TAMING THE HEARTLESS VAMPIRE (ENGLISH)

Chapter 5

I did not go to the bridge.

After everything—the hospital, the frozen lobby, the note in my palm—there was no version of me that was willing to walk obediently to a meeting summoned by a creature who thought he owned me. I wasn't his dog. I wasn't a puppet whose strings he could jerk at will.

I stayed in my room the entire evening, sitting on the edge of the bed with my arms wrapped around myself. The air felt stagnant, heavy with something I couldn't name. I told myself that if I simply didn't acknowledge it—if I refused to play along, refused to be afraid—then maybe the whole thing would dissolve. Maybe I'd wake up tomorrow and find that the cancer was still there and all of this had been a fever dream born from medications and fear.

But deep down, I knew.

Every time I inhaled, I could smell the dust on the floorboards. The neighbors' cooking from three houses down. The faint metallic trace of something in my own changed blood.

Hours passed. The clock on my wall ticked like a countdown to the inevitable. From the next room came the soft, even sound of Adrian's breathing in sleep.

Then the curtain moved.

I went rigid. There was no breeze. The night air was dead still. Yet the fabric shifted, and with it came a plunging of temperature—an invasive cold that had no meteorological source.

The voice came from inside me.

"You're stubborn, Aria."

I gripped the blanket until my knuckles whitened. The name in my mind formed unbidden.

Vale.

I couldn't see him anywhere in the room. The lamp cast its small circle of warm light. Everything outside that circle was shadow. But he was there. I could feel him the way you feel a thunderstorm before it arrives—a pressure in the atmosphere, a low charge in the air.

I forced myself to be steady. I didn't want him to see me shaking.

"I'm not going," I said to the darkness. "I never asked for this life. I never asked to be what you've turned me into. If you want a slave, find someone else."

A low, melodic laugh echoed through the room—beautiful and bladed at once. The sound of a man who found a great deal of entertainment in watching something smaller struggle.

"But you have no choice, my dear." His voice was patient. Almost gentle. "You already died, Aria. Your human life ended on the pavement at the base of that bridge. Your only purpose now—your only duty—is to be my thrall."

"And if I refuse? If I starve myself until there's nothing left?"

The amusement drained out of his voice like water from a bowl. "What about your brother?"

The name hit me like a fist.

"How will you protect him?" His voice turned to something low and sleek and dangerous. "Every moment you deny the hunger, you become less yourself and more the thing it makes you. Do you really believe your love is stronger than the thirst I gave you?"

My chest seized. I thought of Adrian sleeping peacefully ten feet away, completely unaware his sister was turning into something out of a nightmare.

Then Vale said something that froze my blood completely.

"Or perhaps I should simply handle the distraction now. It would make you so much more obedient."

"No!"

The word tore from my throat before I could think. I was on my feet and out of the room in seconds, taking the stairs too fast, nearly stumbling.

"Adrian! Wake up!"

"Aria?"

He was on the sofa, still in his clothes from earlier, the TV casting blue light across his face. He was blinking awake, confused.

Relief hit me so hard my legs nearly gave out. I crossed the room and grabbed him in both arms, holding him so tight he made a muffled noise of protest.

"Hey, you okay? What's going on—are you crying?"

"I just—I needed to know you were here." I scanned his face, his neck, his hands. Nothing. He was fine. He was whole. "Are you hurting anywhere?"

"I'm fine, I was literally asleep. Why are you acting like this? Did you see a cockroach upstairs?"

I nearly laughed. I was also nearly in tears. Both at the same time.

Then it happened.

I smelled him.

Not in a human way—not the familiar scent of his shampoo or the laundry detergent on his shirt. Something deeper. Something that bypassed every conscious thought and reached straight for the darkest, most animal part of whatever I was becoming.

I could hear his heartbeat.

Clear, fast, and warm. Thump-thump. Thump-thump. The sound of blood moving through a body that was alive and full of it. The pulse in his neck was visible—a faint blue rhythm beneath pale skin.

And it smelled like life itself.

The thirst detonated in the back of my throat. My gums ached. A strange, horrifying awareness spread through my mouth as my canines began to change—lengthening, sharpening, pressing out against my lips.

I released him and shoved myself backward so hard I hit the wall.

"Aria? Hey—what's wrong?"

"Stay there," I said, my voice cracking. "Don't come near me. I mean it."

I ran for the bathroom, locked the door with hands that wouldn't stop trembling, and faced the mirror.

My breath stopped.

My canines were fully elongated—white, curved, and precise. And my eyes—the ordinary, unremarkable brown eyes I'd had all my life—were changing. A ring of molten gold was spreading from the center of each iris outward, slow and unstoppable, like ink dropped into still water.

Exactly like Vale's.

I slid down to the bathroom floor and buried my face in my hands, pressing both palms over my mouth to muffle the sound of my own sobbing.

What am I becoming? What has he done to me?

"Aria?" Adrian's knuckles rapped softly against the door. "You okay in there? You've been weird all day. Are you sick again?"

I pressed my back against the cold tile, forcing my breathing into something resembling calm. "I'm fine. Cramps. Really bad. I'll be out in a minute."

"Oh." A pause. "Do you want me to run to the convenience store and grab you something?"

