She Tried to Poison Him

Nights at Blackwood Castle had never made a sound. Nine hundred and fourteen years was long enough to turn time itself into a motionless block of ice.

Loneliness here was a kind of architecture—stone walls six feet thick, plaster vaults carved with broken-winged angels, and an air so silent that a sycamore leaf falling in the courtyard could be heard, every fiber of it, as it touched the stone.

But since the second day of the Blood Bond, that ten-century silence had been torn open by an extremely patient sound.

Scrape... scrape... scrape...

It was metal grinding against rough, pitted granite. Steady. Meticulous. It drifted faintly from the corner of a second-floor window—Vanya's bedroom.

Victor sat back in a leather armchair in the ground-floor library, one hand holding a crystal glass of dark red liquid that had long gone cold, the other slowly turning a page of a 15th-century goatskin book.

He didn't need his demonic, supernatural hearing to know what she was doing. Through the tangled nerve link of the Blood Bond, he could feel her every smallest movement: the tension in the muscles of her forearm, the fierce focus that held her heart steady at 60 beats per minute, and above all—a flood of killing intent, pure and steady as an arrow already nocked on the string.

She was sharpening a silver soup spoon.

A silver spoon weighing about an ounce and a half that Aldric had forgotten to take away after the first dinner.

Victor took a sip of wine, and the corner of his mouth curved, extremely faintly, for one beat.

A killer shaped in the savage forge of Siberian Shadow would never give up hope just because her modern arsenal had been taken away. She was a product of bare-bones survival.

In the hands of someone like Vanya, a rusty nail, a sliver of broken glass, or a harmless silver spoon could all become tools for taking a life. She spent at least four hours every night, using the hours when the fog was thickest to hide the sound, patiently shaving the soft metal down a sliver at a time on the stone ledge of the window, turning the rounded handle into a leaf-shaped blade, pointed and sharp enough to pierce the intercostal muscle.

But what kept Victor from closing the book in his hands had little to do with the threat of a silver spoon.

It was the strange feeling taking root inside his chest—a space that had burned out and turned to stone hundreds of years ago.

Nine days. The Blood Bond's countdown clock moved silently, one mark at a time. And the past seven days had been a string of hidden battles, ridiculous and vicious, yet they had breathed a strange kind of life into the gloomy castle.

Vanya never gave up. She wasn't the kind of prisoner who sat and waited to die or begged for mercy. With every day that passed, she came up with a new way to try to kill him—the desperate attempts of a mortal against an ancient creature, but carried out with all the seriousness and elite skill of a top-tier killer.

On the third day, she strung a metal wire as fine as spider silk—pulled from the stitching along the edge of the carpet—across the 13th stair leading down to the main hall. It was a blind spot, where the shadow of the vaulted ceiling fell thickest. A mortal walking past would have had an ankle sliced open or gone headfirst down onto the stone floor.

Victor stepped over it. He simply lifted his foot an inch higher than his normal stride and glided over the steel wire without stirring a speck of dust. When he stepped off the last stair, he glanced back up at the top of the staircase. Vanya was hiding behind a plaster bust, half her face in shadow, her pale gray eyes flashing with bitter disappointment. He didn't expose her. He just walked on quietly, pretending he had no idea that the thin wire had nearly sliced the air under his heel.

On the fourth day, she gathered the broken glass from the wine glass he had accidentally dropped the day before—the bits Aldric hadn't gotten around to cleaning up completely. She hid them carefully inside the tall leather boots he left in the hallway.

Victor knew. He knew from the moment she snuck out into the hallway at 3:00 a.m., her heart beating five beats faster than usual from nerves. And that morning, he unhurriedly peeled off his socks, took off his leather boots, and walked barefoot across the cold oak floor right in front of her. Vanya sat on the sofa, both hands around a bowl of hot porridge, staring as his bare feet glided past the boots full of sharp edges. He heard her grind her teeth deep in her throat—a helpless grinding that was almost adorable.

Adorable?

