Giving Blood

At the same moment, at the other end of the hallway, Victor was walking when a savage backlash of pain slammed into his chest. It felt like a red-hot blade driven through his heart. He stopped, and the body of the 900-year-old vampire dropped to one knee, both hands braced hard on the stone floor.

"Vanya..."

He whispered it, his eyes streaked with red. Through the bond, he could feel her life falling freely into an endless void.

Victor forced himself up and raced to her. He lifted her limp, burning body and gathered her into his arms. Vanya's lips were ashen, and her heartbeat was cramping into choked moans deep in her chest. He carried her to the vaulted brick bedroom at the end of the hallway and shoved the oak door aside.

The hallway blurred past them. Somewhere a door opened and a servant stepped back against the wall, eyes lowered, and then was gone behind them as if he had never been there.

He laid her on the black velvet bed. But this time, there was none of his usual arrogance or calm on Victor's face. The shadows under his black eyes were plain to see, and his breath carried an extreme dryness.

"The indirect methods have all failed," Victor said, his voice as rough as stones grinding together. "And this buildup is draining you faster than I calculated. There is no other choice left."

He said it the way a surgeon tells a family there is only one operation left to try. Calmly, and without letting them see how badly his own hands wanted to shake.

Vanya's eyes opened sluggishly. Her blurred vision caught only his tall shape bending over her.

"Drink it directly," Victor said, looking at her, each word falling heavy as a sentence handed down. "From my neck."

Vanya clenched her teeth as the last scrap of pride of an unbreakable assassin rose up. She used the last of her strength to push weakly against his chest: "No... I would never... do something that sick..."

"Do you want to die?" Victor gripped her wrist and folded it back, his blazing red eyes locked on her. "Either you throw away that useless pride, or you let your spinal cord blow itself apart in five minutes. Choose."

Vanya bit her lip so hard it bled. The searing pain surging up through her nerves in waves blurred the line between life and death. She closed her eyes, and one ragged breath escaped her chest. She was giving her silent consent.

"I need to hear it," Victor said quietly. His hand hung in the air above her, not touching. "Say it."

"Yes." The word came out of her like a splinter being pulled.

Victor didn't waste a second. He knelt with one knee on the mattress, swept his tie aside, and ripped open the top three buttons of his high-collared shirt himself. He pulled the collar aside, baring the whole of his neck, bone-white, hard as marble, the gray-blue demonic veins beneath it pulsing faintly in the lamplight.

"Drink," he said, tilting his head.

Vanya pushed herself up. She opened her mouth, pressed her cracked, dry lips to the cold skin of his neck, and tried to bite down. But the skin of a 900-year-old Pureblood vampire was too hard—human teeth weren't sharp enough to tear it. All she could leave were faint red marks.

A quiet curse escaped Victor's throat. He raised his hand, thick with menace, and with one finger whose nail was sharp as a razor, he sliced a two-inch line right over the vein in his own neck.

Fresh blood burst out.

The dark red liquid, thick and strangely hot, spilled from the cut and ran in a long streak down his strong shoulder.

Vanya couldn't hold out another second. She lunged and pressed her mouth tight to the fresh cut.

A shock of sensation exploded inside her mouth. The taste of ancient demonic blood flooded her throat—it was heavy with iron, bitter as some primal poison, yet at the same time it carried a breathtakingly sweet scent of cloves and old cedarwood. It was so sensual and so tempting that every cell in her body shook with satisfaction.

She swallowed hard. One mouthful. Two.

With each swallow, the cold that had been creeping up her spine all afternoon retreated a little further, the way frost retreats from a window when someone breathes on it.

The blazing demonic blood rushed down into Vanya's stomach and spread into her smallest blood vessels like a high-voltage current resetting her entire life force. Her pale skin began to flush pink, and the spasms vanished completely. She drank greedily, both hands clawing at his shoulders, her nails digging deep into hard muscle.

But halfway through... Victor was the one who broke first.

The feeling of a mortal sucking his blood, the touch of soft, burning lips on the cold curve of his neck, and the violent backlash from the Blood Bond shattered the demonic aristocrat's 900 years of restraint completely. He let out a low growl deep in his throat, grabbed the back of Vanya's neck with one hand to pull her away, and wrapped his other arm tight around her waist and lifted her up.

This time, there was no excuse of "delirious with fever," no reason like "she's about to die." They were both completely lucid. They both saw each other's eyes clearly in the dim lamplight. They knew exactly what they were doing, and how badly they wanted it.

