A phrase I did not know. But repetition, like ritual, was familiar.
Panic made the woman graceless. Her knuckles tightened around the neck of the bottle, then she threw it. The red glass struck my cheek with a dull crack, scattering droplets that smelled faintly of fruit and oak.
I did not move. To move meant to reveal what I was, to surrender the small, precise thread of control that still bound me.
She stood rigid, breathing hard. Then, quieter, more to herself than to me, she muttered, “Great. Now I’m out of wine.”
The absurdity of it almost unmoored me.
I breathed once, shallow and slow. The air trembled in my lungs. My thoughts roared against my restraint.
I am awake.
I am bound by something new.
I must not lunge.
I am going to lunge.
These assertions came not as lines of poetry but as military orders. The final one had the bitter humor of inevitability. I held myself in place through force, memory, and the delicate thread that had taken hold of me upon my awakening. The binding pulled like a leash with teeth. It kept me grounded even as every part of me leaned forward. Anchored to thismortal.
I had been turned into a vampire against my will. The Sovereign Court had hunted me, wanting to chain me to theirservice. I had been trapped inside a coffin for longer than any mind should have to withstand. Now, I stood in a new kind of confinement, one created the moment this woman opened the lid and pulled me back into the world.
The bond that tied me to this woman was not gentle. It was exact. It held me in place with a grip I could feel in every cell of my body. It told me where she was. It told me when she moved. It told me what direction I would pull toward if I gave up even a fraction of my control.
I was tied to a mortal woman who had touched my prison and dragged me into hers without knowing it.
I stayed where I was and forced my focus to the floor between us. Control and discipline had kept me alive this long. I could not let go of it now.
She backed away, eyes wide in a manner that made her face more open than any portrait had been in my memory. More words tumbled from her mouth, so rapid and panicked that I could not parse all of them.
She was beautiful in the honest way of living things. She was alive in a way that made my old bones hurt.
There are moments when history collapses into one human interaction and you know, with the clarity of a man who has been buried and then resurrected, that life will not be the same after. Standing there, feeling the hunger and the tether and the absurd sting on my cheek from a broken glass bottle, I understood that the world had not returned to me for punishment alone.
It had returned to let something begin.
Chapter 4
Nadia
I’d officially lost it.
Somewhere on the floor was a shattered wine bottle. I’d actually thrown it at him. A naked man had appeared out of a fucking stone coffin, and my brain’s first survival instinct was to waste a perfectly good cabernet.
I flung myself behind a wicker chair and peered over the edge. My heart pounded so hard I could feel it in my teeth. My brain was still buffering. My only weapon was gone.
He was still standing there, looking mildly inconvenienced, not a drop of wine on him.
Tall. Pale. Built like an Olympian. Tousled dark hair. A face both infuriating and unfairly symmetrical. If brooding were an Olympic sport, he would win. His eyes had that faint glow again, steady and impossible.
I crouched behind the wicker chair, trying to piece together my decision-making timeline.
Step one: see naked man.
Step two: throw wine.
Step three: regret everything.