The thought popped into Victor's head at noon on the fourth day, and it startled him so badly he nearly dropped the gold fountain pen in his hand.

A 914-year-old vampire. A man who had watched empires fall, had seen thousands of human beings die in plagues, had put down uprisings with his own hands without blinking... was using the word "adorable" to describe a killer who was dying to rip his heart out?

He tried to analyze the feeling with the cold mind of an ancient creature, but every law of reason fell apart. He couldn't stop thinking about her. He caught himself looking up from his ancient scriptures again and again to listen to her footsteps moving upstairs. He caught himself starting to notice whether the stove was warm enough, whether the chicken soup had too much salt for her taste. He didn't understand how he could be so absurdly tolerant of her childish assassination attempts.

That tolerance had little to do with a strong man's contempt for the weak. Its source was something far more dangerous: he liked the way she fought. He liked seeing the wild, primal, unbreakable fire of life burning in those gray eyes—a fire he had lost 800 years ago.

And for Vanya, the change was many times more violent and chaotic.

She wouldn't admit it. She stubbornly used hatred as the only shield she had to protect herself. But that hatred was being worn away day by day by small details that drove her crazy.

On the fifth day, she tried to poison him.

It was an attempt so naive it was almost funny. She had used a safety pin to draw out the toxic fluid from a wild mushroom growing on the castle's stone walls—a mushroom she knew contained an alkaloid that paralyzed the heart muscle—and secretly dripped it into the glass of dark red liquid Victor drank every night.

She had found them growing in the damp stone around the frozen fountain in the courtyard, small gray caps with a faint violet sheen under the gills. In the camp, a boy named Pasha had eaten three of their cousins on a dare. He had lasted until morning.

Victor watched her carry the glass over to him with a face so calm it was fake. He knew there was poison in it. He also knew that a plant toxin was completely useless against a dead biological system like his. But he took the glass from her hand anyway. He looked deep into her gray eyes, stretched wide with anticipation, and then unhurriedly drank every last drop.

"It's a little bitter," Victor remarked, setting the empty glass on the table. "Next time you should go with arsenic. It doesn't change the taste of blood."

Vanya froze where she stood. Her face went pale with fury, but deep in her eyes, something had quietly collapsed. She didn't just realize the endless gap in power between them; she also realized something far more frightening: he knew she had poisoned it, and he drank it anyway. He drank it only to prove to her how powerless she was, or... he drank it only because it was something she had handed him with her own hands.

Cruel kindness.

Every time Victor unhurriedly set a hot plate of food on the table, every time he adjusted the fire in the fireplace when he saw her shiver slightly at night, every time he removed a dangerous window latch so she wouldn't get hurt trying to climb out—every one of those gestures landed a heavy blow on Vanya's mind.

In her head, the image of the 900-year-old blood-drinking monster and the image of stooped old Martha kept overlapping, blending into one truth she couldn't pull apart. She wanted to tear off his mask and prove he was a fake and a manipulator, but his small, silent acts carried all the warmth she had craved her whole life.

She caught herself starting to watch him. She watched the way he turned each page of a book—gently and carefully, as if he were afraid of hurting the old paper.

She watched the way he sat lost in thought in front of the fireplace, his broad shoulders slightly slumped, wrapped in an air so lonely it was hard to breathe.

She realized she no longer looked at him only as a "target to eliminate." She looked at him like an unanswered question, a mysterious creature she wanted to destroy and yet, without meaning to, wanted to get closer to, so she could find out what was behind that eternal ice.

Once, passing the library door late at night, she heard him humming.

It was low and slow and a little off-key, an old tune with a kitchen-radio sadness to it, and she stopped dead in the hallway with her hand on the wall. It was the song Martha had hummed on the stairs with her broom.

She stood there until he stopped. Then she went back to her room, sat down on the edge of the bed, and did not sharpen anything at all that night.

The feeling crept up on her, without warning, like poisonous moss growing silently in a crack in the stone. She hated it. She was afraid of it. And because she was afraid, she decided she had to end it all on the seventh day.