Three Miles

The plate of baked sweet potatoes and the bowl of chicken soup were still steaming on the oak table, giving off a clean, warm smell in the middle of the castle's great room, which was heavy with the scent of leather and cedarwood.

Vanya lay on the black leather sofa, her chest still heaving hard after the three-mile sprint. Her pale gray eyes were locked on the plate of food, and then they slowly rose to look at Victor.

Looking at the chicken soup, her fingers trembled slightly. In her mind, the image of the tall, cold Ancient vampire in front of her instantly overlapped with the stooped figure of old Martha, her hands shaking a little as she carried bowl after bowl of hot soup to her on winter nights in the old apartment.

That cruel contrast went into Vanya's chest like a knife. She wanted to hate him, wanted to curse this food as poison, but her stomach was cramping with exhaustion, and the instinct to hold on to the few warm memories she had in her life wouldn't let her tear her eyes away from it.

She realized a bitter truth: even if he had turned into a monster, these careful gestures of care still held all the warmth of the past 19 days. She was on guard against him and hated him down to the bone, yet she was completely powerless against the strange, vague feeling gnawing at her mind—a feeling that a killer like her flatly refused to name.

She ate it anyway. She smelled it first, and tasted a drop, and waited, because some habits were older than grief. Then she ate every bite, and it was exactly right, down to the pinch of too much salt, and that was the cruelest thing he could possibly have done to her.

Through the Blood Bond, Victor saw straight through the struggle churning in her gray eyes. He didn't say another word; he simply turned and walked unhurriedly toward the library, leaving her the only private space she had.

The stillness of the castle did nothing to cool Vanya's plan to escape. She needed to test the iron chain wrapped around her neck—with her own flesh and bone, instead of a predator's explanation.

She spent the first hour learning the castle.

It was bigger inside than it had any right to be. Corridors ran off corridors, lined with dark portraits and suits of armor and tall windows shrouded in velvet, and the air everywhere smelled of cedar and candle smoke and cold stone. Nobody stopped her. Once, far down a gallery, she saw a servant cross from one door to another, and he did not so much as turn his head.

She found the east hallway by accident. She knew it the moment she turned the corner, the way you know a street you have only ever seen on a map.

The painting hung at the end of it, alone on a long wall of dark paneling, lit by a single brass lamp. Up close it was smaller than she had imagined. The village in the snow, the leaning roofs, the church tower. And the one small window with its point of warm light.

The paint had cracked into a web of tiny lines, like the glaze on an old plate. When she leaned closer, she could see brushstrokes in the snow, quick and certain, and a thumbprint pressed into the corner of the sky where the painter had steadied the canvas centuries ago.

She reached out without meaning to and touched the gilded frame. It was cold, much colder than the wall around it, the kind of cold that seeps up into your fingers and stays.

"Please don't touch it."

He was standing at the other end of the hallway. She hadn't heard him come, and she hated that more than she hated the fact that he was there at all.

"Why?" she asked.

Victor looked at the painting instead of at her. "Because it's the only thing in this house that I didn't choose for a reason I understand."

She took her hand away. He didn't come any closer, and after a moment he turned and walked back into the dark, and she stood there alone with the little lit window for a long time without knowing why she stayed.

Three hours later, when Victor had withdrawn into the depths of the castle, Vanya began her second attempt.

She didn't take the main route. Slipping through a second-floor window whose latch had been removed, Vanya dropped onto the carpet of rotting leaves outside the castle without making a sound. The uncanny strength of the vampire blood running in her veins let her legs glide along lighter and faster than in any drill at the Siberian Shadow training camp.

She ran through the dark woods behind the castle, keeping off the road this time, ducking low branches that shed their snow down the back of her neck. The pines smelled of resin and cold. Her breath tore in and out of her in white rags.

One mile. The blood in her body was still calm.

Two miles. Her chest began to tighten, and the second heartbeat from the Blood Bond pounded like a war drum.

The three-and-a-half-mile mark.

CRACK!

The thread of blood in her gut felt like a giant hand had clamped down on it and yanked it backward. This time it went beyond the organ-deep pain of the last attempt—a sudden spike in blood pressure made Vanya's vision go black. Fresh blood ran from the corner of her mouth and from her nose.

It was like being yanked backward on a leash made of her own veins. Her body folded in the middle, and the snow came up to meet her.

Vanya collapsed onto the carpet of dry leaves and lost consciousness completely before she could even feel her body hit the ground.

When Vanya opened her eyes again, she found herself back in the velvet bed in the castle bedroom. The blood on her face had been wiped clean. Next to the vanity sat a glass of warm water and a clean cotton towel.

That same silent care, again.

A folded card sat propped against the glass of water. The handwriting on it was slanted and old-fashioned, the ink so black it looked wet. Rest. The door was never locked.

She tore it into eight pieces and dropped them on the floor. Then, after a minute, she picked them up again and put them in the drawer of the nightstand, and she could not have said why.

Vanya clenched her teeth as her fury and helplessness hit their peak. She got up, walked to the old brick wall of the room, poured every last bit of her strength into her left fist, and slammed it into the hard stone.

THUD! CRACK!

The bones of her knuckles cracked, fresh blood seeped between her fingers, and a stabbing pain shot straight up to her shoulder.

Her knuckles throbbed in time with her heart, and for one strange second she could have sworn she felt the throb echo somewhere else, just beyond the wall.

At that exact moment, from the library connected by a thick wooden door, came a CRASH!—a glass shattering to pieces on the floor.

Vanya froze, hid her bloody hand behind her back, and slowly pushed the door open and stepped through.

Victor was standing beside his desk. An expensive crystal wine glass lay shattered at his feet. He ignored the shards and looked down at his own left hand—his knuckles were flushed bright red and gave one faint tremor, as if they had just taken a hard mechanical impact.

His black eyes rose to look at her, dark and strangely forgiving.

"Thirty percent," Victor said, his tone calm but carrying a heavy, pressing weight.

"Any physical harm you do to yourself... 30 percent of that pain and impact bounces straight back into my nervous system through the Blood Bond."

A bitter smile twisted Vanya's lips. She had found the first crack in the immortal's armor: he couldn't keep her prisoner without paying for it with his own nerves.

She filed it away very carefully. It was the first useful thing she had learned in this house, and she already hated what it might cost to use it.