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“It is yours.”

“Yeah.” He lifted the garnet on its chain and looked at it. “It is.”

I kissed his temple.

That was when I heard it.

I heard a very small sound, nearly under the music: a click, and then a soft mechanical whir, thin as a fly’s wing. Behind it came a smell, faint and metallic and appalling, that cut through the honey and the sweat like a knife through cloth.

Silver.

Cold, clean, and unmistakable. The smell of a blade that has been kept in oil. The smell of a bullet in a chamber.

I went rigid.

“What is it?” whispered Lex.

I put a finger to his lips. With the other hand, I drew the sheet up over both of us, and I turned my head, very slowly, toward the window.

The curtains were drawn. But at the corner, where the fabric did not quite meet the frame, there was a gap no wider than a pencil. And on the far side of the street, on the roof of the darkened bakery across the way, where the snow lay smooth and unbroken, something small and round caught the streetlight and glinted once.

A lens.

It glinted, and was withdrawn.

I lay there, listening to the wind. To the quiet, unhurried footsteps on gravel, going away. To the soft, satisfied hum of a man who had gotten what he came for.

“Maksim,” said Lex, very low. His hand had found mine under the sheet, and was gripping it hard. His eyes were enormous. “Someone’s watching us.”

I did not answer.

I looked at the boy in my arms, with his garnet and his tear-stained face and the whole bright wreckage of his heart, and I thought: I have kept my rule for eleven hundred years. I have never hurt a human. I have never taken what was not offered.

I will not lose him to a photograph.

Outside, the last footstep faded. Below us the band began another song.

And in the quiet of Room 101, with the snow coming down over the sleeping city, I made a new vow, the fourth of my life, and it was the simplest of all.

Whatever it costs. Whatever they are. I will keep him.

PART THREE

THE SERIES

Chapter 22

LEX

The Fruit Basket

Ibrought a fruit basket to a vampire bar.

I’d like that said plainly at the top, because it was the most surreal sentence I’d ever lived. It was ten o’clock on a Saturday morning with snow on the ground, and I was standing on a black-painted step outside a door with no sign, holding a wicker basket the size of a small dog, wrapped in cellophane and tied with a ribbon. It held pears and clementines and a pineapple with a bow on its head. I’d bought it at a grocery store two blocks over because Maksim said Tamsin had said I owed her one, and I am a man of my word.

“She was joking,” said Maksim, beside me.

“She wasn’t.”