“It’s the way to stop the killing. To stop everything. I can recreate the?—”
“No.” He grips my shoulders. “It’s too dangerous.”
“It’s not.” I try to shrug him off, but his grip tightens. “I can make the poison. Then we’d just need to get close enough to deliver it.”
“You don’t understand the depth of the Dragonis bonds.” He sighs.
“I’ve seen the books, tried to decipher your notes. From what I can tell, Gregor and Theo must’ve beenverem?”
His eyes round slightly.
“Their trees were connected in the book, right? So closely linked that if one dies, the other eventually dies, too?”
He nods.
“That’s why Gregor is fading. He’d formed that bond—theveremthing—with his own son.” I’d exhausted what translations I could when I figured out those notes. It would take a lot more time in the library for me to make sense of the rest of the tree diagrams.
“Yes, they were Blooded.”
“Blooded? What does that mean, really? And how?” I couldn’t figure this out from the text. “What makes their link so special? Your connection to Gregor isn’t the same, right?”
“No. He would never want me for his Blood. He forced the bond with Theo, feeding off him for centuries until they became inexorably linked.”
“Why would he do that, though? Doesn’t it make him vulnerable?”
“He thought it would make him stronger.” He slides his hands down my arms, his touch warm. “Like a parasite on a strong host. He thought Theo’s youth would give him even more power, keeping him at the head of the Dragonis line for time everlasting.” He sways a little on his feet.
I grab his waist. “You should rest.”
“Not yet.” He glances down. “I need to get rid of all this.”
Blood. He’s still covered in it.
“Fair, but I don’t know if you have the strength to get through a shower, and you might drown in the bath.”
He gives me a weak smirk. “Volunteering to shower with me?”
“Get over yourself.” I wrap my arm around his waist and walk him into his bathroom and over to the shower. Reaching in, I flip the water on, testing it for warmth. “All right, you can?—”
He strides past me, and I realize he’s naked. In the few moments it took for me to get the shower going, he’d stripped everything away.
Leaning against the white marble wall, he lets the water pour over him, a red river forming beneath him.
I step back and look at the wall, my cheeks heating.
“I’ve been inside you, Georgia.” I hear the smile in his voice. “You can look all you like.”
“Didn’t I just tell you to get over yourself?” I glance at him, the blood washing away and revealing smooth, intact skin. NowIdostare. “I thought there’d be at least some sort of—if not scarring, then at least some evidence of trauma. But—” I think back to the blood samples I worked on in the lab “—the lack of white blood cells, maybe that’s what prevents scar tissue from forming? But there was plenty of fibrin.”
“Didn’t I tell you there’s more to our blood than whatever you can see under a microscope?” He turns to me and scrubs his chest with a bar of soap, the familiar scent wafting through the humid air. More blood runs down the drain, an impossible amount that would spell death for a human.
His muscled frame, lithe and strong, sends an unwanted shiver through me. I look away again and clear my throat. “Anyway, I guess I should go. You seem to be doing bett?—”
“Fuck. Is this…”
I peer at where his hand has stopped at his side, then step closer. “Your wound is still open. Shit! You have to get out of the shower. You can’t let it get wet like this.” A million things run through my mind, not the least of which is sepsis.
“It’s all right.” He swipes at it with the soap.
