Second Chances
Ifloated somewhere between dreaming and death, my mind searching for an anchor. The darkness cradled me without consequence, like it was holding space to see if my soul would choose to be born again.
Ethereal sounds echoed in my abyss and slowly took form. What were undefined chimes and tunes transformed, firming into words I could understand.
The voices reached out to me. Calling my name, begging me to come back. Like when I would fall into a vision and leave a concerned onlooker back with my physical body. But I wasn’t in control. This wasn’t a vision I could willingly exit.
I lingered, stuck in this state until I heard him.
“Hello, lovely.”
“She hasn’t been responsive yet. She needs more time to rest,” a protective, sharp tone warned him.
“I understand. I just want to sit with her a while. You can stay if it puts you at ease.”
A huff from beyond his voice and the sound of scraping. A chair being dragged, maybe.
“Here.” It was a female. “I’ll be watching. And just a reminder that she’s recovering but I’m fully rested. You have five minutes.”
“Understood,” he stated with a clipped tone, and I tried to picture him in the abyss of my mind. Blue eyes, fierce as the sea, blinked back at me in the dark.
Those eyes. I knew those eyes.
“I don’t know where to start,” he whispered with a tentative nervousness. “With thank you or I’m sorry.”
“Start with you’re sorry,” the female barked at him from farther away.
“Do you mind?”
“Being next to her right now is not a privilege you’ve earned and you’re on borrowed time. Four minutes.”
She was protecting me from him. But I wasn’t afraid. No, I knew in my marrow he wouldn’t hurt me.
He let out a frustrated exhale.
“Reyva. You said you loved me. I was in a frenzied state—having so much of your blood at once—but, I heard you. I will not allow you to rob us of the chance to love each other. Please, come back to us. To me.”
I felt a limb somewhere in the physical world lift. He was holding me. A piece of me. His lips pressed ever so softly to the top of my skin.
A thin line of warm light broke through the darkness. Like a fiery sun rising on an orange horizon. Then, it disappeared again. Somewhere, muscles twitched. I wanted to feel more of him, to see him.
“Reyva?” he called.
Yes, I answered. Only to myself. I tried again, but words couldn’t form. A low grunt of acknowledgement rumbled against my aching bones.
Then the light emerged again. Bigger and more brilliant than before. I blinked, welcoming in more and more of the light and room around me.
“Reyva!” There he was. Stormy eyes just as I’d seen them in the abyss. And a second face. The woman.
“She’s waking up!” she yelled and my head throbbed relentlessly. Her face disappeared as she kept shouting. She was demanding the healer be brought to me. But I didn’t follow her retreating form. My eyes stayed fixed on his.
“Hello, lovely,” he said, pressing the back of my hand against the stubble of his cheek.
It hurt, but I smiled, and croaked, “I meant it.”
A muscle feathered in his jaw and his eyes went still.
I breathed again, a painful breath. The symphony of pain rose in my body as I regained consciousness. “I meant it—when I said—I love you.”
“I know.” He kissed my hand again, careful not to move me too much. “I know you did, Reyva.”
“I love you,” I repeated in case the abyss took me again. He needed to know. Dommik deserved to know.
He set my hand down and fell to his knees onto the floor next to the hay bed. His hand gently stroked my hair as I kept whispering my declaration to him. But my body was so weak. I was so tired.
“I know, Reyva. I love you, too.” His fingers traced my cheeks before returning to my hair. I blinked slowly. “Rest, lovely. I’ll be here.”
The black murkiness of sleep crept over me, but there was no despair in this darkness.
Only hope. And love.
Dommik never left my side. I would wake, and he would be there, reading something Oddo scrounged up or simply holding my hand. But always there. And he looked so tired.
I encouraged him to go, hunt, feed. Gorvin and Oddo had taken to animal blood in the drought of willing humans. Dommik only took what was left after everyone else was satiated.
“She’s not an option,” Cova would warn him. Her protective stance was an ever present figure beyond Dommik’s frame.
“Of course not,” he placated my sister. Their banter was welcome if it meant everyone was alive.
“You need to feed,” she insisted one day, ushering him away from the room.
Lydia took his place, holding a bowl of brown, mysterious stew. “Don’t ask what’s in it.”
We’d taken refuge in the basement of the Day Guard barracks, not five miles from the Hive to heal and regroup. There weren’t many light-tight places for our vampire companions to reside when the sun was out, and while the cramped accommodations weren’t ideal, they would have to suffice.
