The First Kiss

The seventh night.

Dinner was served in the castle's main dining room. The cedar table was 16 feet long, but Victor had set only two places, at one end near the fireplace. The room was lit by beeswax candles that gave off a soft scent and threw swaying black shadows across the old portraits hanging on the stone walls.

The portraits watched them from the walls, a long line of pale, grave faces in the clothes of forgotten centuries. In the candlelight, Vanya noticed for the first time that every one of them had the same eyes. She did not let herself wonder why.

Vanya sat across from Victor. She was wearing his white dress shirt—the only thing she had to wear right now, falling to her thighs and covering the tangled scars on her pale skin.

Her right hand was hidden under the edge of the table. Her fingers were clamped around the handle of the silver spoon she had been grinding down for the past seven nights.

The thin, sharp metal blade, ground flat on both sides, was tucked neatly into her small palm.

Victor sat at ease at the other end of the table. He cut his medium steak into pieces with the flawless manners of a 19th-century aristocrat. He didn't look at her, but the Blood Bond between them was humming at violent frequencies. He could feel her heartbeat—it wasn't racing with nerves anymore. It was slow, deep, and extremely cold.

It was the heartbeat of a killer the moment before the decisive strike.

"Is the food not to your taste tonight?" Victor asked at his leisure, his deep voice ringing out in the silence. He set his silver knife down on his plate and looked up at her.

Vanya didn't answer.

Her pale gray eyes stared blankly at the half-burned candle on the table. The golden candlelight fell across her angular face, drawing out features that were delicate but cruelly hard. She slowly stood up.

"I'm not hungry," she said under her breath, and started walking around the table.

Her steps were very light. Her bare feet glided over the oak floor without a sound. She circled behind Victor's back and moved closer to the corner by the fireplace, pretending she was looking for a little warmth from the half-burned logs.

Victor didn't turn his head. He stayed leaning back in his chair, his hands laced together on his thigh. He knew she was right behind him. He knew her right hand was ready with the sharpened silver blade. He could even calculate the exact path her arm would travel, the angle of the stab, and the force it would take to get through his handmade suit.

With the speed of an Ancient vampire, he could turn and catch her wrist before she moved a hair. He could snap the bones of her forearm in a tenth of a second, or simply vanish from the chair before the point of the blade touched air.

He could easily have dodged it. As easily as he had stepped over the steel wire or avoided the broken glass.

But Victor sat still.

He closed his eyes for an extremely short moment. In that endless moment, the craziest and most primal thought surged through his mind: Let's see how far she'll go. He wanted to feel her fire at the closest possible range. He wanted to know what it would feel like to be hurt by the very person who carried his blood inside her.

WHOOSH!

Vanya lunged.

No sound, no warning. She threw in her whole body weight, all the spring in the legs that had been forged by 10 years of mortal training, along with the demonic strength running through her veins from the Blood Bond. She swept around his left side, her right arm swinging up in a perfect arc.

The sharpened silver spoon handle drove straight into the left side of Victor's chest.

SHUNK!

The metal point ripped through the fine suit fabric, punched through chest muscle as solid as rock, and sank deep into the gap between the fourth and fifth ribs—exactly where his heart was.

The silver handle snapped in two under the force of the stab, but the three-inch blade had sunk all the way into Victor's chest.

Blood—dark red, thick, and carrying the chill of ancient ice and snow—spurted out and spattered the front of Vanya's white shirt.

Victor didn't dodge. He didn't even shift his body to soften the impact. He took the full force of the stab with the most chilling calm.

And in that very moment, the iron law of the Blood Bond exploded.

CRACK!

"Hkk...!"

A violent moan of pain was crushed in Vanya's throat.

Thirty percent of the pain from a chest wound in a 900-year-old vampire—pain carrying a horrific neural load—slammed straight back into her nervous system like a high-voltage surge of a hundred thousand volts.

Every muscle in Vanya's body seized violently. Her gray eyes rolled back, and her vision went black instantly. The strength in her legs vanished completely. The broken spoon handle slipped from her hand and hit the wood floor with a dry CLATTER.

She collapsed.

Her slight body in the oversized shirt swayed and dropped straight toward the stone floor.

But she never hit the ground.

A large, strong hand, carrying that familiar chill, reached out, caught her by the waist, and lifted her into the air.

Victor rose from the armchair. The silver blade was still buried deep in the left side of his chest, and dark blood was spreading, staining a large patch of his gray waistcoat red. His face was paler than usual, his jaw muscles clenched against the pain of the stab, but there wasn't a trace of anger in his black eyes.

He held her up—with the blade still buried in his own chest.

"You fool..." Victor whispered, his voice deep and rough with nerve pain. "Still haven't learned your lesson about 30 percent?"

Vanya couldn't answer. The backlash of pain made her lungs feel crushed, and no air could get past her larynx. She dug her wildly shaking fingers into his shoulders, trying to keep herself from falling into nothing.

Victor took one step forward and pressed her body back against the old stone wall right beside the fireplace so she wouldn't crumple to the floor.

The distance between them closed to zero.

Vanya's body was pinned flat against the cold stone wall, while in front of her Victor's hard, bloody chest pressed down on her. His blood—strangely warm even with its icy nature—soaked through the suit fabric and spread onto her white shirt, staining a large patch red right over both their chests.

