The Door He Couldn't Knock

When the dawn light was snuffed out by the thick fog outside the window, Victor climbed the stone stairs. He stood in front of Vanya's door.

He raised a slightly trembling hand, about to knock on the oak. He ran through every sentence in his head, revising each word over and over so the truth would come out of his mouth sounding a little less cowardly:

“Aldric deceived me… I had no idea he had been doing this for the past 40 years…” — It sounded like the cowardly excuse of a man who took no responsibility. “I trusted him, but I never imagined he was using human blood,...” — Even more of a lie, because not asking where the blood came from for 40 years was the cruelest kind of complicity.

I didn't know. That one, at least, was true. It was also worth nothing at all, and he knew exactly how it would sound in a room with 14 files in it.

His hand stopped in midair, only a few inches from the wood. Then he lowered it, turned, and walked away.

The second time, when the noon sun shone through the Gothic stained-glass windows, he came back to stand in front of her door. He stood there for 10 minutes, listening to the steady rhythm of her breathing inside, struggling with every cold breath of his own, and then backed away again, hopeless.

Once, very faintly, he heard her turn over in her sleep and say a word in Russian. He didn't catch it. He stood there for a long time afterward, hoping she would say it again.

The third time, when a blood-red sunset stretched down the hallway, he stood in front of the oak door once more. But in the end, the proud demonic aristocrat still turned his back and walked away.

For the first time in 900 years of immortal existence—through hundreds of bloody wars, through countless encounters with silver-sheathed stakes and thousand-year curses—Victor knew fear. He wasn't afraid of the sun, wasn't afraid of death, and wasn't afraid of Aegis's silver blades. He was afraid of the look in Vanya's eyes when she saw that he was the one who had fed on the corpses of 14 of her own people.

Before dinner, he went to the east hallway, hours earlier than he had ever gone there. He stood in front of the painting and found that he couldn't look at it. The little window was lit, and warm, and far too innocent, and he turned his back on it and stood in the dark until the dinner bell rang. Then he went down with his hands clasped behind his back, so that no one would see them shake.

Dinner that night passed in a silence so deep it was eerie—more tense and suffocating than the moment their skin had come together so feverishly the night before.

The servants had set the table as if for a celebration. White linen, two silver candelabras, the good crystal. Victor had not asked them to. He suspected they could feel the weather in the house, the way animals feel a storm coming, and had decided to meet it with their best silver.

At the long cedar dining table in the middle of the vaulted room, Victor sat in the host's seat at the head, while Vanya sat at the opposite end, exactly 13 feet away from him.

Between them were two perfectly prepared lamb steaks and two glasses of dark red wine. A candle flickering between them gave off a dim, murky light and threw long, twisting shadows up the rough stone wall.

No one touched a knife or fork.

Not a single sound broke out except the wind whistling through the Gothic tracery of the window.

Somewhere in the castle, a door closed. Neither of them turned to look.

Vanya didn't lower her head, and she didn't look away. She sat up straight in a high-collared gray robe, her pale gray eyes as still as a frozen lake, locked on the man across from her. She didn't ask about the strange smell of blood she had caught, and she didn't press him about the sound of metal being dragged in the basement. Her silence was razor-sharp and cold, a blade shaving away each passing second, backing him against the wall.

She had pinned her hair up. The fang marks on her neck were bare in the candlelight, two small dark points above the collar, and he understood that she had done it on purpose, so that he would have to look at them every time he raised his eyes.

At the other end of the table, Victor leaned back in the high-backed leather chair. He didn't look at her; he only stared blankly at the dying candle flame. The fact that the always-arrogant vampire aristocrat was avoiding her eyes was the clearest confession of all.

He knew she had figured it out, and she knew he was deliberately hiding something. The 13 feet between them now seemed as wide as an endless void of betrayal, lies, and the deepest kind of tragedy.

The meal went on for 30 minutes and ended without a single bite of food being touched. Victor stood up first, turned his back, and walked toward the study at the end of the hallway without saying a word.

He heard her chair scrape back in the dining room as he walked away. He heard her footsteps go in the opposite direction, toward the stairs, and then stop, and then turn.

Ten minutes later.

Victor sat behind his black oak desk, his hands clasped on his thigh, staring blankly out the frost-covered windowpane.

After a while he got up and opened the narrow top drawer of the walnut cabinet. The silver bullet lay on its green velvet where he had left it, small and dull and innocent.

He picked it up and held it in his palm until it burned. He had thought, once, that it was the most dangerous thing she could ever do to him. He had been wrong about that, as it turned out, and about a great many other things.

Click.

The heavy study door was pushed open without any warning. Vanya walked in. She had changed back into her sleek black assassin's gear, but on her pale neck his fang marks were still plain to see.

She moved like a blade coming out of a sheath, smooth and quiet and entirely without hurry, and every candle in the room leaned away from her as she passed.

She walked slowly up to Victor's desk. Her steps were light, but they carried the staggering pressure of someone about to walk into her last battle. Without a single wasted movement, Vanya slipped her slender hand into the pocket of her robe, took out an object, and set it lightly on the oak desk, right in front of him.

It was a white leather glove—a worn piece of specialized medical gear, stained with a few yellow chemical marks, something she had quietly picked up off the floor of the underground vault while he was standing in anguish outside her door.

The fingertips were stained a dull yellow-brown, and the leather was cracked across the knuckles. It still held the faint shape of the hand that had worn it.

Victor looked at the white glove lying alone on the desk, then slowly raised his eyes to her. His blazing red eyes held no coldness or authority now, only emptiness and a bottomless exhaustion.

The clock on the mantel ticked. The fire, which had been burning low all evening, went out entirely, as if someone had closed a hand around it.

Vanya braced both hands on the edge of the oak desk and leaned forward, closing the distance between them. Her pale gray eyes bored into the very bottom of his soul, and her voice was ice-cold and flat, yet it carried the merciless weight of 14 lives that had been laid to rest:

"I counted 14 files. Do you want to tell me yourself, or should I?"

Author's note:

A little explanation of the Vampire Laws in this story for anyone who's wondering:

In this world, pureblood vampires have a strict taboo against drinking human blood for long periods. If they indulge in mortal blood, they become corrupted, lose the purity of their bloodline, and turn into hideous, uncontrollable creatures — a grim fate no Ancient vampire wants any part of (except those blinded by power).

That's why, for the past 40 years, Victor always assumed the blood Aldric brought him came from ancient creatures of the deep forest. He trusted that the man who once took a blade for him would never push him down that path of corruption.