Wow, what a totally normal sentence! This is getting better and better. I look up at him.
“I suppose it’s five-star accommodations all the way? Next you’re going to tell me there’s also a concierge in the lobby and a maid to leave a mint on my pillow every night.”
“If a mint would please you, I will arrange for ten,” he says, dead serious. “Anything you want—anything that pleases you—you can have. All my wealth and power is at your disposal.”
I close my eyes because I do not have the bandwidth to deal with Vampire Daddy Warbucks at the moment. I’m going to think of something else, I tell myself. Something pleasant, like Book Club.
Instead, the thing in the dungeon rises to the top of my mind, like a dead body floating to the surface.
“What was that thing?” I ask, wishing my voice was steadier. “That thing you called a ‘Wraith?’ How did you—” I motion weakly at his hand. “—do what you did? How did you get rid of it?”
The big vampire is quiet for a moment. Then he sets the sponge aside, as if honesty requires him to have both hands free.
“My father wanted power,” he says at last. “Not the kind one earns. The kind one steals. He bargained for it—took into his flesh a relic called the Crimson Brand. It is older even than the Crimson Eye I used to find you. It is Cursed—it fused to him. When he died, it fused to me.”
He turns his palm and I see it—the obsidian shard, seated like a jagged jewel in his skin. Its edges glow faintly like a coal that refuses to die.
“With it,” he continues, “I can bind and command certain things that dwell in darkness. I can force them down. Cage them. But every command costs.”
I remember the blood dripping from between his fingers and the smell of burning flesh.
“Costs…costs what?” I whisper through numb lips.
He shrugs, his broad shoulders rolling.
“Blood…strength…sanity, if I am careless.”
“Wow…” I give a shaky laugh that comes out as more of a croak. “So your family heirloom is a portable demon-tamer.”
One corner of his mouth quirks upward.
“An inelegant phrase but not inaccurate.”
A shiver rolls through me hard enough that water laps over the tub’s rim.
“It…said things.” My voice is suddenly so low I can barely hear it. “About my Grandma…about my friends. It said it could see their deaths. It sounded so sure.”
“The Wraith feeds on despair,” Lucian says. He brushes a wisp of hair away from my face. “It speaks only to wound, little one. There is no truth in its words.”
“Tell that to my nervous system,” I say grimly. “My nerves feel like they’ve been through an industrial strength shredder.”
I wrap my arms around my knees and immediately regret it because my skin is still oily with the Wraith’s residue. The water’s gone lukewarm while we’ve been talking—thin comfort against the bone-deep cold I can still feel gnawing at me.
Lucian frowns down at me.
“You’re shivering again.”
“Because I can’t get warm.” I shiver harder—I can’t help it.
I’m hoping he’ll run more hot water but instead, he twists a valve and the drain opens with a gurgle. As the water drains, so does the lingering heat. I clutch my knees tighter and my teeth start to chatter.
“Wh-what are you d-doing? S-so c-c-cold!”
“I know, lovely one.”
To my surprise, He leans into the tub without hesitation and gathers me close to him like I’m not a walking biohazard. His shirt soaks through and gets smeared by the oily streaks of the stuff still left on my skin.
I want struggle—to tell him to leave me alone. But he’s giving off heat like a furnace and it feels so good—too good to resist.
