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No footsteps. No door. I can’t hear him at all. I can hear the lamp humming on the desk and my own pulse in my ears, and that’s it. He’s somewhere in the suite, and he’s not breathing, and he doesn’t make a sound when he walks. I didn’t think about that part.

I edge to the end of the bookcase and look out.

The doorway is empty.

Then cool air moves against the back of my neck, and his voice says, right by my ear, “You’re breathing very loudly.”

I shriek. I can’t help it. I spin, and he isn’t there. He’s six feet away, by the ladder, leaning on it with one hand like he’s been there all evening, and I didn’t see him move. I didn’t see anything. One second he was behind me, and the next he wasn’t.

“Holy shit,” I say.

“You keep saying that.”

I run.

I go around the far side of the bookcase and out through the second door I didn’t know the library had, back into the hall, and I’m laughing, high and breathless, because I’ve never been so scared and so turned on at the same time in my whole life. I make it halfway down the hall. Then he’s in front of me.

He doesn’t block me. He just stands there, in the middle of the hall, in his shirtsleeves, and for the first time, I see it.

He’s not standing like a businessman. He looks ready to chase me no matter which way I might run. His weight is forward, loose and balanced, like an animal that could go in any direction faster than I could follow it. His head is tipped very slightly to one side. His fangs are down, fully down, white in the dim light, and his eyes have gone almost black, and he’s watching me the way I’ve seen a cat watch a moth against a window. Patient. Completely focused. Delighted.

I stop. Every instinct I have tells me to turn around and run the other way, and some much older instinct tells me I wouldn’t make three steps.

And I’m not afraid of him. That’s what surprises me. My heart is slamming and every hair on my arms is standing up, and I’m not afraid of him at all.

He doesn’t move. He’s waiting for me to decide.

I back up one step. Then another. He comes forward exactly as many steps as I go back, no more, matching me, until my shoulders touch the wall beside the library door and there’s nowhere else to go.

He puts one hand flat on the wall beside my head. Not touching me. Just there.

“Caught,” he says.

I’m shaking. I look at his face, at the fangs and the black eyes and the very faint smile, and I could say red. I know I could. He’d be across the room before I finished the word.

I grab his shirt in both fists and pull him down to me instead.

He kisses me like he’s starving.

It’s nothing like the kitchen and nothing like downstairs. There’s no patience in it at all. His hand comes off the wall and into my hair, and his other arm goes around my waist and lifts me straight off the floor, pinning me between the wall and his body, and I wrap my legs around his waist because there’s nowhere else for them to go. He’s cool everywhere. I’m burning everywhere. His fangs graze my lip, and I don’t care. I bite him back.

When he finally pulls his mouth away, it’s only to put it on my throat. His lips are open against my pulse, and I can feel his fangs there, right there, the points of them resting on my skin and not pressing, and I can feel him shaking. Lenart, who doesn’t lose two seconds. He’s shaking.

“Tara.” His voice is ragged. “You have to tell me what you want.”

“What happens if you bite me?”

He goes absolutely still against me.

“It hurts,” he says, after a long moment, “for a second. Then it doesn’t. I take very little. You’ll feel it afterward, a little lightheaded, like you stood up too fast. I’ll close it when I’m done, and you’ll have two marks for a few days, and then they’ll fade.” He breathes out against my neck. “Your thoughts stay private. And afterward, you’ll have the same choices you have now. You can leave me, tell me to keep my distance, whatever you want next.”

“Then what does it mean?”

He’s quiet for so long I think he isn’t going to answer.

“For me,” he says finally, very low, “it means I’m trusted. I haven’t fed from anyone I loved in more than a hundred years. I stopped thinking I would.”

Loved. He said loved. I don’t think he meant to.