Victor yanked the fur cloak open, baring every inch of Vanya's slight body in front of him. The hazy lamplight fell on her smooth skin, flushed pink with the ancient blood, and picked out the faint scars scattered across it—cruel little marks that drove the animal instinct in him to the point of madness.

He lowered his head and pressed his own cold, bloody lips to hers. The kiss exploded, rough and wild. He devoured her mouth, forcing her to swallow every last bitter drop of demonic blood that lingered there. Vanya didn't pull away at all; the thrill of the blood boiling in her veins made her kiss him back fiercely. She arched up, both hands sliding into Victor's wavy black hair, pulling the kiss deeper, swallowing the heavy taste of iron and the dense scent of cedarwood.

His ice-cold skin collided with the blazing, living fire inside Vanya, creating a thermal reaction so intense it burned away the last of their reason.

Victor rolled over and sank her into the black velvet mattress. The absolute dominance of an immortal slammed into Vanya's nervous system like a high-voltage current. That night, the vaulted brick room was swallowed by a wild storm, where reason was shattered and animal instinct took complete control. The taste of bitter blood, ragged breathing, and the scent of cedarwood tangled together in the thick air.

At the peak, when the Blood Bond exploded in a blinding neural light inside her brain, the bond between them hummed at its highest pitch, then settled, leaving behind an absolute silence.

After the storm had passed.

The room went back to absolute stillness, with only the sound of ragged breathing slowly finding its rhythm again.

Victor still held Vanya in his arms. He lay on his side on the velvet mattress, one arm under her head, the other wrapped around her back, pulling her slight, bare body tight against his broad chest. The dark brocade blanket was drawn halfway up over their hips.

There was a faint pale line on his cheekbone where her stick had caught him three nights ago. It should have been gone by now. She lifted one finger and touched it, very lightly, and felt the matching line on her own face sting in answer.

He closed his eyes when she did it. He didn't open them again for a long time.

Neither of them said anything for a long time.

The candles on the mantel had burned down to nothing during the night. Only one was still lit, the small one by the door, and its flame stood perfectly straight in the still air.

The air was heavy, but there was no avoidance in it. The dim light of dawn fell through the arched window onto the fang cut on Victor's neck, which had stopped bleeding, and the dark purple bruises on Vanya's hips.

Outside the window, the fog was lifting off the valley in long, slow sheets, and far off, a crow called once and then fell silent. The world was going on, somewhere. It seemed very far away.

Vanya buried her face in the curve of his neck and listened to his demonic heartbeat, deep and slow, beating under his cold skin.

It beat so slowly that between one beat and the next she had time to wonder whether it would come again. It always did.

After a long silence that seemed to go on forever, Victor stirred slightly. His hand stroked gently over her tangled hair. He lowered his head, brought his lips close to the curve of her ear, and said exactly one sentence—very softly, in a flat voice, yet it held the truest thing he had never told anyone in 900 years of existence:

"I don't want you to die."

One short sentence. No flourishes, no vows, and yet it was the sweetest thing he could have said right now.

Nobody had ever said that to her. Volkov had wanted her alive the way a man wants his rifle clean. Rourke had wanted her alive the way a company wants its best employee to stay. This was something else, and she didn't have a word for it in any language she knew.

Vanya lay still and didn't answer, but her arm tightened on its own around his waist.

She pressed her face deeper into the curve of his neck and breathed in deeply, looking for that familiar cedarwood smell to calm her restlessness. But the moment the tip of her nose touched the skin on Victor's neck that had just bled...

Vanya froze.

Her eyes suddenly flew open in the dark.

Every nerve she had went cold and clear at once. The warmth in her body drained out through her feet, and the killer came up out of the dark inside her the way she always came, quietly, already counting.

On the skin of Victor's neck—beneath the smell of cloves, cedarwood, and the heavy scent of demonic blood—she smelled something strange.

It was the faint, warm, unmistakable metallic smell of human blood.

Fresh mortal blood.

And she knew one thing for certain: It was absolutely not her blood.

Author's note: For those of you curious about the "Frost Antibodies": the answer is in Chapter 36. But don't skip ahead and jump straight there!

Every meeting in this world is arranged by fate — whether it brings sweet fruit or tragedy. The bond between Vanya and Victor is no different. Keep this little reveal in mind, relax, and let the story carry you through the whole journey.