He walks into the corridor.
I wait for his footsteps to turn toward the conference room. They don’t. They go the other direction, down the main hall toward the front entrance. I hear the main entrance opening, the wards parting, and then speed. Into the night.
He’s gone. I sit in the dark. He left. He actually left. The bond thins.
I feel it happen. The full connection reducing to thread. He’s moving at speed. The direction of him pulls southwest, toward the city, and then the distance takes over and I stop being able to track him specifically. What’s left is a thread instead of a connection. The pulse still present, just smaller, the way a voice goes when the person speaking it moves away down a hallway and keeps moving.
I look at the gold on the nightstand.
I stand up.
The room feels too empty. I straighten the sheets. My hands need to be doing something. I pick it up off the nightstand and hold it in my palm.
I put it in my pocket.
The compound is waking around me. Footsteps in the east wing. Voices starting low and building.
I move through the corridor and out to the east garden.
I find the bench at the garden’s edge and sit.
The night passes. I don’t track it.
Dawn comes. The sky goes from dark to gray to amber. I watch it with the awareness I’ve been trying not to think too hard about. I could keep watching. The light won’t hurt me. Dormancy can’t take me. I have this particular freedom and I’ve been using it to keep secrets from the man who gave me his father’s ring.
The compound goes quiet all at once. Dormancy sweeps through the building. Everyone under. The sun clears the tree line. Full daylight.
Congratulations. You’re the last vampire standing. Again.
His end of the thread stays lit. Faint, but conscious. The compound is silent, the sun is up, and he’s still awake somewhere across the city. He holds for a long time. Then the thread dims. He’s under.
I sit in the sunlight and think about six mornings.
Every one of them the same. Lying still while he went under, feeling his hand go slack at my throat, counting to sixty before I moved. The times I came back inside and lay down beside him and chose silence. I was going to tell him once I understood it. That moment kept not coming.
The only reason you’re telling me now is that the choice was taken from you.That’s what he said.
He wasn’t wrong.
The city noise drifts over the compound walls. Traffic. The low mechanical hum of Atlanta going about its daylight business, completely indifferent to the fact that I’m sitting in a garden cataloging my own failures.
Get it together.
I take the chain out of my pocket again. Hold it.
He’s been the one who stays. Every time. Feet planted, hands open, standing exactly where I left him. He kept choosing me every time I gave him a reason not to.
And I kept letting him do that work because it felt safer than doing it myself.
He put his father’s ring on a chain at my throat and asked me to carry it. He claimed me. In front of a room full of vampires.
I haven’t done the same thing back. Not once.
I need to fix this.
Not as an apology or atonement, but because it’s true and it’s overdue.
The afternoon turns. The light shifts west.
