Never Once Asking

The centrifuge whirled with a steady hum, like the last exhale of a chest running out of oxygen. In the underground laboratory buried beneath three levels of Blackwood Castle's granite, the cold white fluorescent light reached into every corner, laying bare the quartz test tubes, the strips of semiconductor circuitry, and the rows of glass bottles lined up neatly on the shelves.

The air here was flat and stagnant, heavy with the smell of sterilizing solution mixed with the stifling rust-iron scent unique to the blood cells of an Ancient vampire.

Machines he had bought over the past 40 years lined the walls, patient and blinking, next to glass retorts older than the country outside. The only sound besides the centrifuge was the faint tick of the heating pipes and, very far above, the wind.

Victor stood motionless before the protective glass table. His maroon brocade robe fell long to the icy stone floor, but the whole body of the 900-year-old vampire was frozen stiff as a block of limestone.

He had not slept in three days. Vampires did not need sleep, exactly, but they needed something like it, a stillness in the dark, and he had not allowed himself even that.

On the silver metal tray in front of him were 10 cylindrical glass test tubes holding samples of fresh blood he had drawn from Vanya's wrist the night before.

Last night, the magical thread of the Blood Bond etched deep into her wrist had begun to crack. When she told the lie "I haven't figured that out yet" right there in bed, the magic mark that always blazed like fire to punish a liar had stayed completely silent. The cruel magic that had bound master and slave for a thousand years was dissolving on its own because of the real understanding between them.

He had lain awake beside her afterward, listening to the silence where the pain should have been, and it had been the most frightening silence of his very long life.

That anomaly threw Victor into a panic. He remembered very clearly the warning written in red ink on the last page of the ancient family chronicle: If the Blood Bond is forcibly broken or fades on its own while the mortal is not strong enough to withstand it, the magical toxin will sweep through the veins and burst the organs of that person, killing them.

That was why he had locked himself in this laboratory for three nights straight. He didn't believe the Blood Bond would vanish for no reason. He suspected Vanya's body was carrying some hidden damage or some vicious biological reaction that was quietly killing her from the inside and making her reject the magical link. He needed to draw her blood and analyze every cell to find a way to save her life before it was too late.

He had asked her for the blood. He had expected a fight.

She had looked at him for a long moment across the dim lab, and then, without a word, she had rolled up her sleeve and laid her arm on the steel table, palm up, the inside of her elbow pale and blue-veined under the lamp. She watched the needle go in and didn't flinch. When it was done, she pressed her own thumb over the puncture, rolled her sleeve back down, and left without asking what he was looking for.

It was the first thing she had ever handed him that could be used against her. He had understood that, holding the warm tubes in his palm, and it had frightened him more than any silver bullet.

The spectral analyzer gave off a dry tick... tick..., shooting streaks of blue laser through the clear plasma. On the cloudy screen in its antique brass frame, the hematology readings began to jump nonstop, automatically sorting themselves into long, complex genetic codes.

Victor's blazing red eyes contracted.

The result that came up was hundreds of times more horrifying and more brutal than anything he could have imagined.

In Vanya's blood were traces of vampire blood-cell structure — but it was not his original Pureblood. It didn't carry the native magical frequency of the Blackwood line. Her plasma held a synthetic, perversely modified chemical compound, and that impurity had been in her circulatory system for 18 years — long before the day she knocked on the door and set foot in Blackwood Castle.

He knew that signature. He had tasted it, once, in 1994, in a glass offered to him across a table at a Council dinner by a woman who was smiling. It was the taste of blood from the Dumont farms, cooked down and changed into something that should never have been put inside a child.

Its concentration in her blood wasn't high enough to poison her immediately, but it had been built up steadily and precisely at a ruthless dosage: the pattern of scheduled injections continuing for eight straight years while she was still a child under the management of the Aegis assassin network.

Victor gripped the edge of the stone table with both hands. The skin of his hands went bone-white, and blue veins twisted across their backs. He immediately brought up the classified data retrieval system he had quietly seized from Dumont Holdings' underground network and the classified Aegis data files.

Yellowed documents encoded in old Cyrillic script and lines of code numbers slowly appeared on the screen.

He read Russian the way he read every language he had ever lived in, without translating it in his head. The dry clinical phrases slid into him one after another. Cohort, dosage, subject response, loss.

