I'm standing at the vanity, reaching for my left earring, when the door clicks. It's the smallest sound—metal tongue sliding out of its socket, a deliberate break of silence. He never makes noise. He doesn't breathe, not really, and his footsteps are softer than the dust motes floating in the lamplight. So this click is a gift. A warning. A choice.
My fingers pause on the pink heart-shaped stud. I twist it free and set it in the crystal tray. The second one comes off slower, my thumb brushing my earlobe as I stall. My reflection stares back at me—honey-brown eyes a little too bright, chestnut curls already escaping their messy bun, the pink sundress brushing my thighs. I look like a girl who read too many books and believed them.
Then I feel him.
It starts at the back of my neck—a cold prickle that shouldn't be there, like someone opened a freezer door behind me. My skin breaks into goosebumps. I don't turn. I keep my eyes on the mirror, waiting for his reflection to catch up.
One second. Two. The mirror shows only my own face, my own pink dress, the wardrobe behind me empty. Three seconds. The air thickens, heavy with something that makes my breath shallow. Four. Five.
And then he's there.
Like the mirror had to download him in slow motion—first the black of his shirt, then the pale column of his throat, then those sharp cheekbones and the crimson gleam of his eyes. He stands behind me, hands in his pockets, head tilted, watching me watch him. The delay is creepy as fuck. It would make me scream if he weren't so beautiful it hurt.
"Why are you taking so long?" His voice is quiet, almost a murmur, but it cuts through the room like a blade through silk.
I let out a little laugh, soft and teasing. "You're impatient." I tilt my head, meeting his eyes in the glass. "Hungry for my blood?"
He says nothing. Just stares. That's answer enough.
I reach up to undo the clasp of my necklace—a thin gold chain with a tiny heart pendant, the one my mother gave me. My fingers fumble with the clasp. "Take it off for me, will you?"
He looks away, jaw tightening. That flicker of defiance. That pride still bleeding.
"It's an order," I say softly.
He rolls his eyes—actually rolls them, like a petulant teenager in a three-century-old body—but he steps closer. His hands come up, cold fingers brushing the nape of my neck as he unclasps the chain. I shiver. His touch is ice and silk, and it leaves a trail of goosebumps down my spine.
In the mirror, his reflection is still catching up. He's a shadow, a smear of darkness where his body should be. The necklace slides free, and he holds it for a moment, staring at the tiny heart in his palm, before setting it beside the earrings.
His fingers don't leave my neck. They linger, tracing the line where my pulse beats under the skin. He leans in, and I feel his breath—cold, scentless—against the curve of my shoulder. He inhales, slow and deep.
"Do you like my perfume?" I ask, and my voice comes out smaller than I meant. Hesitant.
He pauses. "I prefer your bodily scent underneath the perfume."
I blink. That's not what I expected. I thought he'd mock it, or ignore the question, or say something about roses and vanilla. But he said my scent. Underneath. Like he's been cataloging me on a level I can't even smell.
Then he pulls away, and my hair falls loose around my shoulders. I look at his hands—he's holding my hair tie, the plain black elastic that held my bun together. He places it on the wardrobe, next to the necklace.
"I prefer your hair down," he says, and there's nothing in his voice. Flat. Silent. Like a stone dropped into still water.
I sigh, trying to find my footing. The power shift is rippling under my feet, and I need to hold it. "So… do you want to bite my neck?"
His head snaps toward me so fast I flinch. His eyes go wide, the crimson bleeding into something darker, hungrier. "Can I?" The words tumble out, desperate, almost childlike. The arrogance stripped away.
"I mean… if you ask nicely?" I say, and I'm backing up without meaning to, my heels hitting the rug. He follows, step for step, silent as a shadow. My breath catches.
I gulp and sit on the edge of the bed. The mattress dips under my weight. He stands in front of me, looking down, his hands still at his sides but twitching—like he's holding himself back by a thread.
"Does it hurt?" I ask. My voice is barely a whisper.
