Pregnant for the Ruthless Billionaire Vampire

CHAPTER 8

ELENA'S POV

"Tell me what to do," I said. "Right now. Tell me everything."

Seraphine didn't stop her compressions. "The ritual requires your blood as the base catalyst. But not just drops this time. You need to push your power through it consciously. Direct it into her heart and force it to restart."

"I don't know how to do that."

"You killed two vampires three hours ago without training."

"That was instinct. That was anger…."

"Then find something to be angry about," Seraphine snapped. "Because she has forty seconds."

I grabbed the silver dagger from my hip and sliced across my palm.

The blood rose immediately, and this time I felt it differently. Not just warmth. Something alive.

Something that recognized the blade and the intention behind it and responded like it had been waiting to be called.

"Now what?" I demanded.

"Put your bleeding hand over her heart. Don't touch her chest. Hold it above. And push. Like you're forcing something through a locked door."

I pressed my bleeding palm over Viviana's sternum, close but not touching, and I pushed.

Nothing happened.

"Elena…."

"I'm trying…."

"Don't try. Do it. Feel her heart. Find where it stopped and push."

I closed my eyes.

I stopped thinking about the ritual and the blood and Seraphine's voice counting seconds behind me. I stopped thinking about Lucian on the mountain road getting closer with every breath I wasted. I stopped thinking about everything except the stillness beneath my hand.

And I found it.

Not a heartbeat. The absence of one. A silence where something vital should have been, like a room with all the furniture suddenly gone. Wrong and hollow and impossible to ignore once I'd located it.

I pushed.

My blood lifted from the cut on my palm without me consciously directing it. Three drops, then five, hovering in the air between my hand and Viviana's chest, glowing gold the same way they had during training. But brighter this time. Much brighter.

"Good," Seraphine said sharply. "Keep going. Don't stop."

The drops lowered toward Viviana's skin slowly, like they knew exactly where they needed to go. Where they touched her chest they didn't sit on the surface.

They were absorbed. Disappeared into her skin and kept moving, deeper, following some path I could feel but not see.

I tracked them with my mind the way Seraphine had taught me.

Down through skin. Through muscle. Through the dark adapted poison still clinging to her veins like rust on iron.

And then I felt it.

Her heart. Cold and still and silent as a stopped clock.

I pushed everything I had into that single point.

The gold light blazed.

Viviana's body arched off the table.

"Hold it!" Seraphine grabbed her shoulders. "Don't pull back, Elena, hold it…."

I held it.

The light pulsed once. Twice. A third time, stronger than the last.

Then Viviana's heart lurched.

One beat. Ragged and uncertain, like something that had forgotten the rhythm.

Then another.

Then another, stronger, steadier, finding its way back like a runner finding their stride after a long fall.

The flat monitor tone broke into a rapid unsteady beep.

Then steadied into something that sounded like survival.

I pulled my hand back and nearly went down.

Seraphine caught me by the arm before my knees hit the floor. "Stay up. Stay with me."

"Is she…."

"Alive." Seraphine pressed her fingers to Viviana's throat and exhaled for what sounded like the first time in minutes. "Pulse is weak but it's consistent. You did it."

I looked at my palm. The cut was already closing, sealing itself the way I still wasn't entirely used to.

The gold light faded from my fingers and the room felt dimmer without it.

"I felt her heart stop," I said. "I felt exactly where it stopped and I pushed into it and it started again."

"Nightshade healing runs deeper than any vampire ability," Seraphine said, guiding me into the chair.

"You don't just repair damage. You restore what was. You reach into something broken and remind it what it was before the breaking." She pressed a bottle of water into my hands. "Drink. You just used more power in three minutes than most awakened vampires use in a week."

I drank without arguing.

My hand was shaking around the bottle. Not from fear. From something I didn't have a name for yet.

Something that felt like standing at the edge of a very high place and realizing the height didn't frighten you anymore.

"I didn't know I could do that," I said.

"You knew you could destroy," Seraphine said. "Now you know the other side of it." She moved back to Viviana and checked her pulse again, her touch precise and practiced. "Both are weapons.

Destruction is obvious. Everyone fears it. But the ability to restore what someone believed was permanently gone?" She looked at me over her shoulder. "That's what makes people trust you. That's what makes people follow you into something they'd never survive alone."

I set the water bottle down and stood.

My legs held. Barely, but they held.

Something shifted in the air as I stood. Thin and warm and faintly gold, like a filament of the same light that had just moved through my blood. It ran from somewhere in my chest across the room and ended at Viviana, subtle enough that I'd have missed it entirely an hour ago.

