Chapter 24
VALENTIN
I stop with my hand on the door.
Her question hangs in the room with the weight of a blade perfectly thrown, lodged exactly where I did not intend to be struck, and for a rare, unwelcome moment, I feel the shape of the decision before I make it.
A decision that instinct says I cannot delay much longer.
Not with two dead, an old scent in an alley where no such scent should be, and Eira Cross standing in my penthouse with my taste still on her, looking at me as if she already knows I have reached the edge of what I can conceal without making myself strategically useless.
I should lie by omission. Give her a polished half-truth and lock the rest behind the same doors that have kept empires intact and enemies starving.
But I still cannot lie, and I have taught her where my silences live.
If I continue like this, she will either pry the truth free in pieces or walk directly into danger without understanding what hunts alongside us.
Not knowing that one of my Five Blood brothers may have her in their crosshairs.
Neither outcome suits me.
So I turn.
She stands with arms folded, chin high, grief banked beneath anger while curiosity burns through both. There is still a faint flush on her skin from what happened on the sofa, which does not help my concentration in the slightest.
Silence stretches while I weigh the cost.
The worst that can happen is simple enough in theory.
I tell her what I choose then bind it to trust. If she betrays that trust, if this becomes vulnerability rather than asset, then I erase her memory.
I dislike the thought.
Memory alteration isn’t beneath me. It is a tool, and I have used uglier. But I dislike it because some part of me recoils at the idea of taking anything from her mind now, of forcing blankness where her sharpness lives.
I cross back towards her slowly, close enough to read the minute shifts in her expression. The way she braces for evasion and refuses to show it.
‘If I answer what you have asked,’ I say, voice lower than intended, ‘you will understand things that place you in greater danger by knowing them.’
Her mouth tightens. ‘That feels like a dramatic way of saying yes.’
‘It is a precise way of saying you will keep silent.’
‘Valentin—’
‘No. Listen to me.’
That gets her attention.
‘If you betray what I show you,’ I continue, each word deliberate, ‘the consequences will be severe. For anyone you speak to. For any channel through which it travels. Even for you, little hunter.’
There it is, laid bare and cold.
For the first time since I have known her, she looks hurt.
It is quick, a flicker in the eyes, a tightening at the corners of her mouth, but I see it, and I resent seeing it because it means some part of her expected better of me. Expected trust without threat.
Expected… what, exactly?
Tenderness? Faith?
We’ve known each other for days.
She blinks once, inhales, and when she speaks again, the hurt is gone behind that bright, cutting composure she wields so well.
‘Since we’ve only known each other for like…
five minutes,’ she says, with a dry edge that does not quite conceal the bruise beneath it, ‘I won’t let that hurt my feelings. But you can trust me.’
She is correct. That is what unsettles me.
It has been mere days, yet I know the cadence of her breathing, the look she gets before provoking on purpose, the taste of her fury, the sound she makes when pleasure tears through her.
My body remembers the sofa before my mind can stop it. Her tremble beneath my hand. Her arousal blooming richer with every pass of my mouth. The slick, exquisite heat of her.
Netheris take me.
Even now, with Tezra’s murder fresh in my territory and the alley’s discovery making old certainties unstable, my thoughts slide back to Eira Cross with humiliating ease.
Kissing her. Tasting her sublime cunt until she forgot every weapon she carried and every argument she had prepared.
It is untenable.
It is also true.
I drag my mind back into alignment by force and search her face again for intent. I find agitation, grief, indignation, desire she is trying to bury.
And beneath it all… resolve.
If there is calculation there too, she hides it well.
You can trust her.
And if the worst occurs, I will do what is necessary and remove the memory from her.
Decision made, I hold out my hand. ‘Come with me.’
Her gaze drops to it, then lifts to my face, suspicion and intrigue sparking together. ‘Those are usually the words women regret right before being lured into a crypt.’
There is the snark again. Softer now. Threaded with something she cannot quite hide.
Excitement.
A beat ticks by. Two. Then she places her hand in mine.
The contact is visceral and immediate, hitting me like storm-tossed heat poured directly into the blood.
Her skin is warm, pulse quick at her wrist, fingers strong despite the slight tremor she still carries from shock and grief and everything else this day has become.