Siberian Shadow.

The veil of secrecy that had covered that name for 800 years was suddenly ripped away before his eyes. The brutal mercenary legion of folk legend had never existed. The name belonged to an underground Aegis experimental project: a program to raise, dissect, and train kidnapped or orphaned mortal children into killing machines completely immune to compulsion by injecting them with a compound extracted from the blood of vampires they held captive in their twisted farms.

Every child was a number, one line in a log tracking biological reactions. Vanya... was Specimen No. 47.

He scrolled down the list with a hand that didn't feel like his own.

No. 44. Deceased, age 8. Cardiac failure during dosage.

No. 45. Deceased, age 11. Escape attempt.

No. 46. Katya. Deceased, age 10. Hypothermia. Note: subject transferred body heat to No. 47 during fever episode. Behavior noted as anomalous. Recommend separation of future cohorts.

Victor read that line four times. Then he closed his eyes and stood there in the white humming light, and for a moment he was back in a warm kitchen in Queens at 3:00 a.m., listening to a hoarse voice tell him about a girl who had frozen to death holding her.

The file expanded, revealing the image of a man in a white lab coat under a fur coat, his eyes stripped of everything but a butcher's coldness: Grigori Volkov, head of the Siberian Shadow project.

He was younger in the photograph, but not by much. Heavy in the shoulders, balding, with a neat gray beard and the patient, attentive eyes of a man who has never once in his life been in a hurry. He was smiling. He was standing in front of a line of small children in the snow.

And the next savage blow slammed straight into Victor's mind — Aegis's official archive recorded that Volkov had died in an ambush in 2019. But in the Dumont Holdings underground bank statements Vanya had just gathered from the Council of Five Houses... there was a recurring payment in gold bars wired into Volkov's anonymous account just last month.

The butcher had never died. He was still alive, and he was still quietly taking money from Seraphine.

The payments went back 11 years. Every quarter, like clockwork, in gold. Seraphine had always been a creature of tidy habits.

Victor took a step back. The heel of his leather shoe struck the stone floor with a clack that echoed in the empty room.

The sound seemed to go on and on, bouncing from wall to wall, long after it should have stopped.

He slowly leaned back against the cold stone wall of the laboratory, then slid down to the floor. The 900-year-old vampire — who had watched empires fall and crushed tens of thousands of enemies with his Pureblood authority — now slumped down on the jagged stone floor like a man completely defeated.

The centrifuge wound down and stopped. In the sudden silence, he could hear the old building breathing around him, the settling of stone, the tick of cooling pipes, and his own heart, which he had not heard in years, beating much too fast.

A blow straight to the heart. No silver-sheathed stake, no battle with rivers of blood, could have hit him like this naked truth tearing through his mind.

He realized... everything she had ever felt for him was REAL.

Every flinch, every silence, every time she had stayed in a room when she could have left it. None of it had been his doing. All of it had been hers.

There wasn't a single drop of his manipulation or compulsion in it. His magic, his authority, the thousand-year power over blood that he used to bend minds and force others to obey... had been completely useless against her from the very first second she walked through the castle door.

For 900 years, Victor had gotten everything in this world by imposing his will, by threats, and by bending the wills of others. He saw mortals as chess pieces that were easy to move. He was used to living in a world where every smile, every word of obedience, every bit of fearful respect around him was a product of mind control.

But the one person he longed for, the one person who made him feel that his cold chest still had a heartbeat... he couldn't break or manipulate her, not even a hair.

In nine centuries, people had feared him, obeyed him, bargained with him, and tried to kill him. Nobody had ever simply chosen him, with nothing forcing them to do it. He did not know how to hold a thing like that without breaking it.

She had seen his cruelty, seen the bodies and the darkness in his eyes, yet she still chose to stand at his back and take the blade, chose to overturn his death sentence with her own hands before the Council of Five Houses — by her own free, clear-eyed, and ruthless will.

Victor raised his trembling hands and covered his face. His blazing red eyes stung. He couldn't bear that gift. Real love from a free soul was far too noble, far too pure for a monster soaked in sin like him.

His hands were steady. That was the obscene part. They had always been steady. They had been steady while he drank from the carafes, while he signed the Council's papers, while he let Aldric carry trays up the stairs for 40 years without once asking what was on them.