Blood and Surrender

The first taste of her blood was not copper, but sunlight and ozone. It exploded through his dead veins, a searing, ecstatic pain that was her power, her life, her very soul flooding into him. Kimberly arched against him, a raw cry torn from her throat, not of pain but of release, as if a dam had broken inside her. And in that moment, Earl didn't just feed—he remembered what it was to be alive, the sensation so vast it threatened to unmoor him from centuries of cold control.