I rise, zipping the length of the room in a frenzy of moment while shadows cling to me like loyal dogs.
Finally I still, breathe deep, reaffirm the most important truth.
Elara alive means answers—and answers mean blood.
Retribution. Closure.
I pour the rest of the decanter over the fire.
Flames roar up, licking the ceiling, illuminating the portraits on the walls. She’s in most of them. My obsession rendered in oil and memory. Her face painted over centuries by artists who never knew they were painting a ghost.
I tear one from the wall, the frame splintering in my hands.
“You took everything,” I whisper to the woman in the painting. “Now you’ll give it back.”
The clock on the mantel strikes midnight.
Outside, thunder rattles the windowpanes. I open the balcony doors and let the storm in. Rain lashes my skin, cleansing nothing.
Below, the streets pulse with mortal life.
The smell of it drives my fangs from their hiding place. I leap from the balcony, landing soundlessly in the alley, my fluttering coattail settling around me like a reassuring friend.
The city hums with blood and secrets.
I take one step, then another, until the jazz and laughter fade behind me and I am nothing but shadow and hunger.
By the time the horizon bruises with dawn, I will be gone.
Florence awaits.
And if she’s truly alive—if the woman in that photograph is my Elara—then the centuries of silence between us will end in fire and agony and death.
Because love never dies.
But jealousy never forgives.
Two Hundred andFifty Years Ago
Somewhere outside Rouen, France
The nightI lost her began with laughter with rain on the windows and wine in our blood. She wore my shirt, opened and white and pure, and nothing else. The firelight kissing her skin, turning her hair to living flame.
“You look at me like I’m your last meal,” she teased, tracing the edge of my jaw with her finger.
“You are,” I murmured, catching her wrist, pressing a kiss to her leaping pulse while my other hand teases the shirt open a little more, eager for another glimpse of those blood red nipples and the riot of curls framing her pussy, between which the hood of her well-sucked clit peeked, swollen and ready for another loving. “Every century, every hunger—none of it compares tohow your blood tastes in my mouth. Inside me. It’s like a miracle and a curse, all at once.”
She smiled then, soft and dangerous. “You shouldn’t love me, Lucien.”
“I stopped listening to reason the day you walked into my crypt.”
Her laughter was the only sound and light and sustenance I ever needed.
She leaned in, brushing her lips against mine, slow and deliberate. I felt her magic spark beneath her skin, warm and golden and alive. The witchcraft she tried to hide from the world now completely owned and celebrated. Put to the vital use of making her near immortal.
My perfect mate.
Over a century after the Salem trials that sent witches into hiding, many still lived in fear even this far away from the horrors.