He blinks. A long, slow motion, like he's dragging himself out of a trance. "Yes." One word, flat, no comfort.
I look down at my lap, at the pink fabric pooling around my thighs. In my head, I'm scrolling through all those dark romance books, the ones where the vampire bites the heroine and she moans, arches, shatters with pleasure. It's supposed to feel like drowning in honey. Like every nerve ending catching fire. I hold onto that image.
"You're only allowed to take a little bit, okay?" I say. "Just a little."
He blinks again. That's it. No promise. No reassurance.
I lean back against the headboard. The wood is cool through the thin dress. My heart is hammering so hard I can feel it in my throat, in my temples, in the tips of my fingers. He sits down beside me, and the mattress shifts, tilting me toward him. He's so close I can feel the cold radiating off his body.
He's hyper-attentive, his crimson eyes locked on the curve of my neck like nothing else in the world exists. It's creepy. It's terrifying. It's so hot it makes my stomach flip.
"Okay," I breathe. "Go ahead."
He leans in. His lips brush the skin just below my ear, cold and dry. I squeeze my eyes shut, waiting for the pleasure I've read about. The euphoria. The melting.
Then his fangs sink in.
It's not pleasure. It's not even close. It's like a cluster of red-hot sewing needles being driven into my neck all at once, deeper and deeper, twisting. The pain is so sharp and so sudden that my body jerks, a scream ripping out of my throat—high and raw and animal.
"Stop—stop, stop, stop—" I push at his chest, my palms flat against the cold hard muscle, but he doesn't budge. He's a statue. Unyielding. His hands grip my shoulders, holding me in place, and I feel the pull—a deep, suctioning tug at the wound, like he's drawing the blood out of my very bones. It burns. It burns so bad my vision goes white at the edges.
I cry out again, but the sound is weaker this time. My arms are trembling, my fingers clawing at his shirt, but I have no strength. I feel lightheaded, my limbs turning to lead. The pain isn't just at the bite—it radiates out, down my collarbone, up into my jaw, a web of fire that spreads with every heartbeat.
Tears stream down my cheeks, hot and fast. I can taste salt. I can hear myself sobbing, gasping for breath between cries. And he keeps drinking. Keeps pulling. I can feel the blood leaving me, a warm trickle running down my neck and soaking into the collar of my sundress. The fabric sticks to my skin.
I stop pushing. I can't. My hands fall to my lap, limp. The room is swimming. The ceiling is too white, the light too bright, and I'm so tired. So tired.
Then he tears away.
The release is almost as violent as the bite—a wet, tearing sound that makes me gasp. He's heaving, his chest rising and falling even though he doesn't need to breathe. His eyes are blown wide, the irises swallowed by black, a thin ring of crimson glowing at the edges. His lips are smeared with my blood, dark and glistening in the lamplight. He looks high. Feral. Like a wild thing that just tasted its first kill.
I stare at him through my tears, and I see it. The animal. Not the brooding vampire lord, not the sarcastic husband. Just a predator with blood on his mouth.
My neck is on fire. I lift a shaking hand to touch it, and my fingers come away slick and red. The blood is pouring now, dripping onto the pink fabric, leaving dark blossoms that spread like flowers. I press my palm against the wound, but it's too big. Two holes, deep and raw, weeping into my skin.
I'm sobbing, my whole body shaking. A girl in a pink sundress, crying on a bed, bleeding out over her mother's necklace. This isn't how the books go. This isn't pleasurable. It's agony. It's violation. And he did it anyway.
He swallowed my blood like he was dying.
I look up at him. He's staring at me now, and something shifts in those black eyes. Recognition. Horror. His hand comes up, fingers hovering near my neck, but he doesn't touch. "Ophelia," he breathes. My name. Not a snarl, not a command. An apology.
I flinch away from him, pressing my back against the headboard. "Don't," I whisper. "Don't touch me."
His hand falls. He looks at his fingers—still stained red—and then back at my neck, at the blood soaking through my dress. His expression cracks, just a hair. The animal recedes, and something else surfaces. Guilt. Shame. Desperation of a different kind.
