Page 128 of Bleed

I nod slowly. “Okay…”

“But gifts are rarely without consequence.” His jaw tightens, the muscle in it feathering. “The hunger for knowledge is constant. I can satisfy a question, but doing so invariably creates ten more. There is no endpoint. No moment where my mind simply decides it has enough.” His gaze drops briefly to my throat. “My bloodlust functions similarly.”

A chill moves through me as his dark eyes lift to mine again.

“When I was younger, I believed discipline would be sufficient,” he continues. “That with enough practice and control, I could learn to feed normally. But I couldn’t.”

I watch him carefully, the anger that brought me charging out here slowly giving way to something colder.

“I would bite someone intending to take only what I required,” he says, his voice unnervingly even. “But once I started, there was no point at which the hunger diminished. Every swallow only intensified the need for another.”

My stomach twists as I ask, “How many?”

He averts his eyes. “Too many. Every human I drank from, I drained.”

The words settle over me like a lead weight.

Every human.

I think about the way he drinks from a glass instead of a vein. The way he refused to bite me no matter how relentlessly I pushed. All those warnings I mistook for stubbornness or some weird hang-up he refused to explain.

You don’t know what you’re asking for.

Turns out, I really fucking didn’t.

“Eventually, I accepted that I couldn’t feed from a live source,” he says, forcing his gaze back to mine. “I switched exclusively to bagged blood. Even then, the instinct remained, so I experimented until I discovered that mixing different types helped. The combination doesn’t correspond to a human source, so it confuses the instinct enough to make the hunger manageable.”

My brow furrows as another piece falls into place.

All those glasses of mismatched blood. Positive mixed with negative. His insistence that he preferred it that way. It was never a preference– it was another safeguard. Another carefully constructed barrier between himself and the monster he was terrified of becoming again.

And I spent weeks trying to tear it down, never considering there might actually be a method behind the madness.

“And then you bit me,” I whisper.

His expression twists. “Yes. When our blood reacted, I understood the implication immediately, and something in me broke.”

I swallow hard, the side of my throat pulsing with phantom pain.

“I don’t remember making the decision to bite you,” he murmurs. “I remember seeing the reaction, realizing what it meant.” His pupils flare as his gaze drops to my throat again. “Then I remember your blood.”

My pulse pounds harder beneath his stare.

“I couldn’t stop.”

A chill snakes its way up my spine, the tips of my fingers going numb.

I think about those last few moments in the lab. The fear cutting through the venom-induced haze, my fingers uselessly clawing at his arm, and the darkness closing in while his mouth remained sealed to my throat.

Then I woke up here. Alive.

“But you did,” I say quietly.

His eyes snap up to mine, head tilting.

“You said you’ve never been able to stop before. But with me, you did.”

“Not soon enough,” he mutters, the shame in his expression almost painful to look at. “I felt you lose consciousness. Your pulse was slowing, your breathing had gone shallow. Somehow, I pulled away and got you here in time to be stabilized.”