Page 30
Chapter Fourteen
Carson
Gina’s voice slipped through the cracked apartment window like smoke on midnight wind, lilting and irresistible. “Carson, darling. Come walk with me. I have the cure you need—the one Mathias will never give you. Freedom from the ruin before it consumes you both.”
Her words echoed his own from last night in a terrifying loop. Something about Gina always put him on edge, watching for the fists to fall.
Carson stood at the threshold, body still humming from the previous night’s desperate union, bite marks healed to faint silver lines. The tremors had worsened, his dreadful blackouts lengthening, and Gina’s promise tugged at the fraying edges of his will. Tangled loyalties warred inside him from Mathias’ warnings, the camp’s resentful eyes, his own masochistic craving for the high. But the sun’s whisper in his dreams, the ruins of his human life...maybe release was mercy.
He followed her into the night, drawn by that velvet-glove tone.
The warehouse looked wrong tonight—shadows thicker, the illusions tattered and frayed at the edges. Gina led him deep into the interior rooms, past clusters of whelps whose eyes gleamed with unstable hunger. “Internal threats fester here,” she murmured, guiding him towards a barred chamber. “Sun-mad elders we hide from the world. But one carries the essence that can sever your bond. A clean break. You’ll be free.”
She produced a vial of dark, viscous blood—tainted, swirling with unnatural streaks. “Drink. It will burn the link away.”
Carson hesitated, but the craving for any relief won. He tipped it back.
The first swallow hit like acid, his stomach turning violently as blazing heat exploded through his veins. He doubled over, retching, fire racing along every nerve. Visions assaulted him of sun-mad elders clawing at their own flesh, screaming promises of peace as they walked into the dawn. Then he saw dozens of failed turns reduced to ferals, mindless and ravening. He watched camps fracture into pieces where sires turned on dams in fits of jealousy and hunger. The full horror of vampire existence laid bare—endless predation masked as survival, “no needless kills” a fragile lie that stretched thin over centuries of necessary ones.
Gina watched with sorrowful eyes. “Mathias would have let it destroy you slowly. This is mercy.”
Carson collapsed, convulsing, blood foaming at his lips as the tainted essence waged war inside him. Blazing heat scorched his throat, acidic bile rising in waves that smeared vision and mind.
***
Mathias
Mathias felt the bond scream in agony. He burst into the chamber in a blur of fury, finding Carson writhing on the floor. “Gina! What have you done?”
She stepped back, voice cracking with twisted love. “Saving you from yourself, brother. The sun harvests you faster because of him. I offered the cure—”
Mathias’ roar cracked the warehouse air. He hit Gina hard enough that she spun into a stack of crates, and then he was on his knees with Carson’s weight already in his arms. Carson’s skin burned. His mouth was wet with blood that smelled wrong—acid, rot under iron, not the clean copper Mathias knew.
A whelp drifted too close, drawn by the noise. Mathias’ lips peeled off his fangs before he chose it. The young one flinched back. In the far corner, a chain rang: an elder, sun-mad, rocking, whispering, “Come, come, she is warm, she is waiting,” in a voice that scraped along Mathias’ own Call until he had to shut it out or step towards the light with him.
No one moved to help. That was the tell. Two of the older ones watched from the rail with their arms folded. A pair of whelps had their heads tilted towards the door, scenting chaos like a gap in a fence. Under the blood and the poison, Mathias caught a thread that did not belong to this roof—rival, brief, already gone. He had been deaf to that. He was not deaf now.
He tore his own wrist with his teeth. Untainted. He put it to Carson’s mouth.
Carson gagged, tried to turn away, the terrifying memory of Gina’s “cure” teasing its way through the bond. He then locked on and drank like a drowning man. Mathias shoved the link open—no words, only the feel of his own cool blood pushing the burn back vein by vein. Carson arched until his spine left Mathias’ arm. Heat poured off him, and then he broke into shudders. The bond slammed back into place, tight enough to hurt, a wire pulled through a wound that had not closed.
Mathias stood with him and walked. He did not look at Gina. He did not look at the chained elder. Cool night air hit Carson’s face, and the trembling eased a fraction, though not enough.
In the apartment, Mathias laid him on the bed. Carson’s skin had gone gray-pale. Every few breaths, a muscle jumped, as if the acid was still looking for a way out. Mathias knelt, smoothed sweat from Carson’s hair with fingers that had been claws ten minutes ago.
Carson’s eyes opened. They found Mathias and did not soften.
Mathias left his hand where it was anyway and felt the space between them like a dropped glass no one was going to sweep up tonight.
“You let her get close enough to do this,” Carson rasped, voice raw. “All your warnings, your vows—and then she nearly killed me with your camp’s own poison. I saw everything, Mathias. The madness. The fractures. The things you hide.”
Mathias’ head bowed, quiet voice thick with pain. “I never wanted you to see the full horror. The sun-mad elders we restrain, the fractures that threaten to tear us apart. I thought I could protect you from it.”
Carson turned away.
The bond still sang—want, the high, that forward lean Mathias could feel in his own teeth. Carson’s shoulders told the other story. They invited only a new distance. A line drawn through the gold where trust had been.
Mathias did not reach. Reaching would have been another claim, and he had already put too many on this man tonight, from the rescue, the clean wrist, and the warehouse horrors Carson should never have had to swallow with tainted blood.
