TAMING THE HEARTLESS VAMPIRE (ENGLISH)

Chapter 6

Every muscle in my body locked up at once.

The air left my lungs in a rush. Not because of anything Vale had done—just the simple, devastating fact of recognition.

Aaron.

The man I had loved for three years, the man I had worked double shifts for, the man I had given my body and my trust and my absolute devotion—was sitting bound to a chair in a vampire's palace, weeping, covered in bruises, trembling so hard the chair legs rattled against the stone floor.

His expensive shirt was torn. His hair was matted with dried sweat. When he saw me, something passed across his face—first relief, wild and desperate, then quickly tangled with shame.

"Aria!" His voice broke. He thrashed against the bindings, the wood groaning under his weight. "Aria, please—you have to help me. I don't know where I am, I don't know who these people are—please, I don't want to die!"

He was sobbing now. Great, heaving sobs that contorted his face into something ugly and infantile. This was the man I had believed was my anchor. He looked small now. Remarkably, pathetically small.

"Please," he kept saying. "Forgive me. I cheated on you—I know, I know it was wrong, I was a coward, but please don't let them kill me. For the sake of what we had—please."

I stood very still and examined what I felt.

I waited for the grief to resurface, or even the hot edge of the anger I had carried out of his apartment. But there was nothing. The love was gone. The wound was gone. It had all been burned away somewhere in the dark water of that river.

To my new, altered senses, he was just a collection of veins and warmth.

I turned away from him and faced Vale.

"Let him go," I said.

The room went very quiet.

"I beg your pardon?" Vale's voice dropped to something that barely qualified as sound.

"Release him." I met his eyes. "Whatever happened between Aaron and me is my private business. It's not yours to weaponize. I am not your instrument for revenge."

Vale's expression underwent a slow, dangerous transformation. Then—

He moved.

Before I could track the motion, his hand was around my throat, and my back was against the wall with enough force to rattle the paintings. The portraits of old, gold-eyed faces swung on their hooks.

"No one lectures me about what I do in my own palace," he said softly. Very softly. The calm in his voice was more frightening than shouting would have been. "Do you think your human morality has any jurisdiction here?"

His grip tightened. My vision began to spot at the edges.

"You are my thrall," he continued. "My blood is in your veins. You are an extension of my will. You do what I tell you to do. Do you understand that?"

I couldn't breathe. My hands clawed weakly at his wrist. But through the blurring vision and the screaming instinct for air, something else surfaced.

A smile. Small and stubborn and completely involuntary.

I'd rather die again than bend the knee to someone like him.

He saw it. His eyes sharpened.

"Do you love your brother, Aria?"

The smile died.

Those words reached somewhere deeper than the hands on my throat. They bypassed every defense I had and drove straight into the soft center of everything I was still fighting for.

I looked at him with different eyes now—not defiant. Pleading.

That was what he'd been waiting for.

He released me. I dropped to my hands and knees on the cold floor, gasping, pressing one palm flat against the marble as the room steadied itself.

When I looked up, Vale had produced a small, ornate silver knife from somewhere—and with a flick of his wrist, he sent it spinning across the floor toward Aaron's chair. It came to rest against the leg with a sharp metallic ring.

Without another word, without a single backward glance, Vale walked out of the room. The heavy doors clicked shut behind him.

Silence.

I pushed myself to my feet and turned toward Aaron. He had stopped crying. He was staring at the knife near his feet with a fixed, glassy expression. And his wrists—I looked—were free. Vale must have cut the bindings in that last impossible instant of movement.

But he wasn't running. He wasn't screaming. He was just... staring.

"Aaron." I took a step toward him. "Drop it. We need to leave."

He didn't respond. He bent slowly, mechanically, and picked up the knife.

"Aaron—"

He raised his left forearm. His face was completely vacant. Whatever light usually lived behind a person's eyes was simply absent. Like a puppet with cut strings acting out a final command.

Then he drew the blade across his wrist.

Deep.

The blood came immediately—bright, fast, and warm. The smell hit me like a wall.

There is no way to explain what happened in my body at that moment in any language that doesn't sound like madness. It was as though every cell I possessed turned toward that smell the way a compass needle finds north. The hunger didn't build—it detonated. My throat went dry in an instant. My gums screamed. My fangs dropped fully, and I felt the change in my own eyes—the burn of gold consuming brown.

"Aaron, stop—" The word came out distorted. Wrong. A growl wearing a name.

I fought it. I held myself still with every gram of will I had left. I pressed both hands against the nearest bookshelf and dug my fingers in hard enough to crack the wood.

"I'm sorry," I whispered.

That was the last thing I said.

After that, there was nothing but the dark.

✦ ✦ ✦

When I became aware of myself again, the first thing I felt was the cold of the marble floor against my knees.

I was kneeling. My chest was heaving as though I'd run for miles, and there was a warmth inside me—unfamiliar and deeply uncomfortable, like a fire that had been stoked in the wrong room.

Then I saw what was in front of me.

Blood. Vast amounts of it, spread across the white marble in dark, spreading patterns. It covered my hands. It was under my fingernails. The smell of it was everywhere.

And Aaron—

Aaron was on the floor. His eyes were open, fixed on a point in the middle distance. His skin was the color of old paper. He wasn't breathing.

I stumbled backward, catching myself on the edge of the desk. "No. No, no, no—"

I stared at my own hands. Shaking. Stained. Irrefutable.

The one thing I had sworn I would never do.

The first person I killed was the man I used to love.

I pressed my back against the wall and slid down it and sat on the blood-soaked floor and did not move for a very long time.

Then—

The door opened.

Heels, clicking softly and precisely on stone. A figure stepped around the pools of blood with the careful, practiced grace of someone accustomed to navigating beautiful destruction.

She was extraordinary. Pale as porcelain, with long black hair that moved like silk and a dark, flowing gown that seemed to be made of the same material as shadows. She carried herself with an authority that had nothing to do with effort—it was simply a fact of her existence, the way gravity is a fact.

She looked at the body on the floor with an expression of faint, bored appraisal. Then she looked at me.

Her eyes were curious. Deeply, unsettlingly curious—as though she had been looking forward to this introduction for some time.

"So you're the new thrall everyone's been talking about," she said, her voice like honey stirred into something lethally cold. "The girl who came back from the dead."

She tilted her head, considering the blood on my hands and then the body on the floor, the way one might consider a painting they were deciding whether to buy.

"My name is Cassandra," she said, settling her gaze back on mine. "And judging from the state of this room, I'd say Vale has already started breaking you. He always did have a flair for the dramatic."

She stopped directly in front of me, her expression settling into something cool and precisely measured—the look of someone taking inventory.

"Welcome to the Nightborn family, Aria."