still.
The venom was flooding her now, liquid warmth pooling low in her belly, climbing through her veins like honey set on fire, and I could feel every wave of it through her pulse because it quickened each time she almost gave in.
Her lips parted on a ragged breath. Her hips shifted against my lap, a fraction, a bare involuntary roll, and the sound she trapped behind her teeth was close to a whimper.
She caught herself. Locked her spine rigid. Squeezed her eyes shut. But her grip on my forearm was bruising now, her nails biting through the fabric of my sleeve, and the flush on her skin had spread down her throat, her chest, painting her in shades of desperate want she refused to name.
She was barely hanging on. One more pull and her resolve would crack, and we both knew it.
And I was no better.
Twenty-six years of discipline. A decade of feeding from donors without a tremor in my hands, without a single lapse of control.
I’d drained enemy combatants mid-battle with precision.
I’d held screaming women in my lap as the venom took them, and I’d felt nothing beyond appetite and clinical satisfaction.
This was nothing like that. This was madness.
Every sound she swallowed hit me like a fist. Every involuntary shift of her body against mine sent fire scorching down my spine.
Her scent had deepened with arousal—darker, richer, a note underneath the sunlight that made my fangs ache and my hands shake and the predator in me howl to take what was right here, right now, willing and warm and trembling in my arms.
I wanted to slide my mouth lower. I wanted to peel the shirt from her shoulders and trace the flush down her throat with my tongue.
I wanted to hear the sound she’d make if I let my hand drop from her waist to the heat between her thighs.
I wanted all of it. Wanted it so badly my vision had gone red at the edges and my cock strained painfully against my trousers and every controlled instinct I’d forged over a lifetime screamed at me to stop fighting and just take and bury my cock into her willing cunt.
But I’d given her my word. No sex. Her call. Always.
So I held the line. I gentled the pull. I kept my hands exactly where they were and forced my breathing to steady, even as every cell in my body rioted against the restraint.
This wasn’t like denying a donor. This was denying myself Max, and the difference was the distance between a candle flame and an inferno.
I took less than half of what I normally needed. My girl was exhausted, and she had still chosen to come.
I sealed the wound. One slow pass of my tongue over the puncture marks, and a shudder moved through her.
“You didn’t take enough,” she said roughly.
“I took what I needed.” I pressed my lips to the sealed marks. My marks.
She looked like she wanted to argue. Then the fight left her, and she let me pull her in.
I held her. Just held her, arm around her shoulders, thumb tracing slow circles on her upper arm, her warmth seeping into my cold skin. She fit against me as if she’d been made to.
I found myself wondering if anyone had simply held her before. In the mine, comfort cost more than food.
“I’m sorry about your sister.” I kissed her temple. “When the time comes, I’ll be there. We’ll get her back. Tell me what you need. Anything you want, it’s yours.”
She lifted her head, her midnight eyes finding mine. Clear and steady, with a determination that made my chest ache.
“Train me, Nikolai. I need to be ready before I go after Missy.”
Pride moved through my chest. Not asking for comfort. Not asking for promises. Asking for the tools to save her sister herself. That was my girl.
“We’ll all train you,” I said. “Aelindor for magic. Caspian for hand-to-hand combat. Drakken for swords and battle strategy.” I studied her.
“What I’ll teach you is different. I can’t give you the gift of draining an enemy from a distance.
Only the most powerful of my kind can do that, and you aren’t a vampire.
But I can teach you the art of disguise and deception.
How to disappear into a shadow. How to stand in a room full of people and be seen by none of them. ”
The warmth that crossed her face made my heart pick up.
“That’s exactly what I need, prince.”
“Then you’ll have it.” I swept her up, and she flushed with delight at how easily I took her weight. “But first, you eat.”
I carried her to the dining room, where warm bread and thick stew waited.