A laugh escaped me through the tears—sharp and painful and wholly involuntary. He had been buying me supplies for that particular ailment since he was twelve years old, without an ounce of self-consciousness, because their mother had taught him that being helpful meant being helpful.

"Do you still have money?" I managed.

"Yeah."

"Then go."

"On it."

I heard the front door open and click shut. The moment he was gone, I pressed my forehead against the cold tile and made a decision.

I could not stay here. I was a lit fuse, and Adrian was the powder. I had no way of knowing how long I could hold on before something terrible happened.

I left a note on the kitchen counter, scribbling something about a hospital emergency, and walked out into the night.

I moved differently now. I noticed it the moment I hit the sidewalk—the ground felt like it was responding to me rather than resisting me. I covered a block in the time it should have taken to cover half of one. The world around me slowed down, the traffic blurring, the pedestrians drifting past like they were caught in water.

I stopped at the end of a cross street, staring at my own hands. So it's real. This is what I'm becoming.

The bridge materialized ahead of me before I had consciously decided to go to it.

But Vale wasn't there. Instead, a tall, broad-shouldered man in a grey suit stood leaning against the gleaming hood of a black car parked at the far end. He straightened as I approached, and offered a precise, formal nod.

"My name is Damien," he said, his voice deep and steady. "Master Vale is expecting you, Ms. Sinclair."

He opened the rear door of the car.

"Where is he?" I asked, scanning the bridge. "He said to meet here."

"He waited for several hours. When you didn't arrive, he lost his patience. He asked me to bring you directly to Nightborn Palace."

"Nightborn Palace." I turned the phrase over. "Is that an actual place? Like a building?"

Something shifted in Damien's expression—not quite a smile, but close. "The world you see is only a veil, Ms. Sinclair. Master Vale lives in the truth behind it."

I looked at the open door. Then I looked back at the quiet street, at the apartment building that held everything I had loved and everything I was about to lose.

I had no real choice. If I went home, I was a loaded weapon left next to the only person I cared about in the world. If I stayed out in the city, the hunger would eventually take the decision out of my hands entirely.

I got in.

We drove in silence. The city fell away behind us—the neon and traffic and noise giving way to darker, older roads that climbed upward into the hills. After perhaps twenty minutes, we entered a stretch of forest where the trees were enormous and ancient and the fog was dense enough to block the road entirely.

Then a gate appeared.

Iron. Massive. Wound with thick, climbing vines that looked as though they had been growing for centuries. It swung open without anyone touching it.

Beyond the gate, trees unlike anything I had seen before in this country towered on both sides of the drive—their canopies so high they were lost in the mist. And then the fog parted just enough to reveal what waited at the end of the road.

A palace.

Ancient stone, gothic spires, and high stained-glass windows glowing with warm, amber light. It had the architecture of old Europe—Italian or French, maybe—rendered in dark volcanic stone and set in the heart of a Philippine mountain forest as though it had always belonged there, as though the jungle had simply grown up around it over the course of centuries.

The Nightborn Palace.

Something settled into place in my understanding then, heavy and permanent. I was no longer standing in the world I had grown up in. I had stepped across a threshold I couldn't uncross.

Damien escorted me inside. The hallways were lined with velvet carpets in deep burgundy and oil paintings in gilded frames—each subject pale-skinned and gold-eyed, staring out with expressions that ranged from imperious to bored. We stopped before a set of carved wooden doors at the end of a long corridor.

"Master Vale is inside," Damien said. "Good luck, Ms. Sinclair."

I drew one long, steadying breath. Then I opened the doors and stepped in.

The office was vast—walls lined with packed bookshelves, the air heavy with the smell of old paper and expensive wine. Vale was seated in a high-backed chair behind a massive desk, completely still, as though he had been waiting in exactly that position for some time. The look he gave me when I entered was cold and assessing.

He was not alone.

In the corner of the room, a man sat bound to a chair. A hood covered his head. His shoulders heaved with barely contained panic.

"Sit," Vale said, gesturing to the chair across the desk.

I sat. My skin was crawling.

"I disliked being kept waiting for several hours, Ms. Sinclair," he said, his English crisp and quiet. "Punctuality is a virtue you must learn."

"You completely upended my life," I said, the anger edging past the fear. "Do you think it's easy to accept all of this? You gave me a new existence and then made me a monster. I didn't want any of this."

His expression darkened. The air seemed to compress slightly. "Your stubbornness is testing my patience. You are mourning the loss while ignoring what I have given you."

"I would rather be dead than be whatever you've made me."

He was out of his chair before I finished the sentence—fast enough that I registered only the blur of his movement before his hand closed around my throat, pinning me back against the chair.

"You are one of us now," he said, his face inches from mine, his voice carved from absolute zero. "Whether you like it or not. The blood of the Nightborn flows in your veins. And you will obey."

He released me and walked toward the hooded figure in the corner.

"You need to feed," he said, without looking back. "The transition is nearly complete. If you don't take blood now, your organs will begin to shut down again—and this time, it will be agonizing."

"You want me to bite him," I said flatly. "I won't do that."

Vale reached down and yanked the hood free.

"I thought you might say that," he said. "Consider this a gift."

The world stopped.

The man in the chair was bruised and tear-streaked and trembling in absolute terror. His eyes found mine immediately, wide and bloodshot and begging.

I knew his face.

"A—Aaron?"