I understand its significance without being told. For a vampire of his age and power, with his history of enslavement, offering his throat is an act of profound trust. He's making himself vulnerable in a way he probably hasn't since before Luciano took him.
"You're sure?" I whisper.
"I'm sure." His voice is steady, but I can feel the tension in his body. "I want you to know me. All of me. I'm tired of hiding."
I move over him, straddling his hips, feeling him stir beneath me. That can wait. This first.
I lower my mouth to his throat.
His skin is cool against my lips, smooth over the taut muscle beneath. I can smell him. My fangs extend without conscious thought, responding to proximity and desire.
I press a kiss to his pulse point. Another to the hollow of his throat. Another to the place where his jaw meets his neck.
"Whenever you're ready," he says. His voice is steady, but his hands have come up to grip my hips, fingers digging in.
I bite.
His blood fills my mouth, and the world explodes.
It's nothing like drinking from a blood bag. Nothing like the stolen sips of contaminated blood that kept me alive before Maximus found me. This is something else entirely. This is drinking lightning. Drinking fire. Drinking centuries of existence compressed into liquid form.
I taste his age first. The sheer weight of six hundred years, each one leaving its mark. Layer upon layer of experience, of memory, of emotion. More than any human could ever contain.
Then the emotions hit me.
Grief, old and deep, like a river that's been flowing so long it's carved canyons into stone. Loneliness so profound it makes my chest ache, centuries of going through the motions of existence without ever truly living. The cold patience of survival, of endurance, of continuing forward simply because the alternative is unthinkable.
I taste his human life. A boy in medieval Italy, learning to fight, learning to lead. The men he trained, the battles he survived, the family he left behind. Letters he never got to send. A mother he never saw again.
I taste Luciano. The taking. The century and a half of enslavement.The violation of being used, controlled, broken down, and rebuilt into something he didn't recognize. The hatred that kept him alive when everything else had been stripped away. The moment he finally killed his maker and felt nothing but hollow silence where satisfaction should have been.
I taste Catherine. The first person he loved after Luciano. The hope she represented, the future he'd started to imagine. Then the horror of watching her go feral, of realizing he would have to kill her himself. The blade through her heart. The centuries of guilt that followed, the vow to never let himself care that much again.
I taste the walls he built. Brick by brick, year by year. The careful distance he maintained from everyone. The way he convinced himself that power was enough, that control was safety, that love was just another word for vulnerability.
And beneath all of it, running through everything like veins of gold through dark rock: warmth. New warmth. Tentative and fragile and fierce.
The warmth has a name.
Me.
I taste how he felt when he first saw me in that alley. Irritation mixed with curiosity mixed with something he couldn't name. The moment he decided to save me. The moment he realized he wanted to keep me.
I taste the night he watched me on the security feeds during my first solo mission. The way his chest tightened every time I moved out of frame. The realization that he was compromised, that he cared, that all his centuries of walls had been breached by a fledgling with eight months of experience and a stubborn streak a mile wide.
I taste his fear. Fear of losing me. Fear of caring. Fear of opening himself up to pain after so long being numb.
I taste his desire. The way he's wanted me, fought againstwanting me, surrendered to wanting me. The way every touch between us has burned itself into his memory.
And I taste, unmistakably, irrevocably, his love.
He loves me.
It's not just an emotion. It's a certainty. Bone-deep. Blood-deep. The truest thing he's felt in centuries. He loves me with a desperation that terrifies him and a tenderness that surprises him and a totality that has remade him from the inside out.
I pull back, licking the wound closed, and stare down at him.
My face is wet. Tears, I realize. I didn't know vampires could cry.
