“Let go!” she gasped, her shoulders stiffening even as her body leaned into mine.
My heart was still beating hard from the rush of rescuing her, and that rush twisted swiftly to anger at her ingratitude at my saving her from an injury that she had almost inflicted upon herself through her own foolishness.
But I locked down on it and set her down with great care, and as her feet took her weight, I took three measured steps back to the base of the staircase.
Foolish child, a part of me thought as she stood there, terrified and gasping, and then edged back toward the door. She believes that she can run from me. She believes that she even wants to. I should order her back to her room for that, and then she would understand what she really wants.
But I did not. Instead, I just watched as she groped, not very surreptitiously, for the doorknob behind her.
As her hand closed around it, I said, “Go ahead.”
She jumped and let out a tiny, shrill squeak.
“You may leave, Cora,” I said. “I have already told you that you are not my prisoner.”
No, what held her was a force greater than stone walls or iron bars. She was a prisoner of the same power that held me—our bond. And that was something that few cognates had ever given up willingly, even when they’d had the most pressing reasons.
“You also said I belong to you now.” Her voice shook as she spoke the words.
Ah, there it was. I felt a flicker of amusement. She was looking for confirmation—not of her freedom but of my possession of her.
“You do,” I said. “You’re mine. In this house, at your university, in class, in bed. A mere change of scenery cannot alter that.”
She opened her mouth, though whether to protest or to thank me I doubt that even she knew. God, she was so beautiful, standing there, all wide, dark eyes and tumbled hair. So innocent, staggeringly so, though she probably imagined herself a woman of the world.
Then she made a desperate sound and wrenched open the door, whirling to run through it.
I closed my eyes even before the rectangle of sunlight could blast through the room, but she cried out, and I heard her stumble back into the house before she slammed the door.
I opened my eyes again to see her standing with her back against it, blinking away tears of pain.
“I recommend good sunglasses,” I said to her mildly. “And a hat.”
“What have you done to me?” The words were a cry, wrenched from some place deep inside her.
Everything, I wanted to say. And also: Nothing—yet.
But aloud I said, “I saved you, Cora.” Saved her from her cancer—and from her humanity, which had been killing her, too, if not quite as fast. “I will be happy to provide you with sun protection, and if you wait for my chauffeur to come around, he will take you wherever you want to go. It wasn’t a trick when I said you could leave.”
She shivered and said nothing.
I pressed on. “Or, if you want to know more, you could have breakfast with me, as I first suggested.”
I could see in her eyes how much she wanted to say yes, but she muttered, “It was more of an order.”
That response took me off guard, and I reviewed our previous conversation in my mind and realized that she was correct. I wasn’t used to suggesting things to anyone other than agnates.
But to Cora, I would suggest. I must suggest. The fact that she would demand such niceties, however irksome, should be seen as helpful to my goal of keeping us both sane—and alive.
“Ah, and so it was,” I said. “How remiss of me. Would you care to join me, then? For breakfast?” I emphasized the last word, promising—and offering—no more than that.
Hoping that I wasn’t lying to myself.
“Fine,” she said, still wary. “But then I’m going home.”
“Of course,” I agreed instantly, even as I wondered if she was lying, too. “Follow me.”
I turned and mounted the flight of stairs she had just fallen down, the steps that led up to the main level of the house—the piano nobile, as the Italians who had devised these architectural conventions called it. I could hear her behind me, each tentative, nervous step as she followed at a distance that she likely imagined to be safe.
“The breakfast room is just beyond the grand salon,” I said, to fill the silence more than anything else.
She did not reply, but she continued to follow me under the arcade that circled the room. The central open space of the salon was surrounded by a colonnade, a design that had been inspired by Roman models of atrium and peristyle, which had in turn been inspired by the Greeks by way of the Etruscans who had themselves imported it from Asia, where it had been used for millennia. Perhaps that was why I had found comfort in it, all those years ago. It followed the pattern that said home to me.
And now it was home to her, whether she realized it yet or not.
I threw open the double doors to reveal the breakfast room and stepped aside so that Cora might enter. She hesitated, her gaze fixed upon the terrace beyond the wall of windows.
“Why doesn’t this sunlight seem too bright?” she asked with a frown.
Clever question. She had a good presence of mind, given everything she’d been through.
“To an ordinary human, it is quite dim,” I said. “There is a filtering film on all the windows in the house.” The day we’d had it installed, Alys had drifted throughout the house, going from window to window for hours. It had been far more than the delight of being able to allow daylight to spill into her rooms for the first time that moved her; it had been a symbol to her of not only current progress but also future hopes. “It is one of the luxuries of the modern age that we can dispense with curtains and shades.”
Now Cora stepped over the threshold with almost exaggerated care, as if the light might suddenly come alive and attack her. “What would happen if I stayed out too long? Is sunlight...deadly?”
The old myths again, always with their grains of truth. “Not at all, but you would get a spectacular sunburn. We aren’t magic, Cora. We won’t turn into dust and blow away.”
She appeared to have no intention of moving, so I crossed over to the buffet and began filling a plate methodically with an array of the delicacies that the chef had provided—to tempt and impress her, certainly, as he had long fallen into the habit of preparing me a single, small, exquisite dish, in hopes that its excellence and rarity might make up for the fact that I could not abide more than a few bites of food any longer.
Or at least I couldn’t before today.
