Chapter 19
VALENTIN
Sweet fucking fires of Netheris.
I do not answer immediately, because answering is not merely speaking. It is choosing to turn private conviction into fact with dire consequences. Ancient courts. Bloody battles. Sacred oaths binding my brothers and the Five Blood Thrones.
The curse we earned when we doomed Morrighan, our creator.
I release her gaze and step away with deliberate calm, letting the room regain its shape after what we’ve done to it.
Irony is not lost on me. That I am the one caged by obligation.
Honour dictates I answer. Not the performative chivalry mortals romanticise, but an older, stricter thing built into the bones of my kind. We are creatures of appetite and power. Without constraints, we become nothing more than hunger with a title.
If I say I cannot lie, my words must mean something.
So if I bargain, I must pay. If I permit a question, I must accept the cost of it.
Even if the cost is handing a weapon to the very woman who has been sharpening herself against me since we met.
Eira watches me, chin lifting as if she expects evasion.
Her body has not fully recovered from the kiss. I see it in her breath, in the way her fingers flex then still, in the betraying brightness of her eyes. She keeps flicking glances to my mouth, craving it and resenting that craving in equal measure.
I know the feeling.
I cross the room without haste, then turn back, keeping my hands behind my back so I do not reach for her.
If I touch her again before I speak, I will not speak at all.
‘You’re desperate,’ she repeats, testing the word with a bite. ‘Why? Does she owe you money? Or like… an organ?’
Her snark is armour, fear wrapped in irreverence and called control. I recognise the tactic. Make danger ridiculous, and perhaps it feels smaller.
It will not work on me.
But I let her have the moment, because I’m not answering to satisfy her curiosity alone. I’m answering because I gave my word.
I stop at a polite and pointed distance. Choose my words with care, because the first time a truth is spoken, it becomes a key, and keys can be used in more than one lock.
‘Lyra Hannigan,’ I say, her name tasting of iron and midnight, ‘is not merely a missing person.’
Eira’s eyes narrow. ‘No kidding.’
I ignore the remark, though the corner of my mouth threatens to twitch with amusement, because she cannot help herself.
‘She is the woman my blood was meant to bind to.’
The room shifts.
Quieter this time.
Eira’s breath catches. Her expression blanks for one fleeting second, stunned as though struck somewhere tender, then sharpens again almost immediately.
Almost impressive.
She swallows, the slender, viciously alluring column of her throat, working before she speaks again. ‘You mean,’ she says slowly, brittle casualness covering the crack, ‘she’s your… what, your soulmate?’
The word is too soft. Too mortal. I feel a flash of irritation at the dilution of meaning, at the way mortals turn blood-bound inevitability into a romantic concept they can consume without understanding the cost.
‘No,’ I reply, voice flat enough to cut steel. ‘I do not have a soul, little hunter. What I mean is she is my fated mate.’
For a moment, Eira simply stares at me. No gasp. No hand to her chest.
Her lips part, then close. Her throat works again as her gaze flicks over my face, searching for the smallest twitch that might reveal falsehood, but of course there is none, because there cannot be.
Her shock is quiet, draining colour from the edges of her expression before snark floods back in to save her.
‘Oh my God,’ she says, half laugh, half disbelief. ‘You’re joking.’
I say nothing.
‘You’re actually joking,’ she insists, stepping half a pace closer.
Her foot hovers about a shard of glass before she places it carefully out of the way, her gaze darting back to mine.
‘This is a skit or a prank, right? This is you trying to freak me out. Make me feel special. Make me—’ She cuts herself off and her eyes flash.
‘I don’t mean special for me, personally, but special because I’m part of this hunt for your…
’ She shakes her head. ‘No, I’m sorry, this is ridiculous. ’
‘It is not ridiculous. It is rare. Binding. Also inconvenient.’
‘Inconvenient,’ she repeats, mouth twisting. ‘That’s one way to put it.’
She begins to pace, short restless steps through the ruined ceramic. Her hands flex as if searching for a weapon, a handle, a point of leverage.
There’s agitation. Then something more.
‘You’re saying,’ she fires at me, stopping abruptly, ‘that you’ve been hunting this woman because your blood says so?’
‘That is not a poetic description, but it is close enough.’
‘And you can’t lie,’ she adds quickly. ‘Like, literally can’t?’
‘I cannot.’
‘So you’re actually telling me you’ve got some mystical bond thing with a human woman you never even claimed.’
I feel the old irritation stir. ‘I did not claim her, no. I intended to. She fled.’
Eira’s eyes blaze. ‘I’m not surprised at all.’
The tips of my claws emerge before I force them back. ‘Meaning?’
She shrugs. ‘Well, she obviously fled because you’re you.’
The accusation has a vicious bite. She knows it too, because her gaze flicks away for one telling second.
I let it hang.
She resumes quickly, words thrown like knives. ‘Okay, wait. So this fated mate thing is real, and it’s your big secret, and you’re feeding off lookalikes because you think one of them might be her, and you’re not telling your little vampire council because, what? You’re embarrassed?’