Oddo assisted with the healer tracking my recovery progress. Dommik offered his blood to speed the process, but Oddo advised against it. He was still healing too and his poisoned blood could do more harm than good. As a consolation, they’d given Dommik permission to rest on the hay bed next to me.
“Only if you can behave yourself,” Cova warned.
“If only she knew how much restraint I’ve had to show since meeting you,” he’d whispered into my hair.
Laughing hurt.
I would fall asleep unabashedly wrapped up in him. The rhythm of his rising and falling chest lulled me into deep, restful sleep.
Gorvin appeared in my doorway on the third night.
“Good to see you sitting upright.” His flat tone didn’t match his words. Rhazien’s steward had withdrawn entirely into himself. What little emotion or feeling he may have expressed was smothered by his grief and loss of his regent.
“You were nearly drained twice in the space of two days. It should have been impossible for you to do what you did.” He moved toward me and took a well-postured seat in the chair next to my cot. “What I mean to say is, thank you. For saving us. And him.”
Gorvin nodded a bald head towards the open doorway. Oddo’s breathy chuckle echoed off the walls and what I’d suspected in my early days at the Hive about the pair became clear.
Words failed me at the prospect of the second chances given to so many of us. Gorvin wasn’t one to appreciate overly verbose conversations. So I simply said, “You’re welcome, Gorvin.” And that felt like enough.
At dusk that day, I overheard Oddo asking Cova questions about all that had transpired from her perspective. Between moments of grief, he’d been begging the Day Guard to procure him more paper to record everyone’s account. A slave to his insatiable need for knowledge.
“This is history! It must be preserved,” he insisted while scratching feverishly on his parchment.
He constantly shared his worry that irreplaceable records may have been destroyed in the culling.
And even if that weren’t the case, one thing was certain.
The vampires couldn’t return to the Southern Hive. It belonged to the shades now.
On the fifth evening, I was allowed out of bed.
Cova permitted Dommik to help escort me to a primitive bathing barrel but shooed him away as I undressed.
I wondered as I guided warm water over my bare skin beneath the winter moonlight if he was somewhere in the frosted treeline watching. A part of me hoped he was.
If he had been lurking somewhere, he didn’t let on when we returned to the barracks basement.
The remaining high-ranking members of the Southern Hive strategized at a table in the common area as Lydia attempted to comb through my unruly mane.
I slid my gaze to the table when I heard Dommik insist, “We have to move on soon. I know Eryx. I know his mind. He’ll come back. I don’t know when or with what numbers, but he will come back.”
Lydia stilled. Her sun-kissed skin faded at the mention of Eryx and I remembered why Rhazien’s mission to ascend and wake Lorana was so important. Someone needed to continue his work.
And that someone was Dommik.
There hadn’t been a door to my room the first few nights, but Cova had demanded Shaw find or make one, and now Dommik closed the makeshift barrier, giving us much needed privacy.
“What a day,” he groaned, kicking off his boots before wrapping himself around me.
“You mean night.” I chuckled into his chest.
Dommik grumbled something about me being a smart ass before planting a long kiss on my forehead. I hummed beneath the press of his lips.
The moment was a glimmer. A happy moment amongst a million unhappy ones. The Southern Hive had fallen, but we had each other. Survivors were displaced and traumatized, but we had each other. We’d both nearly died, but we didn’t, and we had each other.
Everything had been stripped from me. My titles, comforts, freedom, and nearly my life, all to be restored ten-fold, then stripped away again.
But here, tangled up in the weight of Dommik’s muscled limbs, I didn’t feel like I needed much else. The only title I wanted was to be his. And I would choose him every day, if he would have me too.
“We have to leave soon?” I whispered against his lips.
His stubble tickled my chin and cheeks as he nodded softly.
“What’s next for us?” I asked, lifting my gaze to meet his.
“Resettle. Rebuild,” he said through a heavy exhale.
“They’ll follow you,” I said, brushing a strand of dark hair from his forehead.
“And I’ll come back for you,” he said, and my heart threatened to crack in half. We hadn’t talked about a plan, but one had already been decided on. And it didn’t include me.
My muscles tightened beneath his embrace, but before I could retreat entirely, he explained, “Reyva. Wait. I’m not going to abandon you.”
“Then tell me what you mean,” I pleaded softly as my vision blurred.
Dommik’s hands captured my cheeks and he pressed a long, deep kiss to my lips.
“Feel that? That is what I want with you forever. Hear me, Reyva? I want forever with you.”
“But—”
“But we can’t have that if Eryx gets what he wants.”