I withdrew, every muscle tight with denial.
She deserved safety, not hunger masquerading as devotion. Not these chains disguised as a bond that she’d unknowingly thrown herself into. I knew what it was to not be able to make my own choices, to live my life by the rules of others. I would not do that to her.
Still, as I stood in the doorway, watching her chest rise and fall, I could feel the hum of the tether promising ruin.
I didn’t want to want her. I shouldn’t need her.
But the truth pressed against my ribs.
She had no idea what she’d done when she woke me.
And I wasn’t sure I wanted her to.
For a moment, I simply watched her sleep.
Nadia lay tangled in her blanket, one hand tucked under her cheek, her hair a wild halo against the pillow. She looked nothing like the tempest she was when awake. No sarcasm. No nervous chatter. Just utterly human.
I did not understand how anyone could have been cruel to her. The thought of it made my chest twist—an unfamiliar, unwelcome ache.
I had the absurd impulse to crawl into the bed beside her. To pull her close, feel that warmth against me, and pretend—just for a few hours—that the world was simple. That I was a man instead of the monster she’d accidentally revived.
I forced myself to leave the room, shutting the door softly behind me.
The bond tugged immediately, a physical ache under my sternum. I could feel her presence like gravity itself, pulling, reminding me where she was. I resisted. Barely.
I needed distance. Air. Anything familiar. I should be strong enough to stretch the limits of the bond now that I had eaten, and Nadia wouldn’t feel the effects as strongly while she was asleep.
Nearly four hundred years had passed while I slept, and I still hadn’t seen the world I’d awakened to—not beyond the sterile, humming confines of that house. I longed for something that smelled of earth and woodsmoke, not soap and glowing rectangles.
The air was cooler when I stepped through the door, thick with the scent of foreign chemicals. The night should have felt like freedom, but everything looked wrong. Too many lights. Too many sounds.
I stepped carefully down the front path and eventually made my way onto the street, keeping to the shadows.
That’s when I saw them—metal beasts roaring past, eyes burning white and red. They moved with alarming speed, growling like demons bound to invisible reins.
“Good Lord,” I whispered. “What sorcery?—”
One passed so close that the air slapped my face. I stumbled back, clutching the fence. The contraption blared at me—a monstrous, blaring trumpet—and a human head emerged from the side of it.
“Nice sweats, asshole!” the man shouted before disappearing back inside the roaring creature.
Stunned, I stared after it.
Nice sweats.
How peculiar. I glanced down at the gray trousers Nadia had given me. The ones withJUICYemblazoned across the back in pink.
Ah. Compliment. He must have admired them.
I straightened my spine, feeling oddly pleased. “The people of this century are surprisingly forthright to call out praise to strangers so freely.”
Another metal beast whooshed by, shrieking and glaring again. I bared my teeth. “And loudly passionate, it seems.”
I continued down the street, trying to memorize the landscape—the painted lines on the ground, the blinking lights, the endless rows of identical houses. I could feel the faint pull of the bond in my chest, tugging me back toward Nadia’s heartbeat. The distance between us felt wrong, unbalanced.
Still, I walked a few more blocks, inhaling the strange new scent of the world: oil, metal, sugar, rain.
It was not the world I’d known. The stars above looked smaller, dimmer somehow. And yet, for all my complaints, something inside me whispered that maybe this place held the only thing left worth belonging to.