He kneels. Not on the bed. On the floor. His knees hit the wood with a dull thud, and he stays there, head bowed, hands limp at his sides. "I didn't mean—" He stops. Swallows. The words come out broken, like they hurt him more than the bite hurt me. "I couldn't stop. Her blood. Your blood. I couldn't—"
I stare at him. The mighty vampire, groveling at my feet, covered in my blood. My tears are still falling, but something else is growing in my chest. Something cold and sharp. Power.
I press my hand harder against my neck, trying to stem the bleeding. "You're going to make this right," I say, and my voice is thick but steady. Shaky, but steel underneath. "You owe me."
He looks up. Those crimson eyes, still hungry, still desperate, but now with a thread of fear. Of hope.
"Anything," he says.
And I look down at him, this beautiful monster on his knees, and I know exactly what I'm going to ask.
But before I can, the words catching on my tongue, something shifts. The room tilts, just a degree, and I blink. The ceiling light leaves trails. My hand is still pressed to my neck, but the pressure feels distant, like I'm touching someone else's skin through thick glass. I try to shape the demand—the thing he owes me, the thing that will put me back in control—but my mouth won't cooperate. The words dissolve. My vision swims.
I feel my head... Lightheaded. The room is a watercolor, edges bleeding into each other. The pink of my dress pools into the white of the sheets. Eryth's kneeling form blurs at the edges, a smear of black and pale and red. I try to hold on to his face, to the guilt in his crimson eyes, but it's like trying to grip water. My fingers slip. The light drains.
It hurts. Not the bite anymore—something deeper, a hollow ache that radiates from my core outward, like my body is remembering it needs the blood he took. I can't move. I can't even lift my hand to signal him, to say something's wrong. My vision swims in slow circles, and then everything goes black.
Beeping.
It's the first thing I hear—a rhythmic, mechanical pulse that doesn't match my own heartbeat. My heartbeat is slow. Thick. Like honey through a sieve. The beeping is faster. Clinical. A machine counting seconds I can't feel.
I try to open my eyes. The light is dim, but it still stings, pushing against my lids like a weight. I force them open a crack, and the world swims into focus in pieces. A ceiling. White. A lamp on a wooden nightstand, turned low. The beeping comes from somewhere to my left, a monitor with green lines tracing peaks and valleys across a dark screen.
I'm lying down. The bed I was bitten on—I recognize the canopy above me, the same gauzy fabric that drifted when Eryth leaned over me. But something's different. The sheets are clean. The smell of blood is faint, covered by antiseptic and something floral. My dress is gone. I'm wearing something softer, lighter—a cotton nightgown in pale cream, the kind a grandmother would buy you. My hair is tied back, loose and careful, off my neck.
My neck.
I lift a hand—it takes effort, my arm heavy and foreign—and touch the bandage taped to my skin. Gauze, thick and padded, held in place by medical tape that pulls at my hairline. Beneath it, the bite throbs with a dull, distant ache. Sealed. Tended. Healed enough that I'm not bleeding anymore.
I have a drip. A thin tube snakes from a bag hanging beside the bed—clear liquid, but with a dark red tint at the bottom of the bag. Blood. My blood type, probably. They're giving me back what he took. I stare at the tube, following it to the needle taped to the inside of my elbow, and I feel a strange, hollow laugh try to climb my throat. A vampire giving a human a blood transfusion. The irony would be funny if I weren't so weak.
My brain is fuzzy. Cotton-mouthed and slow, like I've been asleep for hours instead of... however long it's been. I don't know how long I was out. The room is the same, but the light through the curtains has shifted—darker, evening or early night. The monitor beeps. The IV drips. I'm alive.
And then I hear voices.
They're muffled at first, coming from somewhere beyond the door. I strain to listen, my head turning on the pillow, and the voices clarify. Someone is yelling. Scolding. A woman's voice, sharp and cold, cutting through the wood like a blade. Séraphine. I'd recognize that languid, cutting drawl anywhere, even when it's laced with fury.
