TAMING THE HEARTLESS VAMPIRE (ENGLISH)

Chapter 8

After the dinner, Damien came to collect me. He moved through the palace with the practiced calm of someone who had been navigating its corridors for a very long time, and I followed him in silence, trying to absorb the scale of the place—the width of the hallways, the height of the ceilings, the way every surface communicated age and authority.

We passed through the main hall and out into the rear garden.

It stopped me entirely.

The space was extraordinary. Lantern light strung through ancient trees created a canopy of soft, scattered gold against the dark sky. At the center, a small stone fountain moved with water that seemed to carry its own luminescence in the moonlight. Night-blooming jasmine released its scent in slow, thick waves, filling the humid air with something almost narcotic. A stone patio along the garden's far edge was draped in climbing vines, and seated there, framed by the darkness as though the garden had been designed with him as its centerpiece, was Vale.

He was in the carved wooden chair with the casual authority of someone who has never once in his existence been uncertain of his place. His gaze was lifted toward the sky—toward stars obscured by low cloud cover—with the expression of someone replaying a memory too old to have been photographed.

"Master Vale," Damien said, and bowed with the precision of long practice.

Vale acknowledged it with a slight inclination of his head. Damien withdrew into the dark without sound, leaving us alone inside the weight of the garden's quiet.

I made myself walk forward. I sat in the chair across from him, leaving a deliberate distance between us, and folded my hands in my lap.

"I'm ready to listen," I said.

He looked at me for a long moment—not unkindly, exactly, but with the thoroughness of someone examining a piece of equipment for structural weaknesses. Then he nodded.

"I'll start with the first rule," he said, "and I won't repeat any of them."

His English was formal. Precise. The kind of accent produced not by any one country but by centuries of moving between languages.

"You address me as Master Vale. Not by name. My name is not a privilege you've earned."

He stood then, and moved with his hands clasped at his back—slow, measured pacing that covered the patio like a general surveying a map.

"Your primary duty is obedience. My word governs you. Not as suggestion, not as preference. As law."

He stopped in front of me. Towering was the right word for it.

"If I am threatened, you place yourself between the threat and me. If the sun rises and I cannot find shelter, you find it for me. If I am hungry and you are the nearest source of blood, you offer it without negotiation."

"If you're so powerful," I said, because I couldn't entirely help it, "why would you need a shield at all?"

"Second rule." His voice went perfectly flat. "You don't interrupt me while I'm speaking."

I pressed my lips together. "Sorry."

"You do not leave this palace without my explicit permission. You do not initiate contact with strangers. You do not involve yourself in family matters that are not your concern. I own your time, and I own your choices. Autonomy is something you have not earned and may not assume."

The fountain continued its quiet movement behind us. Somewhere in the garden, something small moved through the undergrowth.

"If you disobey—if you act in any way that threatens my family or compromises our security—you already know what leverage I hold." He paused, meeting my eyes. "Your brother lives because I allow it. That arrangement is conditional on your behavior. Do you understand that?"

I had to swallow twice. "Yes. I understand."

He waited. The pause stretched, precise and intentional.

"Master Vale," I added.

Something at the corner of his mouth moved—not quite a smile, but the shadow of one. The smile of a man who has gotten exactly what he wanted and feels no particular joy about it.

"Good. You learn quickly."

He turned to leave. Then stopped, one hand resting on the edge of the stone railing, his back still to me.

"There is one more thing."

The quality of his silence changed. It became something heavier.

"As my thrall, your obligations are not limited to loyalty and obedience." He turned his head, enough that I could see his profile against the garden light. "Whenever I am hungry, your blood is mine. Whenever I choose it—your body as well."

He didn't wait for my response. He walked back through the garden and into the palace, and the darkness swallowed him completely.

I sat in the chair for a long time after he was gone, staring at the fountain.

His blood. His body. His choices. His law.

I made a decision, quietly and without ceremony, sitting alone in the most beautiful garden I had ever seen.

I would survive this. I would learn every inch of his world, every rule of his kingdom, every crack in its foundation.

And then—when the moment was right—I would find my own way out.

✦ ✦ ✦

I didn't sleep. When morning came, I found Damien in the main corridor.

"I need to go home," I told him. "I need to see my brother."

"You're not able to return to your previous life, Lady Aria," he said. His pity was genuine and entirely useless. "The transition has changed your scent. You're Nightborn now, in every way that matters to the senses of a blood-sensitive creature. Anyone close to you is at risk until your hunger stabilizes."

"I know I'm changed." My voice cracked with the effort of staying controlled. "But I can't just disappear. He has no one else. Our parents are gone. He'll think I'm dead or that I abandoned him."

Damien folded his hands. "You need Master Vale's permission to cross the gate. And he's currently—"

"Where is he?"

"Somewhere you're not permitted to go."

"Then I'll find him myself."

I pushed past him and walked toward the front of the palace. The iron gate at the end of the drive loomed large and final. I pushed on it. It didn't move.

But before I could figure out an alternative, the hinges groaned and it swung inward. A black car rolled up the drive and stopped in front of me, dust rising around the tires.

