I feel all of it. Every agonizing second.
But I don't stop. I drink deeper, pulling her into me, and I feel her doing the same at my wrist. Two currents flowing in opposite directions. Two rivers meeting, merging, becoming one.
Fear. Not of death, but of losing me. Of being used against me. Of becoming the weapon Konstantin designed and destroying the man she loves with her own hands.
And beneath that fear, love. So much of it. Overwhelming, terrifying, all-consuming. She loves me with a ferocity that I can't comprehend. Chose me. Keeps choosing me. Even knowing what she might become.
The bond begins to form.
I feel it like a thread of fire stretching between us, fragile at first, barely there. But with each pull of blood, each swallow, it grows stronger. Thicker. More real.
Her memories crash into me.
A little girl with scraped knees, learning to throw a punch from an older cousin. "You're small," he says, "so you gotta be fast."
A young woman standing over her mother's body, too numb to cry. Teenage Simone sobbing beside her. The smell of death and the knowledge that nothing will ever be the same.
The underground ring. Blood on her knuckles. The roar of the crowd. The only place she felt powerful, in control, alive.
Waking up in a warehouse, alone and changed and terrified. A note on a receipt: "Welcome to eternity, sweetheart."
Eight months of survival. Contaminated blood and desperatehunger and the constant, crushing loneliness of being something inhuman in a human world.
And then, me.
I see myself through her eyes.
The first time she saw me in that alley. A monster in an expensive suit, offering salvation or death. She couldn't tell which.
The first time I touched her, checking her wounds in the medical wing. The electricity that sparked between us, unexpected and undeniable.
The first time she realized she was falling for me. The terror of it. The impossibility.
I drink deeper, and she does the same, and the bond thickens into something unbreakable.
Her feelings pour into me, raw and unfiltered. Not just love, but everything. The anger she carries, hot and bright. The grief for the life that was stolen. The fierce protectiveness for her sister, for Elena, for the people she's come to care about. The terror of losing control, of becoming Konstantin's puppet, of hurting me. The desperate need to be enough. To be more than what he made her.
And beneath it all, running like a river through everything she is: strength. Pure, stubborn, relentless strength. The kind that doesn't know how to give up. The kind that fights back even when winning is impossible.
This is who she is. This is what I'm binding myself to. Not the weapon Konstantin tried to create. The woman who refuses to be controlled.
Yes, I think. Yes. All of it. I want all of it.
The bond snaps into place.
It's like nothing I've ever experienced. Six hundred years of existence, and nothing compares to this moment. One second I'm alone in my own head, the way I've been for centuries, the way I thought I'd always be.
And then I'm not.
She's there. Not just her blood in my veins or her body in my arms. Her. Her presence, her essence, woven into the fabric of my consciousness. I can feel her fear fading as my strength floods into her. Feel her pain dulling as the bond stabilizes whatever the silver was destroying.
I can feel her feeling me.
My centuries of loneliness. The endless nights. Luciano's cruelty, carved into my psyche like scars that never fully healed. The walls I built around my heart, so high and so thick, I thought nothing could ever breach them.
And then, her. The crack in those walls that became a doorway. The light that flooded in when I finally let someone see me.
She sees it all. Everything I am. Everything I've been. Every dark corner, every shameful memory, every moment of weakness I've hidden from the world.
