The vampire in the corner office

what he is

He told her everything, because there was no version of the conversation where he could tell her nothing anymore.

"I'm a vampire," Adrian said, standing at the window, back to her, like he couldn't watch her reaction. "I've been one for a very long time. Longer than you'd believe."

Mia sat very still on his office sofa, the necklace — her necklace, somehow, impossibly, also Elena's necklace — clutched in her fist.

"Okay," she said finally.

He turned, startled. "Okay?"

"I mean — it explains a lot. The list. I have a list, actually, it's on my phone, it's embarrassing—"

"Mia." Her name, from him, for the first time. It landed somewhere in her chest and stayed there. "Aren't you afraid?"

She thought about it honestly, the way she thought about everything, weighing it like a bill she couldn't quite afford.

"A little," she admitted. "But I've spent three weeks slowly falling for a man who cries when it storms and flinches every time I get a paper cut. I don't think 'vampire' is the scariest thing about you, Adrian. I think it's just the most obvious."

Something in him broke, quietly, the way ice breaks under sun instead of pressure.

He told her the rest, sitting across from her now instead of hiding behind glass: that he'd lived over two centuries, that Elena had been his wife for six of them, human but aware of what he was, and that four years ago she'd died in what everyone called a car accident on a rain-slicked road.

"I never believed it was an accident," he said. "She was investigating something at the company before she died — something in the finances that didn't add up. She told me she'd found proof. Two days later, she was dead."

"And the necklace?"

"I gave it to her the year we married. After she died, I searched for it everywhere. It was gone. I assumed it had been lost in the crash." He looked at Mia now, at the pendant in her hand, and something raw crossed his face. "Where did your mother get hers, Mia?"

Mia's mouth went dry.

"I don't know," she whispered. "She never told me. She died before I could ask."