The driver's door opened.

Vale stepped out. He looked at me standing in the gateway and his expression went from composed to irritated in the time it took me to blink.

"Where do you think you're going?"

"Home," I said. "I need to see Adrian."

He came around the car door and studied me with that cold, evaluative gaze. "You've been here less than twenty-four hours and you're already attempting to leave. That's almost impressive."

"Please." The word cost me something. "I'm not asking for my freedom. I just need to tell him I'm all right. I need to say goodbye properly so he doesn't spend his life not knowing what happened."

His expression didn't shift. "And what do I gain from granting you this?"

I didn't hesitate. "Everything you want. Complete compliance. No more arguments, no more defiance. I will be exactly what you need me to be. I promise."

Something moved behind his eyes. A flicker of something calculating and unreadable. "Promises made in desperation tend to be painful to honor."

"I know," I said. "I'll honor it anyway."

The silence between us lasted exactly long enough to make me want to fill it.

Then he turned and walked back to the driver's side. "Get in."

"What?"

"I said get in. I'm not letting you do something irreparably foolish without supervision. And I'm not your driver—sit in the front."

I scrambled to the passenger side.

He drove the way he moved—with a total, unapologetic disregard for the ordinary limitations imposed on everyone else. The city came up faster than it should have, the expressway flowing around us like water around a stone. Neither of us spoke.

We pulled up in front of the house I had grown up in. It looked very small.

I was out of the car before he turned off the engine.

"Adrian!"

He was on the sofa. Still in yesterday's clothes, hair wild, eyes going wide when he saw me.

"Ate—where were you? I called, it kept going to voicemail—"

I crossed the room and held him as tightly as I could, and for a moment I just let myself exist in the simple fact of his being okay.

"I'm sorry," I said into his shoulder. "I'm so sorry."

"You left a note about the hospital but you weren't there. I checked."

"I know. Something came up. I can't explain it right now."

He pulled back and looked at my face, and whatever he saw there—the pallor, the changed eyes, some quality of wrongness he couldn't name—deepened the worry on his face considerably. "What's going on with you? You look different."

"Adrian." I held both his hands. "I have to tell you something. I'm leaving."

"Leaving where?"

"Away. For a long time. I got a job—a private company, overseas placement." The lies came out hating themselves. "It pays well. It'll cover your tuition, your living costs, everything you need."

His face went through several things quickly. Then it settled on the one I had been dreading.

"No," he said quietly. "No, Ate. I'll get a part-time job. I don't care. Don't leave. Not right now."

"This is for you—"

"I don't want to be alone." His voice was flat and completely honest, stripped of performance. "Mom and Dad are gone. If you leave too, I don't have anyone."

My chest felt like it was full of broken things.

I pressed his face in my hands. "I'll send money. Every week, without fail. And I'll come back. I promise."

I went upstairs, packed a bag with mechanical efficiency—clothes, my ATM card, the cash I had set aside—and came back down.

Adrian was standing at the far end of the sofa.

Vale was sitting at the other end, one ankle crossed over his knee, looking exactly as comfortable as he would have been in his own palace.

"Who are you?" Adrian said, voice tight and controlled. "Why are you in our house?"

"I'm her employer," Vale said, not looking up from his watch. "She's late."

"Ate, who is this?"

"It's fine," I said quickly. "He's—he's my boss. He wanted to make sure I actually got my things." I looked at Vale and communicated with my eyes exactly what I thought of his decision to come inside. He received the message with complete indifference.

"He looks dangerous," Adrian said under his breath.

"He's fine," I said, in the tone of someone who did not believe this at all but needed to believe it for the next five minutes. I crossed to Adrian and pressed the money and the ATM into his hands. "Study. Eat properly. Text me every day."

"Ate—"

I hugged him one last time. I held it as long as I could. Then I turned and walked out the door and did not look back, because I knew that if I did, I would not be able to make my legs keep moving.

I got into the car. Vale followed without a word and started the engine.

We drove in silence for several minutes. Then I noticed we weren't heading back toward the forest road, back toward the palace.

"Where are we going?"

Vale didn't answer immediately. He took a turn that climbed steeply, carrying us up into a hillier part of the city's outskirts, then deeper into tree cover that thickened and darkened as the road narrowed.

Then a building appeared in a clearing, lit by violet and neon-red lights that spilled through the trees like something from a fever dream. It was modern and low and sleek, built to look like a high-end lounge, but it vibrated with something I couldn't classify. Something old pretending to be new.

In large, luminous cursive script above the entrance, the name glowed:

Vee's Restobar.

I turned to Vale. "What is this?"

He turned off the engine and looked through the windshield at the glowing sign.

"This," he said, "is where your kind actually spends their nights." He pushed open his door. "Come. There are things you need to understand about the world you've entered."

He walked toward the entrance without waiting.

I sat for a moment in the dark of the car, the neon light painting the dashboard in shifting violet. Somewhere inside that building, the next chapter of whatever my life had become was already beginning, whether I was ready for it or not.

I pushed open the door and followed him inside.