“Take this,” I said, handing the plate to Cora. She accepted it reflexively. Even her hands were thin, I noticed as they closed around the plate’s rim. But she wasn’t sick any longer, and that would soon change.
“Sit,” I ordered her. “Eat. My medical staff plumped you up with a feeding tube until you began to come out of your coma, but you will feel better with some real food in you.”
I wanted to erase the hollows in her cheeks and around her eyes, to see the sharp angles of her hips rounded with robust health.
She said nothing, just biting her lip as she cast her eyes over her food. I could feel the sudden welter of feelings ripple through her—not her ambivalence about me, for once, but her hunger at the sight of the food and the wash of relief that she could feel such a common, ordinary desire.
When her eyes flickered up again to meet mine, they had a sheen of tears, which she blinked quickly away before I could reach out. She took the place setting on the near side of the table, setting the plate in front of the array of water-beaded goblets there.
I decided to pretend not to have witnessed that private moment, and I turned to the buffet to choose food for myself. It was an automatic reflex…and yet I discovered that as I looked at the food, I, too, felt hungry.
For an instant, I was so surprised that I froze, but then, with a small breath, I let habit take over, lifting lids and dishing out small servings of various foods onto my plate. Shrimp and individual crab balls; cold tongue; bacon, braided into an elaborate cage with some kind of wild mushroom omelet inside; an American biscuit, already crumbling with butter.
“You ate dinner at the restaurant, too,” Cora said, her voice small, tentative.
An impersonal answer sprang easiest to my lips. “We need to eat less than humans, as our metabolism is much slower and our resulting body temperature considerably lower, but we are like all creatures—if we don’t eat and drink, we will die.”
“Right,” she said. I glanced back at her. She was blushing slightly. “Not undead. Does your staff know?”
“About my nature?” The thought of their ignorance amused me. So much depended on my thralls—on the thralls of any agnate. To imagine us without them was like imagining a human without his limbs. “Of course. They have been with me for a very long time and are completely loyal.”
“Because of what you are,” Cora said, her voice strained. “Because they don’t have a choice.” There was bitterness in the words.
She had guessed some part of it, at least—from her own reactions, though they did not translate perfectly to those of other humans, much less a thrall’s, and she still was not acknowledging the fact that she did nothing she did not want to do.
“That is a part of it,” I said, carefully neutral, even as I felt the anger building inside me again.
Her voice went higher. “Don’t you have any shame? People aren’t your toys to manipulate into doing your bidding.”
I spun around, setting the plate on the table and closing the distance between us in two strides. I turned her chair to face me squarely with a twist of its back and leaned over her.
The darkness that made me what I was might have changed her, but it had healed her, too, and it could only work because her nature, like mine, was made for it. What she wanted was her own responsibility. I had held back, exercising more self-control than perhaps any agnate ever had, battling not only my inclinations but the ones I felt from her. That she refused to recognize it made it no less real.
And she presumed to ask me—me, when she had writhed on the chaise and begged me to take her—she asked me if I had any shame.
“Don’t you dare,” I said, the words hissing through my teeth. “You, of all people, know better than that, know the lines I have drawn that I will not cross.”
Her breath was coming fast, in fear, yes, but also in blatant desire, her hands gripping the arms of her chair hard though I could feel how badly she wanted to use them to touch me.
So I touched her. Carefully, deliberately, I touched her shoulder, my fingers curling around its curve as her face twisted at her own reaction.
The touch was a demonstration to her—and a dare to her to deny her part in what was between us and the fact that it was only my restraint that had stopped her from giving to me anything I had asked.
She swallowed—and inclined into my hand.
“I could have taken you in my office the first time we met.” My words were low and merciless. She did not deserve my mercy. Not in this. Not right now.
“Yes.” She said that word as if it hurt—or thrilled her. And the strain in it sent a keening blade of need along my own body until all my limbs felt heavy with it. How she wanted me in that moment, and how I wanted her.
My next words came unbidden, spoken out of the hot memory of the moment. “I could have taken you on the street, outside the restaurant, against the brick wall.”
“Yes.” Her voice was faint now, her eyes so large and dark I could drown in their depths.
“And Friday night,” I continued. “I could have taken so much more.”
Her breath was coming in short pants now, her lips parted. I had meant to mock. I had meant to shame, since she had chosen that word.
Instead, if anything, I had inflamed—her desire and mine, an object lesson of the thinness of the line that kept her relatively untouched, a line that was dependent entirely upon me because she would never refuse me anything.
She would never even want to.
Under her layers of denial and self-assertion was that underlying fact of her nature. If she had not been made for me, we could not have bonded. And in a bond, it was impossible that she not want, in her deepest of hearts, all that came with it.
The scent of her body filled my nostrils, the saltiness of her skin and the slight musk of fear, and beneath it all, the rich scent of her desire.
I would have cut off my arm to take her then. But there was far more than that at stake.
I spoke quickly, the words low and harsh. “I want you to understand, clearly understand, how deeply I regret the loss of control that I had that night. But however much you wanted me—you must believe me that I needed you far more.”
She said nothing, but she swayed, leaned forward, tilting her head back under the influence of what pulsed between us.
I straightened abruptly and spun away from her, and I could feel the shock and hurt in her body at my retreat. But her first time with me was not to be one of humiliation. Not even though she would welcome it.
Without looking at her, I said, “Don’t tell me that I have no shame, Cora.”