After the Tribunal

Late that night. They returned to Blackwood Castle.

In the car, neither of them spoke. Vanya sat with her hands in her lap and watched the lights of the Henry Hudson Parkway slide past, and about 10 minutes out of the city, her hands started to shake.

Fear had already come and gone. This was the thing that came after it, when the body finally understands what it has just walked through. She pressed her palms flat against her thighs to stop them, and it didn't work.

Victor didn't say anything. He took one hand off the wheel and laid it on the seat between them, palm up, and left it there.

She looked at it for a long time. Then she put her hand in it. The needles came, bright and cold, and she held on anyway until the castle lights showed through the trees.

The blizzard that had raged outside the windows for the past three days had finally ended, giving way to a clear night sky full of bright stars and the cold silver light of the moon hanging over the mountain peak.

Victor's vast bedroom on the top floor of the castle was full of the smell of burning pine and a faint scent of wisteria. The fire in the stone fireplace flickered, throwing warm orange-gold light across the old stone walls.

No more forced pact. No more fight for survival. No more death sentences or daggers at their throats.

For the first time since Vanya set foot in this castle, the line between them wasn't being drawn by any outside pressure or reason anymore.

There were only two people who wanted this.

The rhythm between them was slow, so gentle it was almost uncomfortable after a run of three chapters of violence and lies.

Vanya stood leaning back against the edge of the oak bed draped in dark velvet. She had shed her leather assassin's gear, down to a thin, dusky gray silk slip. Victor walked slowly toward her. The icy air that usually radiated from his body had been driven back by the warmth of the fire, leaving only the rare trembling of a 900-year-old vampire standing in front of the one exception of his life.

He raised his large hand, and his long fingers touched her cheek softly. The touch was so light that Vanya could feel each faint pulse in his fingertips.

"You didn't have to do that in front of the Council, Vanya," Victor murmured, his rough voice trembling in the silence. "You've put yourself right in Dumont Holdings' crosshairs."

"I have my own reasons," Vanya said calmly, but she didn't pull away from his hand. She tilted her head and gently pressed her warm cheek into his cold palm.

Victor bent down. His kiss landed on her forehead — light as a feather. Then he moved the kiss down the bridge of her nose, across her cheek, and stopped on her lips.

This kiss had left violent hunger and possession behind. It was deep and slow, full of the reverence, tenderness, and bitterness of two souls who had tasted too much pain. Vanya's lips parted, letting his tongue in. She raised both hands and slid her fingers into his short black hair, pulling him tight against her body.

The thin silk slip slowly slid down to the stone floor.

In the flickering firelight from the hearth, Vanya's body came into view. It was the slender but hard body of a warrior, covered in scars long and short — scars from blades and from silver bullets, witnesses to the hundreds of savage kills she had lived through as an Aegis assassin.

Victor lifted her up and gently laid her down on the dark velvet bed. He covered her with his body, but he held his entire weight on his hands on either side of her hips, so she wouldn't have to bear any of it.

He slowly lowered his head and brushed his lips over her thin, fragile collarbone, then moved down to her shoulder. He stopped at Vanya's left shoulder blade.

There was a jagged horseshoe-shaped scar there, deep and twisted. It was the scar from her first life-or-death fight when she was 12 years old — the ugliest, most vulnerable scar, the one Vanya always kept hidden under thick layers of leather. No one in her life had ever seen it, let alone touched it.

Vanya stiffened for one small beat. Her killer's instinct made her shoulder pull back slightly in a defensive reflex.

"Don't pull away," Victor whispered in her ear, his voice full of a bottomless tenderness and grief.

He slowly laid a kiss on the horseshoe-shaped scar. His tongue traced lightly over the rough ridges of scar tissue, warm and reverent, as if he were healing a deep wound in her past.

Vanya let her shoulders relax. A warm, trembling feeling spread from her shoulder blade straight into her heart. She closed her eyes, wrapped both arms around Victor's broad shoulders, and pulled him down against her chest.

Their bodies came together without any rough frenzy or violent collisions. He moved into her slowly, one rhythm at a time, careful and deep. Vanya held him close, taking in every quiet but powerful movement of the Pureblood vampire. Her soft, breathless sighs mixed with the slow beating of his heart in the warm room, making a rare, gentle symphony between two people whose hands were soaked in blood.

Dawn was breaking. The pale blue light of early morning began to creep through the windowpanes, mingling with the last pink embers left in the fireplace.

Victor lay on his side on the bed, one arm under his head, the other idly stroking the long ash-colored strands of Vanya's hair spread across the pillow. Vanya lay in his arms, one hand resting on the vampire's cold chest.

A long silence went by. Victor looked deep into her pale gray eyes and broke the stillness in a low voice:

"Why did you save me in front of the Council, Vanya? You could have just let them sentence me, and you'd have been free to leave this castle, of course."

Vanya was silent. She looked up at the old stone vaults of the ceiling, feeling the warmth of her body passing into his.

Then she answered in a calm voice, without the slightest waver:

"I haven't figured that out yet."

The instant those words left Vanya's mouth, an ice-cold chill suddenly ran down both their spines.

Victor's heart jolted. Vanya narrowed her eyes at once.

They both knew it perfectly well: It was a lie.

It wasn't that Vanya "hadn't figured it out yet." She had saved him before the Tribunal of the Five Houses simply because she couldn't stand by and watch this arrogant vampire be marrow-flayed and destroyed. She had saved him because her heart no longer saw him as a target to take down.

But what made them both realize something and feel a chill at the back of their necks right after that... was what was happening on Vanya's wrist.

One second passed. Two. Everything around them was perfectly still.

The ancient magical band of the Blood Bond etched around Vanya's wrist — the one that used to burn like fire, tearing her veins open and bringing a pain that felt like dying every time she lied to Victor in the past... was now completely silent.

No pain came. No veins burned. The skin on her wrist stayed calm and smooth in the dawn light.

Vanya slowly raised her wrist between their faces. The magical mark of the Blood Bond had visibly faded, leaving only a faint smudge like an old birthmark.

Victor looked at the smudge, and his blazing red eyes contracted.

A magical Blood Bond lived on hatred, on lies, and on the line of obedience between master and slave. When the two people bound by it began to develop real feelings, when hatred was replaced by sacrifice and understanding... that cruel magic would wear itself away and lose its power on its own.

The Blood Bond was weakening, and it was about to disappear forever.

That meant: Vanya would soon no longer be bound by any curse or spell. She might soon be completely free.

And the thing that kept her here beside this 900-year-old vampire... was no longer a survival contract; now it was a real feeling — a true, dangerous feeling that could drag them both down into a dark abyss at any moment.