Blooth Oath

She put a bullet through his skull. He's been losing his mind over her ever since. Vanya Nikolai doesn't miss. Fourteen days of surveillance. One silver-jacketed round from 1,200 meters, dead center of the forehead. Forty seconds later, Victor Blackwood sits up, digs the bullet out of his own skull, and looks straight down her scope. He should kill her for that. Instead, the 900-year-old vampire who rules New York's underworld finds something he hasn't found in centuries: a mind his compulsion can't touch. So he does what he does best. He lies. He becomes Martha, the sweet old widow downstairs who brings Vanya beef stew and fixes the hallway light. Then she ends up dying in his arms, and the blood that saves her binds them together. Now Vanya can't get more than three miles from him without choking on her own blood. Every wound one of them takes, the other feels. And under the ancient law of the Blood Bond, neither of them can tell the other a single lie. For a man who has lied his way through nine centuries, that's a problem. For a woman raised in a Siberian camp to trust no one, it's a war. With the Council of Five Houses counting down to Victor's trial for 14 disappearances he never ordered, a traitor closer than either of them suspects, and her own past waiting in the snow, the assassin and her target have one chance to survive each other. He can't lie to her anymore. He just can't make himself say the one thing that's true. Disclaimer: This is a work of fiction. All characters, places, and events in this story are products of the author's imagination. Any resemblance to actual events or places is purely coincidental.