The smell of ancient blood mixed with cedarwood and a faint whiff of sulfur from the fireplace filled Vanya's senses and made her head spin.

She lifted her head.

Her pale gray eyes, wet with sweat and tears from the backlash, looked straight into his black eyes, as deep and bottomless as an abyss. They were both breathing hard. Vanya's heartbeat and the second heartbeat of the Blood Bond inside her pounded nonstop, weaving together into a frenzied sound that echoed inside her chest.

In that moment, when the pain, the fury, the inner struggle, and the feelings they had pushed down all these days exploded at their peak... no one knew who started it.

Maybe it was Vanya, exhausted and half-mad from the backlash of pain, who reached up for something to hold on to.

Or maybe it was Victor, losing control for the first time in 900 years in front of a mortal's unbreakable fire, who lowered his head.

Their lips met.

Nothing about it was gentle or healing. It hit like a violent collision—as primal as the survival instinct running in their blood.

Vanya's lips were salty with her own fresh blood and bitter with his. She bit down hard on Victor's lower lip in one last attempt at revenge, to brand her hatred on his body. Victor didn't pull away. He tightened his grip on her waist and answered the kiss with an absolute, overwhelming force, devouring and wild, as if he wanted to swallow all of the killer's recklessness and her soul into his own chest.

The pain of the wound in his chest and the backlash of pain in her nervous system didn't stop the kiss. If anything, they worked like fuel catching fire, turning the pain into a kind of insane thrill. Their blood mixed on their lips and ran down their chins, leaving bright red streaks on pale skin.

They kissed out of anger.

They kissed out of pain.

They kissed because they were both cursed and alone and completely powerless to find any other way to talk across two worlds that had nothing in common.

A log in the fireplace gave a loud POP and threw out golden sparks.

The awakening hit them hard, like an ice-cold slap.

They both pulled back at the same time.

Victor let go of her waist and stepped back exactly two paces. Vanya leaned against the stone wall, her body sliding down a few inches before she locked her knees and caught herself.

No one said anything.

The dining room fell into a silence so deep it was frightening. The old clock in the corner kept knocking out its TICK-TOCK, heavy and steady.

Victor looked down at the wound in his chest. Blood was still seeping out, but the cellular regeneration of an Ancient vampire had kicked in, and the muscle fibers around the stab wound were contracting to push the foreign object out.

He raised his right hand and gripped the end of the broken silver blade still sticking out of his chest with two fingers.

SHUNK!

He pulled the three-inch blade straight out of the left side of his chest without a single groan. Blood spurted out in one short streak and then stopped completely. Victor walked unhurriedly back to the table and set the bloody blade on the silver tray beside his half-eaten plate.

He turned to look at her. His face had gone back to its cold stillness, like the surface of a frozen lake, as if that wild, bloody kiss had never existed in reality.

"Tomorrow I'll have someone change the window locks," Victor said, his voice deep and cruelly calm.

Vanya stood with her back against the wall. She raised her hand and wiped the fresh blood off her lips with the back of it. Her pale gray eyes were locked on him without a single blink, the killing intent still burning but now covered by a complicated haze she couldn't name.

"I'll sharpen a fork," she answered, her voice rough but hard as rubble.

Victor didn't reply. He gave one extremely short nod, turned, and walked out of the dining room, disappearing into the darkness of the long, cavernous hallway.

Vanya stood where she was for two more minutes, until the sound of his footsteps had faded away completely. She walked slowly, every step as heavy as if her feet were weighted with lead, back to her bedroom on the second floor.

Every step up the staircase, she could taste him. Blood and cedar and something darker underneath, like the smoke from a fire that had been burning for a very long time.

The bedroom door slammed shut.

Vanya didn't turn on the light. She crossed the darkness to the corner of the room that shared a stone wall with the library next door—Victor's room.

The strength in her legs was completely gone. The backlash of pain from the Blood Bond had faded, but the chaotic, shattered, pitiless feelings inside her chest were tearing her mind apart. The bloody kiss, the taste of him, his absurd tolerance, and the wound she had given him with her own hands... all of it piled on top of itself into a tangle with no way out.

She slid down the wall to the wood floor.

Her back pressed hard against the cold granite surface of the wall. She pulled her knees up, wrapped her arms around them, and buried her face. His bloody white shirt still held all of its warmth and that haunting scent of cedarwood.

And then, through the strange connection of the Blood Bond—the two-way nerve link running through her veins...

Vanya felt it.

On the other side of the 20-inch stone wall.

Someone else was sitting slumped on the floor too.

Victor Blackwood. The 914-year-old vampire. The man whose power ruled an entire territory.

He was sitting with his back against that exact spot on the wall, right on the other side of her body. Through the old stone, Vanya could feel his slow, deep breathing, and she could feel the utter loneliness wrapped around him.

She pressed her palm flat against the stone. It was cold and rough and very thick, and she could not have felt anything through it, not really. She kept her hand there anyway.

On the other side of the wall, she was almost certain, a larger hand was pressed to exactly the same place.

Not a single sound rose.

No one knocked on a door.

No one spoke up to admit the feeling that had just exploded between them.

They sat like that—two people at opposite ends of hatred and fate, separated by a stone wall and by centuries of existence, but with their backs pressed together through a cruel thread of blood.

They sat like that until the first gray light of dawn on the eighth day fell through the arched window and cast pale streaks across the floor.