A TASTE OF HEAVEN

FIRST BITE

The woman in gray rose from the table, stopped behind Elaine, bent low, and whispered, "He wants you."

The drunk woman lifted her head. Something moved behind her wine-dulled eyes, and Elaine understood it a moment before she could name it.

Envy.

Elaine rose. She let her hands find the small, nervous gestures again, let her steps grow careful and unsure, and followed the woman in gray out of the dining hall and back toward the stairs she had climbed once already that night.

The study doors stood open this time.

That was the only thing that had changed.

He stood at the tall window with his back to her, a glass in his hand that he wasn't drinking from. The fire had burned low. The books watched from their shelves. It was the same room it had been two hours earlier, and it was not the same room at all. Now she knew what he did to the women who lived beneath his roof, and the dagger against her thigh felt less like a secret and more like a promise.

He turned, crossed to the pair of chairs by the dying fire, and folded himself into one with the unhurried grace of a man who had never once in his life needed to be anywhere. He gestured to the other chair.

She didn't take it.

He didn't seem to mind.

"You didn't eat," he said.

So he had been watching the table he refused to sit at.

"No."

"The food didn't please you?"

"The food was meat." She let a little of the truth through because a little truth made the rest easier to sell. "All of it. Nothing that grew. Nothing green."

Her stomach turned again at the memory of the platters, that old, deep recoil she still couldn't fully explain to herself.

"If I'm to live here, I'd like fruit. Vegetables. Something that came out of the ground instead of off a bone."

She expected him to laugh at her or ignore her. A woman who belonged to him did not make requests.

Instead, he studied her for a long moment, his head tilted, as though she were a word in a language he had once known well but hadn't heard spoken in a very long time.

"You'll have them," he said.

It was such a small thing.

She hated how much it unsettled her.

"Come here," he said.

The words were soft. They were not a request.

She felt the pull of the contract she had signed in her false name, the whole architecture of belonging she had built to get herself into this room, and she crossed to him because crossing to him was the plan.

He did not stand. He reached up, took a strand of her hair between two cold fingers, and drew it back from the side of her neck, slow and almost tender, baring her throat to the low light.

She held still.

This was the moment.

This was what she had come for, close enough to touch him, close enough to end him. All she had to do was wait for the opening and take it.

Then she felt his breath against her skin, cold where a living man's would have been warm, and the sharp press of something at her throat.

Her body moved before she could stop it.

She shoved him.

Not the flinch of a frightened girl. A hard, trained, two-handed shove that put space between them, that came from somewhere older than the body she was wearing. Something she had not decided to use.

He went back half a step. Only half.

But he went back, and she saw surprise cross his face, bare and genuine, the first honest thing she had seen from him all night.

Fool, she told herself.

Her heart was slamming now for real. She had spent three weeks becoming a woman who could not do what she had just done, and she had undone it in a single breath.

She was surprised, too. Not that she had strength, but that she had this much of it still, wearing skin and bone and a mortal heart.

A shadow of what she had been.

A candle where there had once been a fire.

But not nothing.

He recovered before she did. The surprise smoothed away, but it left something behind it, something worse than anger, something that leaned toward her instead of away. Curiosity.

She had wanted to be forgettable, and she had just made herself the most interesting thing in his three hundred years.

"There it is," he murmured, almost to himself.

He did not ask what she was. He did not need to. He simply reached out again, and this time his hand closed around the back of her neck. There was no shoving him now because he was no longer careless. He held her the way a man held something he had decided to keep.

"Be still," he said.

Then his mouth was at her throat, and the sharpness became a bright, sudden line of pain. The pain became something else.

She had braced for horror. She had rehearsed the horror. What she had not rehearsed was the warmth that spread from the place his mouth met her skin, slow and gold and terrible, loosening her knees, quieting the scream she had readied.

It felt like being drawn toward sleep. God help her, it felt good. The goodness was worse than any pain could have been, because pain she could have hated cleanly. She hated herself for the small sound that tried to climb her throat.

She did not lean in. She stood rigid and let him take what he took and swore to herself it meant nothing, that the body was only a body, that she was still the thing that had walked up this mountain to end him.

When he drew back, his breathing had changed.

His crimson eyes had gone wide and dark. Blood stained his lower lip, and he made no move to wipe it away. For a moment he could not seem to speak at all.

When he did, his voice had lost its smooth, cold edge entirely.

"Three hundred years," he said quietly. "I have fed on kings. On saints. On things that called themselves gods before I proved them wrong."

He looked at her as though she had rearranged the furniture of the world.

"I have never tasted anything like you."

It should have pleased her. It was, in its way, a victory, proof she was exactly as singular as she had gambled on being but it didn't. It frightened her more than the fangs had, because a man did not let go of the best thing he had tasted in three centuries. She had come here needing him to let his guard down, not to want her closer than his own skin.

He seemed to feel it too, the danger of it, the way the ground had shifted beneath them both.

He drew back farther.

He put the arm of the chair between them like a man setting down something he did not trust himself to hold.

"Go," he said. "The woman in gray will take you back."

She turned toward the door, her pulse loud, her throat aching, the warmth already curdling into shame inside her.

"Elaine."

She stopped, but she didn't look back.

"I'll call for you again soon."

It was not a kindness. It was not a threat. It was simply true, the way the lock on her door was.

She let the woman in gray lead her back down the corridor she had counted. She did not touch the mark on her throat. She did not let herself think about how much of her wanted him to keep his word.