“Likethis,” he echoes.
“Pretending like we don’t both know what I’m here for.”
He stuffs his fists into his pockets and traces a slow arc around her. She turns with him, her heart hammering hard. He knows better than to give in to his more basic urges. It makes something inside him coil up tight, pacing like this. It wakens something predatory. Something fanged.
It would besoeasy to lunge.
“I have no batteries for you tonight,” he says. “You weren’t due back until next weekend. Our supply runner doesn’t come through until Friday.”
“That’s okay.” The sound of her swallow is devastating. “I don’t need anything from you.”
“That’s not the game we play.”
“We can play a new one.” She pushes up her sleeve, letting the moonlight slip over her wrist. An unbroken patch of skin gleams up at him. “Just for tonight.”
“Don’t push me,” he growls.
“I’m not pushing you, Lys. I’m offering.”
Deep inside his head, he feels a door click shut. He’s all instinct—primal and on edge, hunger lancing through him. He moves without thinking, pinning her until her wrist is the only thing left between them.
“Don’t,”he repeats through gritted teeth,“push me.”
She ignores him. “Drink.”
“I don’t want to.” He wanted to dance. He wanted starlight and moonglow. He wanted a single fucking moment of make-believe. What good is she if she won’t play along? What purpose does she serve, if all she does is make a monster out of him? She’s no better than Paris, pushing and pushing and pushing until he snaps.
“Screw your twisted rules, Oliver,” she whispers. “Bite me.”
Oliver.He hates it when she calls him that. It’s not the name he gave her. It’s afamilyname. It brings up things he’d rather it didn’t. The smell of blood, the smack of a backhand, the bite of rings into his cheek.Get back up, Oliver. Stop sniveling and fight.
This, in the end, is what snaps his resolve. There’s a blackout rush. A final, brutal lash of hunger. Her skin breaks so beautifully beneath his bite. Her blood is nectar in his throat. The night hums. He is drunk on the taste of her, inebriated by the sounds she makes. Her fractured breathing. Her racing heart. Her soft, dreamlike sigh.
He pulls away before he’s ready, exerting control. Pretending he had any to begin with. Pressing his tongue to a last trickle of blood at his lip, he lifts his eyes to Shea’s. The change in her is palpable. It guts him every time, though he’d never admit it. Not even under pain of torture.
Her eyes are liquid, pupils blown. Beneath her ribs, her heart beats languorously. She looks as though she’s underwater—out of reach. She is always just out of reach. He wonders if that’s what makes the poets write. If they’re all composing sonnets to the things they can’t touch.
She’s watching him, too, riveted.
“You’re beautiful,” she whispers, reaching for his cheek.
He catches her wrist before she can touch him, holding her at bay. He knows what she sees right after a feed. He knows what he looks like to her. A boy, clear-eyed and rosy-cheeked, all traces of atrocity chased away by the fleeting succor of her blood.
It won’t last.
By the time she comes to her senses, he’ll be a monster again.
Sometimes, in his worst moments, he wishes she’d stop coming to see him—wishes she’d vanish without a trace. Nothing at all would be easier than this. Having her in parasitic swallows, in desperate half measures. Thinking of her in the daytime.
“It’s so pretty in here,” she murmurs, unblinking. “You were right, this is the perfect place to dance.”
“I don’t want to dance anymore.”
“Why not?”
“I changed my mind.”
Down in the belly of the hotel, there’s a disturbance. A ripple in the current. The chaos ebbs. The music cuts out, replaced by shouting. Shea doesn’t take any notice of it, and so neither does he. Fights break out all the time at Mercy Ridge. Cyrus will handle it.