"Seraphine."

"I feel it," she said without turning. "The healing ritual creates a connection. Minor. It won't control either of you or manufacture any emotion that isn't already there. But you'll be aware of each other now in a way you weren't before." She paused. "You'll know if she's in danger. She'll know the same about you."

"That's going to complicate things."

"Most true things do."

Outside the engine sound was louder.

Closer.

I crossed to the window and looked out at the darkness between the trees. Nothing visible yet but the suggestion of headlights sweeping through the pines in slow arcs, moving upward along the mountain road with steady, deliberate purpose.

Ten minutes. Maybe less.

"When he gets here," I said, "I want to be the one who opens the door."

Seraphine looked at me. "Elena…."

"I need to face him standing up. Not waiting in a back room while someone else decides how that conversation starts." I turned from the window. "He threw me out. He called me nothing in front of the entire council and then turned his back. He's going to look me in the eye and I'm going to be on my feet when he does it."

Seraphine studied me for a long moment.

"Stand your ground," she said. "Don't close the distance. Let him come to you."

"I know."

"And Elena." She waited until I looked at her fully.

"Whatever he says when he walks in. Whatever explanation he gives or feeling he claims or truth he brings with him. You are allowed to make him earn it.

The bond existing doesn't mean he deserves you.

You don't owe him your understanding because fate decided you were matched." Her gold eyes were steady and serious. "You don't owe him anything."

"I know that too."

A sound from the bed.

Soft. A sharp intake of breath pulled from somewhere deep.

Then another, uneven, like someone surfacing through cold water. Then Viviana's fingers moved against the blanket. Her hand. Her head turned slowly to one side and her face pulled together with effort, brow furrowed, lips pressed, fighting her way up through whatever the ritual had left in its wake.

Her eyes opened.

Ruby red and unfocused, moving across the ceiling without landing. Then they found Seraphine. Then they traveled across the room and found me.

Something moved across her face that I'd never seen there before. Something that had nothing to do with performance or strategy or the armor she wore like a second skin.

She looked at me like I was something she hadn't expected to still be there.

"You stayed," she said. Her voice came out rough and stripped down to nothing extra.

"You're not easy to let die," I said.

She held my gaze for a moment. "I felt it. What you did." She pressed one hand slowly to her own sternum, over the place where my blood had gone in.

"I felt you reach for me and push. I felt the exact moment you found my heart." A pause. "You didn't have to do that."

"No," I said. "I didn't."

She was quiet with that for a moment. Seraphine handed her water and she took it with both hands, gripping the bottle like she needed the anchor, drinking slowly and carefully while her color came back in gradual increments.

"How long?" she asked.

"Long enough," Seraphine said.

Viviana lowered the bottle and looked at the window.

At the headlights moving through the trees outside.

Something sharpened in her expression as her strength returned, the familiar edges coming back, but slower this time, less automatic.

"He's close," she said.

"Yes."

"Are you ready for that?"

"Are you going to tell me I'm not?"

The ghost of something crossed her face. Not quite a smile. "No. I don't think I am." She set the water bottle down carefully on the nightstand and pushed herself upright against the pillows, taking her time, testing each movement before committing to it. Her hands were steadier than they had any right to be.

"Before he walks through that door. There's something you need to know."

I crossed the room and stood at the foot of the bed.

"Tell me."

"I had time in the delirium. Fragments at first, things that didn't connect. But lying there I kept coming back to the same night. The same conversation." She looked at her hands for a moment. "I'd been refusing to put it together because putting it together meant accepting something I'd been choosing not to see."

"What conversation?"

"Three weeks before the ritual." Viviana's eyes came back up to mine. "Morgana didn't come to me first.

She went to someone else. Someone who had access to Lucian that even she didn't have. Someone who could position things, shift timing, make sure you were the one chosen for the ritual that night instead of one of the other servants."

The room was very quiet.

"I heard them talking," Viviana said. "I didn't understand it then. I thought it was just council politics. But now, knowing what the ritual did, knowing what you are, knowing what they were trying to prevent…." She stopped. "It wasn't random that you were chosen for the Blood Moon Ritual, Elena.

Someone made sure it was you. Someone who knew exactly what your blood would do to Lucian.

Someone who wanted the bond triggered."

Outside the engine cut off.

A car door opened and closed.

Footsteps on gravel. Slow. Deliberate. Moving toward the cabin.

Viviana's eyes stayed locked on mine and didn't move.

"I know who ordered my death," she said. "And you'll never believe who it is.”