“Not here.” I glance around at the fifty variables, the fifty heartbeats, the fifty witnesses who have no idea what’s standing among them. “Can we—Can we go somewhere quieter? Please.”
She searches my face. I don’t know what she sees—fear, probably. Desperation. The cracks in two centuries of carefully maintained control going out the window.
Then she nods.
“The garden,” she says. “There’s an alcove past the hibiscus. I saw it earlier.”
She leads me away from the party, away from the lights and the music and Damien’s invisible gaze. Her hand is warm in mine. Her heartbeat is steady, trusting.
She has no idea what I’m about to tell her.
She has no idea that in the next few minutes, everything she thinks she knows about me—about us—about the world—is going to shatter.
But I can’t protect her with lies anymore. I can’t love her and deceive her at the same time. I won’t be the monster who let her walk into danger blind just because the truth was too heavy to speak.
The garden alcove is hidden behind a screen of hibiscus, close enough to the party that we can still hear the bass line pulsing, far enough that the chaos fades to background noise. Fairy lights glimmer through the palm fronds. The ocean murmurs somewhere beyond the darkness.
She turns to face me. Waiting.
And I begin.
“Earlier today, when you told me what Sage said—”
“About the vampire thing?” She laughs, but it’s nervous. “Julian, that was just—”
“She’s right.”
Poppy doesn’t respond.
“She’s right,” I repeat. “About what I am. What I’ve been hiding from you since the moment we met.”
“Julian—”
“I’m two hundred and fifty-seven years old.” I try to keep my voice steady. “I was born in 1769 in a village that doesn’t exist anymore. I was turned when I was thirty-two—the age I’ll be forever. I don’t eat. I don’t sleep. My heart slowed to almost nothing before your great-great-grandmother was born. Twenty beats a minute, maybe less. Just enough to remind me I’m not quite dead.”
She’s staring at me. Her face is unreadable in the moonlight.
“I drink blood.” The hardest part. “Not often. Not from unwilling sources—I have arrangements, ethical ones, as ethical as something like this can be. But it’s what I am. What I need to survive.”
Silence. The waves crash below us. Somewhere in the resort, a door closes.
“Say something,” I whisper. “Please.”
“I knew.”
I blink, stunned. “What?”
“I knew. Or—I suspected.” She glances downward. “The cold skin. The way you don’t eat. The references to things that happened before you were supposedly born. I’ve been making lists, Julian. Keeping track. Trying to convince myself there was a reasonable explanation.”
“And now?”
“Now you’re telling me there isn’t one.” Her voice is steady, but I can hear the tremor beneath it. “You’re telling me that my fake boyfriend who became my real boyfriend is actually a vampire. An actual, literal vampire.”
“Yes.”
“Who’s been alive for two hundred and fifty-seven years.”
“Yes.”