"—could have killed her. Do you understand that, you stupid boy?"
A pause. No answer. Then another voice—deeper, older, I can't name. "She is a human child, Eryth. A human. You know the law. You know what happens when we bite without—"
"I know." Eryth's voice. Flat. Dead. I've never heard him sound like that—not sarcastic, not angry, not desperate. Just empty. A shell saying words. "I know what I did."
I push myself up. My arms tremble, my muscles screaming in protest, but I manage to sit. The room spins for a moment, then settles. I swing my legs over the edge of the bed, the IV tube tugging at my arm. My feet hit the cool wood floor. I stand, my knees buckling once before I find my balance.
The voices continue, muffled through the door. I pad toward it, each step a negotiation with my own body. The monitor beeps behind me, forgotten. I reach the door and press my eye to the crack where it doesn't quite meet the frame.
The hallway is dim, lit by sconces that cast long shadows. Séraphine stands with her arms crossed, her platinum bob catching the light, her lilac eyes hard as gemstones. Beside her, a vampire I don't recognize—a woman in a white uniform, her face sharp and professional, a nurse's cap pinned to her dark hair. And behind them, a dark figure, much like Eryth but older, taller, with long hair, a person I can't name, with his dried-blood eyes fixed on Eryth with an expression I can't read. Grief. Anger. Shame.
And Eryth.
He stands before them, his back to me, his shoulders curved inward in a way I've never seen. His black shirt is rumpled, untucked, and there's a dark stain on his collar. My blood. He hasn't changed. Hasn't cleaned himself. His hands hang at his sides, limp and useless. He's not responding. He's not defending himself. He's just standing there, taking it, like a man waiting for a blade to fall.
Séraphine steps closer to him, her voice dropping, but I can still hear. "She almost died, Eryth. If the nurse hadn't arrived when she did, if I hadn't felt the blood from across the house—" She stops, her jaw tight. "You took too much. You know better. You've had three centuries to learn control."
Silence.
"Look at me." Séraphine's voice cracks like a whip.
He doesn't. His head stays down, his gaze fixed on the floor, his raven hair falling forward to hide his face. He looks dead inside. Flat. Like someone hollowed him out and left the shell standing.
I watch, my breath held, my fingers pressed to the doorframe. And then, as if sensing my gaze, Séraphine's head turns. Her lilac eyes find the crack in the door. Find me.
She knows I'm watching. They all do, probably. Vampires always notice everything—the hitch of my breath, the beat of my pulse, the shift of air as I lean against the wood. I've been caught. I pull back, closing the door softly, and stand there in the dim room, my heart hammering against my ribs.
I sit on the edge of the bed. The monitor beeps. The IV drips. I wait.
The voices outside quiet. Footsteps retreat, then approach—measured, deliberate. Three sets. The door opens, and Séraphine steps in first, her expression unreadable. Behind her, the nurse follows, her eyes scanning the room before landing on me. And behind them both, Eryth. He doesn't cross the threshold. He stands in the doorway, his eyes fixed somewhere above my head, refusing to meet my gaze.
The nurse crosses to me in three silent steps, her fingers finding my wrist before I can react. Her skin is cool, her touch professional as she checks my pulse. She holds my wrist for a long moment, then releases it and shines a small light into my eyes, making me flinch. She checks my pupils, the bandage on my neck, the IV line. Then she steps back and speaks.
"Crazy."
One word. Flat. Accusing.
I blink. "What?"
"Did he bite you forcefully, or did you let him?" She asks me. Her voice is cold, clinical, but there's a thread of something underneath—disbelief, maybe. Or disgust.
I gulp. My mouth is dry. I look at Séraphine, then at the door, where Eryth still stands, a statue of shame. I look down at my hands, at the IV tube taped to my arm. "I asked him."
The room goes quieter than it already is. The silence stretches, fills the corners, presses against my ears. Séraphine's eyes narrow. The nurse's expression doesn't change, but something in her posture shifts—a tightening, a recoil.