My own pulse answers with a hard, immediate surge, and my cock, already too aware of her, turns painfully insistent again.
Netheris fires.
Taking her to my bedroom is, in strategic terms, a terrible idea.
And yet that is precisely why I am doing it. Perhaps repeated exposure to these galling, exhilarating sensations will inure me to her effect.
I lead her through the suite, aware of her attention moving over everything. The habit of a hunter remains intact no matter how rattled she is.
I wonder what she is thinking now that she has taken my hand voluntarily. Whether she hears the same electric hum I do in the silence between us.
If her maddening no-fangs rule were not in place, I would not need to guess. I would have sampled her blood by now and known exactly where her thoughts ran. Instead, I am left to read her by pulse, breath and posture.
An absurd downgrade.
We enter my bedroom, and she slows enough that I feel it through our joined hands.
Her eyes move first to the windows, then the carved stone, then the bed, lingering there.
The bed dominates the room, built in another century when furniture was meant to outlast dynasties and send a message while doing so.
Black walnut and iron, the obsidian headboard is inset with hammered iron tracery, vines and thorns and stars threaded into geometric discipline, while the modern mattress sits beneath linen and charcoal silk severe enough to look monastic until one imagines what happens in it.
It has held many a willing bed partner shackled in place for my use. And yet I cannot conjure a single face in this moment.
Not while watching Eira’s mouth part, and… fuck it all to Netheris, nearly undoing me.
‘Good Gods,’ she says, staring. ‘That’s not a bed. That’s a declaration.’
Despite myself, satisfaction moves through me. ‘Indeed. Florence, 1691. Commissioned for a man who intended to impress every guest and terrify every rival who entered his chamber.’
Her gaze flicks to me. ‘And you acquired it how, exactly? Estate sale? Armed robbery? Winner takes all at vampire poker night?’
‘I purchased the palazzo after his heirs bankrupted themselves pretending they still mattered. The bed came with the property.’
Her brows lift. ‘That is offensively on-brand.’
I incline my head. ‘If you wish to investigate it further, I would be happy to provide an up-close tour.’
Colour rises in her cheeks at once.
She purses her lips in that way she does when she is holding back a retort and a reaction at the same time, and the sight drags a groan to the back of my throat that I suppress with effort.
Focus.
I release her hand before the temptation to pull her onto the bed becomes stronger than reason and cross to the far wall, where the artefact stands concealed behind layered black cloth and shadow.
She follows slowly, curiosity overtaking embarrassment.
The Heartshard Glass rests in a stand of forged iron and onyx, narrow and elongated like a cathedral window cut free from its church. Even covered, it alters the room. The air around it feels denser, light and sound behaving differently in its presence.
Eira notices immediately. ‘What’s that?’ she asks, voice lower.
I do not answer yet.
Instead, I step to the artefact and grip the black cloth, pausing only long enough to measure her from the corner of my eye.
She is alert, wary, intrigued, and despite herself she has drifted closer, bringing with her that faint herbal-metallic shift in her scent that is beginning to work its way beneath my tongue and skin.
Good.
I would rather she see this fully.
I draw the coverings away. The cloth slides soundlessly to the floor, and the glass catches the room at once, fracturing it into impossible depth.
It is not ordinary glass, not even in the broadest supernatural sense.
Its surface appears dark at first glance, smoked and crystalline, threaded within by vein-like streaks of deep red-black that glimmer only when the light strikes them at certain angles.
Its edges are irregular, as though it was once part of something larger, violently broken and refitted into this frame without ever truly consenting to shape.
Eira steps in front of it and sucks in a breath as her eyes go wide. For one heartbeat, she looks neither dangerous nor clever nor defiant.
Only astonished.
Her gaze rises, catches mine, and she gasps again.
‘I can see your reflection.’
‘Yes.’
The word leaves me quietly, but it judders through me with more force than if I had raised my voice.
There is a strange impact in being seen this way. Not merely by her eyes, but through glass that should refuse me and does not, through a surface that returns me whole and places my image beside hers as though such a thing is natural.
I cannot remember the last time another person looked at me through a mirror.
Perhaps not since I was human.
To stand here now, reflected and witnessed while Eira Cross stares at me with astonishment instead of fear, feels less like a parlour trick and more like something denied so long I no longer had language for missing it.
‘How… how is that possible?’