‘They are not a council.’
‘The Black Twelve, whatever.’ She slices a hand through the air.
‘And if she’s your fated mate, fine, I get why you want to find her.
What I don’t get is the frantic hurry now.
She’s been gone six years and you only recently remembered you were fated?
Because she doesn’t owe you money and you don’t want an organ, but you want something else, don’t you? ’
My eyes narrow.
Too precise.
She has been listening. Watching. Threading facts together with a mind that refuses to stay safely beneath the surface.
‘Yes,’ I say. ‘I require something specific from my fated mate.’
‘What?’
‘It is not your concern.’
‘Not my— She’s human,’ Eira presses, almost breathless now. ‘So she’s just out there, living her life, while you’re losing your mind, tearing through cities, digging up graves and lining women up like a breakfast blood buffet so you can—’
She cuts herself off, throat working. Then the angle shifts. ‘If your own supposed fated mate is an inconvenience,’ she says, voice dropping, ‘what does that make everyone else caught in your crosshairs?’
Her eyes dart to my mouth.
Then away.
She hates that she remembers the kiss as vividly as I do.
‘Everyone else,’ I say evenly, ‘is irrelevant. Delicious, distracting, but ultimately… inconvenient, yes.’
Her breath catches.
A flush rises in her cheeks as I watch her carefully. ‘You are unsettled,’ I remark. ‘Why?’
‘I’m not,’ she snaps too quickly. ‘Don’t start diagnosing me like you’re my therapist. You’re a vampire. One who apparently has no compunction drinking and fucking and glamouring and kissing other women while he searches for his soulmate.’
‘Fated mate,’ I correct.
She flicks her hair back, jaw tight, fingers flexing at her sides.
‘You are agitated,’ I point out again, furious with myself for being stung by the accusation.
‘I’m curious and insulted,’ she says, her smile too sharp to be real. ‘There’s a difference.’
I follow her pacing.
Even now, she keeps glancing at my mouth as though she would like to bite it. Right before she claws my face off.
I know jealousy when I see it.
‘You’re insulted on behalf of a human you’ve never even met and don’t even know beyond the pages of a file?’
I felt it burn in my own blood when Malachi touched her, when the Port Authority fool looked at her, when the thought of her being claimed by anyone stirred something dark and unthinkable in me. That is not the way a man thinks when he’s focused on his fated mate.
I did not like the sensation then.
I like it less now, mirrored in her.
It suggests a symmetry I do not wish to acknowledge.
Eira stops pacing, plants herself, then throws the next words fast, as if speed might trip me into revealing weakness. ‘Whatever you’re thinking, you’re wrong. I’m… I’m outraged on her behalf. If you were my—’ She stops, pursing her lips.
Electricity lights through my blood as I tilt my head. ‘If I were what, Eira? If I were your fated mate? What would you do?’
Her magnificent, biteable chin lifts. ‘I would gut you with my Widow’s Fang. For starters.’ Then she shrugs. ‘But I’m not a vampire and, unlike you, I don’t believe in that fated mate bullshit, no offence. So it’s a moot point.’
I want to tell her I did not believe in it either.
Not until Morrighan, Netheris fires devour her charred remains, cursed us.
‘So how do you know?’ she demands. ‘How do you actually know? Is it a vision? A scent? A psychic bolt of lightning? Because I’m telling you right now, if this is based on vibes—’
‘It is not based on vibes,’ I interrupt, because even I have limits.
Her eyes flash with triumph at making me cut in.
Of course they do.
‘And if she stays gone?’ she continues. ‘If I come up short and can’t find her, what’s the ultimate plan? Keep dragging women into your penthouse and scanning their minds until one of them breaks? That’s your grand romantic destiny? How noble.’
‘Watch yourself, little hunter. Or I will teach you another lesson on insolence.’
She stills, and I catch a glint of contrition before defiance reclaims her.
‘It is not romance,’ I continue, patience thinning because she is circling too close to truths I do not wish spoken aloud. ‘It is essential.’
‘What, like a business deal essential?’
I remain silent.
‘And what about her?’ Eira fires back. ‘Does she get a say? Or is it just your essential problem and she’s the solution you believe you’re entitled to?’
The question lands like a blade because it is not only about Lyra.
It is about Eira.
The kiss. Consent. The fact that even immobilised, she fought her way back to movement because she cannot tolerate helplessness.
The fact that I found that resistance extraordinary.
I take one measured step closer. She holds her ground because she cannot help herself.
‘We are done here, I think,’ I say softly.
Her lips part, ready to argue.
I do not permit it. ‘You were granted one question for one kiss and you were entitled to one only. You have greatly surpassed that, little hunter. And without the due grace and appreciation for my patience.’
Her eyes widen at the reminder of the wager.
For a fraction of a second, the snark falters, replaced by something raw and startled.
Then her mouth tightens.
The sharpness returns. Because now she is holding my truth in her hands.
And she is going to have to do something with it, even if that something is pretending she does not believe a word.