Something about her posture suggests she's wrestling with something. Weighing decisions. But I can't know what.
I should look away. Close the feed. Let her have privacy in whatever she's processing.
But dawn is approaching, and she's still awake. Still sitting there. A fledgling of her age should be feeling the pull toward dormancy by now.
I find myself leaving my study and walking through the compound toward her room.
I knock softly on her door. "It's Maximus."
A pause. Then: "Come in."
She's still dressed in training clothes, sitting cross-legged on the bed. Her eyes meet mine, questioning.
"You should rest," I say. "Dawn is coming."
"So should you."
I step into the room, leaving the door open, maintaining propriety even as I violate my own rules about keeping distance.
"The donor system," she says after a moment. "Some parts of it bother me."
"Which parts?"
"The 'voluntary-conditional' donors. It feels like coercion."
"It is coercion. But it's controlled coercion with compensation and protection. Before I built this network, those same people would have been drained by random vampires and discarded. At least this way they're alive and benefiting."
"That's what Elena said."
"Elena understands because she lost someone to the old way. The chaos. The random violence." I move to the window, even though I can't see through the blackout curtains. "I'm not asking you to approve of every aspect of what I've built. But I am asking you to understand why it exists."
"To prevent chaos."
"Yes, to prevent chaos," I confirm. "Because chaos serves Konstantin. Order serves survival."
She's quiet for a long moment, staring at nothing. "My mother died of an overdose five years ago," she says quietly. "Fentanyl, though she thought it was something else. Bought pills off someone she trusted. She was dead before the ambulance arrived."
I'm very still. "I'm sorry."
"It's why the contamination crisis matters to me. People trusting the wrong source, thinking they're safe, and dying because of it. Vampires drinking contaminated blood aren't that different from humans taking tainted drugs. Same desperation. Same bad luck." She looks at me directly. "That's why I can acceptthe moral compromises in your donor system. Because the alternative, random feeding, contaminated blood, vampires going feral, that's the chaos that killed my mother. Just in a different form."
I understand then why she didn't just agree to help; she's invested in preventing this kind of death. It's personal for her in ways I didn't realize.
She's quiet for another moment. "Michael is going to die, isn't he?"
So she understands the severity of what she saw.
"Yes. Tonight. The contamination is too advanced."
"How many others are in the containment wing?"
"Four. In various stages of deterioration. We're trying to save them, but…" I turn back to face her. "This is why the network matters. Why protecting the clean blood supply is worth the moral compromises. Because the alternative is watching people like Michael lose themselves to poisoned blood."
"I understand." And I can see she does. Doesn't mean she's comfortable with it, but she understands.
"You fought well tonight," I say, changing subjects. "You're adapting faster than most vampires do in their first year."
"I had good training before I was turned. Just translating it to vampire abilities."