"Why?" Séraphine demands. The word is sharp, a blade honed by centuries of authority. She steps closer, her lilac eyes boring into mine. "Why would you ask a starving vampire to bite your neck?"
My words come out small, stumbling over each other. "Because... He likes my blood... And I thought... Because he hadn't eaten properly in days... he'd like—" I stop. My words die down. Stupid. I feel like a kid caught breaking a vase, trying to explain why it made sense at the time. I look down at my lap, at the cream fabric of the nightgown. My eyes burn. I don't cry. I won't.
Séraphine glares at Eryth. The weight of her gaze could crack stone. "There's a reason why vampires don't bite humans, Ophelia. They die." She says it slowly, like she's explaining it to a child. "We don't bite because we cannot stop. The hunger takes over. The blood—your blood, specifically—is like nothing we've ever tasted. And you," she points at me, her finger sharp, "you let him. You invited a predator to feed on you, and you're lucky you're alive to hear me scold you for it."
The nurse chimes in, her voice softer but no less stern. "You lost over a liter of blood. If the bleeding hadn't been stopped when it was, you would have gone into shock. Your heart would have stopped." She glances at the IV bag. "You'll need another transfusion in the morning. And rest. Real rest, not the kind that comes from passing out from blood loss."
I nod. I don't trust my voice.
Séraphine sighs, a long, weary sound that seems to drain the anger from the room. She runs a hand through her platinum bob, then looks at the nurse. "Leave us."
The nurse nods, gives me one last look—something that might be pity, might be contempt—and leaves. The door clicks shut behind her.
Séraphine turns to Eryth. "Stay." The word is a command, low and absolute. Then she looks at me, her expression softening by a fraction. "You need rest. I'll have food sent up. Real food. You'll eat it."
I nod again. She holds my gaze for a moment, then turns and leaves, brushing past Eryth without a word. The door closes, and we're alone.
Eryth doesn't move. He stands in the doorway, his eyes still fixed somewhere above my head, his hands at his sides. The bloodstain on his collar is dark, almost black in the dim light. He looks like a ghost wearing his own corpse.
I open my mouth. "Eryth—"
He turns. Walks away. His footsteps are soft, receding down the hallway, and I hear them fade into silence.
I stare at the empty doorway. The room feels colder without him in it. The monitor beeps. The IV drips.
I don't know how long I sit there. Minutes. Maybe longer. The door is still open, the hallway dark and empty, and I'm staring at the spot where he stood, trying to find words for the thing that's coiling in my chest. It's not anger, not quite. It's not fear. It's something rawer—a thread pulled tight, fraying at both ends.
Then I hear a sound. Footsteps, returning. Slow. Heavy. He's back.
Eryth appears in the doorway. He doesn't enter. He stands on the threshold, his hand gripping the doorframe, his knuckles white. His face is still hollow, still drained of everything that made him him. But his eyes lift. They find mine.
And he asks, his voice barely above a whisper, "Why did you let me?"
The question hangs between us, sharp and fragile. I could tell him the truth—that I thought it would be romantic, that I'd read too many books where the bite was pleasure, that I wanted to be the heroine who tames the monster with her blood. But the words sound stupid in my head. Childish. A girl who believed the fairy tale and nearly died for it.
So I don't say that. I look down at my hands, at the IV tube, at the bandage on my neck. I say the thing that's true, even if it's not the whole truth. "I promised you I'd let you."
He stares at me. Something flickers in his eyes—pain, maybe. Or disbelief. His grip on the doorframe tightens, and for a moment, I think he's going to say something. His lips part. His breath catches.
Then his jaw tightens, and he turns away. His footsteps recede down the hallway, faster this time, and the silence swallows them.
I sit alone in the dim room, the monitor beeping beside me, the IV dripping into my arm. The bandage on my neck pulls with every beat of my pulse. The empty doorway watches me.
I don't know if he'll come back. I don't know if I want him to.
But I know one thing for certain: when I ask for what he owes me, I won't be kneeling.