The Last Medical Note

And then his fingers idly brushed over the last medical note in the Siberian Shadow file.

The price of the Frost Antibodies.

Victor read the heading twice before he let himself read what came under it.

To achieve total immunity to compulsion, the compound modified from vampire blood destroyed the child's entire peripheral nervous system. The person injected would gradually lose the ability to feel gentle physical contact — the tactile nerve endings in their skin would callus, scar over, and go completely numb. Gentle touches brought no comfort at all, only a numb, glaring sensation like thousands of needles pricking the skin.

Victor stopped cold. His mind went back to the past, to the night when he had accidentally brushed his finger against her skin, and Vanya had jerked back instantly as if a scorpion had stung her.

At the time he had told himself she was disgusted by him. It had almost been a comfort. Disgust, at least, was a thing he understood.

He had thought it was psychological disgust, a killer's guard against a monster. But no. Her mind had nothing to do with it. It was the brutal physical pain those butchers had carved into her body.

She couldn't feel his gentleness. The gentleness he had tried to give her had only brought her silent physical pain.

He thought of the car on the parkway, on the night of the tribunal. Her hand in his, cold and shaking, and the way she had held on all the way home without letting go once.

It had hurt her the whole time. Every second of it. And she had held on anyway, because it was the only way she knew to say what she couldn't say.

Victor bent forward over the steel table as if someone had struck him in the stomach.

"Is that why you always look at me like I'm a corpse, Victor?"

A flat voice rang out from the doorway of the laboratory.

Victor's head jerked up. Vanya had been standing there without his noticing. She was leaning against the stone doorframe, wearing his oversized white shirt, her arms folded across her chest. Her pale gray eyes were as still as a frozen lake, without the slightest ripple or any sign of weakness.

She was barefoot on the cold stone. The white shirt came to the middle of her thighs, and above its open collar he could see the edge of the horseshoe scar and the two small marks his teeth had left. Her arms were folded tight across her chest, as if she were holding something in.

The thread of the Blood Bond between them was cracking and wasting away by the hour, but the link was still just strong enough to carry the last ripples of emotion. She had been standing there long enough to read every document on the screen, and to see the self-reproach, the torment, and the knife-sharp pain in his eyes.

He could barely feel her through it anymore. It was like listening to a voice on a bad phone line in a storm, the words coming and going under the static.

But what Vanya took from this horrifying truth... was neither self-pity nor the crushing pain of a deceived victim.

Her eyes flashed sharp, decisive, and merciless, like a blade just drawn from its sheath. She had seen a way out.

Vanya took three steps into the laboratory, her heels sounding tap... tap... on the stone floor. She stopped right in front of the vampire slumped on the floor, lowered her eyes to look at him, and spoke each word clearly:

"If my blood was modified 18 years ago... if my body has already produced antibodies adapted to this poison... then cutting the Blood Bond myself with a knife won't make my veins burst and kill me, will it?"

She asked it calmly, like a question about the weather. But he could feel, through the fraying thread between them, how hard her heart was beating, and he understood that she had already half guessed the answer.

Victor looked up at her. His blazing red eyes were full of bitterness, torment, and the deepest fear.

He understood what she meant. He could read the merciless resolve in Vanya's eyes. If she knew her body would survive losing the Blood Bond, she would immediately slice through the mark on her wrist with a silver blade, walk out of Blackwood Castle, and throw herself into the hunt for Volkov alone — leaving him forever.

He could tell her the truth. It would be easy. Her body could survive the cutting, she would be free, and she would be gone before sunrise, walking out into a world that was hunting her with a silver rifle and nothing at her back.

Or he could lie to her, for the first time in his life, and keep her here, and hate himself for it every day until she found out.

He had spent 900 years choosing the clean, cold, rational answer to every question anyone had ever asked him. He did not know, sitting on the floor of his own laboratory, why he could no longer remember how.

The thread of the Blood Bond on Vanya's wrist had faded so much that it was nearly invisible. Its cursed magic no longer had enough power to burn or punish him if he told a lie.

The obvious medical fact on the screen was this: her body had more than enough antibodies to survive and be free if the thread was cut.

The result sat on the screen behind her in plain green letters. Antibody compatibility: 97 percent. Projected survival on severance: high. He only had to turn the monitor, and she would read it herself.

And for the first time since he met her... Victor spoke and told a complete lie — the only lie that was even possible, because the magical Blood Bond had grown too weak to expose him, a selfish and desperate lie told only to keep her within reach of his protection:

The words sat in his mouth like stones. He could feel the shape of every one of them, their weight and their edges, and he knew that once they were out he would never be able to take them back.

"No."

He looked deep into her pale gray eyes, clenched his fists so hard his nails drove into his palms and drew blood, and used the first lie of his life to hide the truth:

Nothing tightened in his throat. The thread was too weak now to punish anything. There was only a small, cold hollow opening under his ribs, like a door swinging shut somewhere deep inside a very large house.

"You'll die instantly if you cut it yourself, Vanya."