Chapter 16
Loren
They'd sent them together for the night because they believed he would hurt her. The Council found him weak. He didn't kill enough, or often enough. He had secured a place for Kiera's family and even excusing it as research on the blood illness wasn't enough.
He knew this. Had known it for weeks, maybe longer.
The way the older Council members watched him when he spoke.
The way conversations stopped when he entered a room.
A commander who wouldn't bleed the cattle wasn't a commander at all.
That was the logic. Clean and simple and ancient as the species itself.
They thought him weak and whatever happened in the room between them, the Council figured it would benefit. Either Kiera would be gone, and therefore her family other than her father could be disposed of, or Loren would refuse to hurt her and lose his command, quite possibly.
Or he would slaughter her and drink all her blood. Certainly the best outcome for the Council. He would be vicious again.
That was the thing about the Council. Every outcome served them. Every door led where they wanted. It was almost elegant, if you didn't think too hard about the girl on the other side of it.
They could use that as their enemies, the Lucian, made their way to Earth.
The Lucian. Scavengers. Parasites who couldn't conquer a world themselves but could smell Vampyren conquest across galaxies the way a vulture smelled rot.
They followed. They waited. And when the Vampyren had broken a planet open, bled its defenses dry and settled into occupation, the Lucian came to feed on whatever was left.
They had done it on Sereth. On Kallos. On every world the Vampyren had claimed in the last three centuries.
And now they were coming here. Earth, with its seven billion cattle and its thin atmosphere and its people who didn't even know what lived among them yet.
The Council needed soldiers for what was coming.
Commanders who would put a blade through anything that moved and not think twice.
They needed Loren the way he used to be. Before her.
He shifted on the floor and regretted it immediately.
His back was not a back anymore. It was a landscape of opened flesh.
Sav had done the whipping — his own brother, because the Council understood theater.
Each strike had been precise. Sav knew where the nerves ran close to the surface, where muscle gave way to nothing but skin over bone.
The first ten had been bearable. Military conditioning.
You breathe. You hold. You count. The next ten had stripped that away.
By the end he had stopped counting. There was just the rhythm of it, the wet crack of the lash and the half-second before the pain caught up, that strange delay where the body refused to believe what had just been done to it.
Now the wounds wept. He could feel them, each one individually, ribbons of flesh that shifted when he breathed.
The cold air found every opening. It was a specific kind of agony — not the sharp blast of the strike itself but the slow, grinding aftermath.
The kind that settled in and stayed. The kind that made you understand why wounded animals crawled into holes to die.
He would not crawl into a hole. He would sit on this floor and he would stay exactly where he was.
The room was deliberate too. Top floor. No curtains on the windows.
Chicago in January. The city was a black void beyond the glass, no stars, no moon, just the horizontal scream of snow against the building.
The window rattled in its frame. Every gust pulled the temperature down another degree.
He could feel the cold like a living thing, pressing through the walls, through the floor beneath him, settling into his chest.
Cold did things to Vampyren. The Council knew this.
Everyone knew this. The colder it got, the further the higher functions retreated.
Reason first. Then restraint. Then memory.
Until what remained was something old and starving and utterly without mercy.
Bloodlust wasn't a metaphor. It was a chemical state.
A reversion. The body consuming the mind because the mind was a luxury the species could not always afford.
He could feel it now. The edges of it. Like a second pulse beneath his own, slower and heavier, pushing up from somewhere deep in his chest. His vision sharpened even as his thoughts blurred.
The shadows in the room became texture, became depth.
He could hear the building settling. He could hear the wind finding the gaps between bricks four floors down.
He could hear her heartbeat.
Kiera was on the cot across the room. He didn't look at her.
Looking at her was a problem he could not afford.
But he could hear the steady percussion of her pulse, and he could smell her.
Warm skin. The iron thread beneath it. Blood moving through her veins like a conversation he wasn't supposed to be listening to.
Each beat pushed her scent a little further into the room, and the room was small, and the cold had already stripped away half the barriers between what he was and what he wanted to be.
As himself, he would never hurt her. But tonight, the dark and the cold pressing in from outside, the room he had been given with her, the blizzard howling against the glass. That combined with the bloodlust, the exhaustion and the burning, unending pain.
His hands were flat on the floor. He pressed them harder against the concrete. Anchoring. The pain in his back was useful now. It kept him present. It kept him him. Every time the bloodlust surged, the pain answered, and the two held each other in a kind of violent equilibrium.
He focused on the facts. Her name was Kiera.
She had a family. He had promised to protect them.
She was not cattle. She was not food. She was the woman who had looked at him like he was something other than a monster, and that was either the bravest thing anyone had ever done or the stupidest, and he was in no condition to decide which.
He wouldn't hurt her. Would not.
The wind screamed against the glass. The cold sank another degree into his bones. His back burned and bled and the bloodlust coiled tighter in his chest, patient as a thing that had been waiting for exactly this.
...but he couldn't be sure.