TAMING THE HEARTLESS VAMPIRE (ENGLISH)

Chapter 10

"How did you know that name?"

The question didn't just hang in the air — it strangled it. Vale's face had become something else entirely, the practiced composure stripped away to reveal something raw and consuming beneath. His eyes burned with a cold, golden fire that promised nothing good. He looked like a man who intended to reach into my chest and locate, by feel, wherever I had hidden that name.

I shook my head slowly, my hands trembling so badly I pressed them behind my back to keep him from seeing.

"I don't know," I said. My voice came out barely above a whisper. "I genuinely don't know."

He closed the distance before I could track the movement. One moment he was across the bar; the next, his hand was at my throat. Not the firm, warning grip from the palace. This was something categorically different. This was the grip of a man operating on pure, ancient instinct with nothing tempering it.

My feet nearly left the floor. I clawed at his fingers, gasping, my vision already beginning to soften at the edges. The restobar, which had been humming with a dozen conversations and the low pulse of music moments ago, had gone as silent as a held breath.

"Liar." Each word was its own separate sentence, carved from something poisonous and precise.

From the corner of my swimming vision, I could see Vee pressed back against the far wall, her playful expression completely gone — replaced by something that looked, on a creature who had survived centuries of violence, unmistakably like fear.

"I swear—" I forced the words out against the pressure on my airway. "I don't know how — it just came to me — when I touched you, it just appeared—"

He wasn't listening. His jaw was locked, every muscle in his body coiled with the terrible tension of something about to break. He had heard the name as a weapon — a deliberate desecration of something he had spent lifetimes sealing away. Nothing I said was going to reach him through that.

"Master — please—" I wheezed.

Seconds passed that felt like much longer units of time. I genuinely believed, in those seconds, that this was how it ended — in a dim bar in a forest, with no one who cared enough to stop it.

Then something shifted in his eyes. A crack. A flicker of something that might have been recognition, or doubt, or the distant echo of a conscience he had mostly discarded.

His grip loosened. Slowly. And then, as though the contact itself had become intolerable, he released me entirely — with the energy of someone dropping something they found repulsive.

I caught myself on the edge of the bar, coughing, both hands pressed to my throat. The skin there felt scorched. Vale did not look at me. He did not speak. He did not offer a single word.

He simply turned, his coat moving around him like a shadow given form, and walked out of the restobar without looking back.

The door swung shut behind him.

He left me there.

Vee materialized at my elbow within seconds, one hand hovering carefully over my shoulder as though she wasn't sure whether to touch me or not. She examined the bruising along my neck with an expression that combined genuine pity with something darker and more difficult to classify.

"That man," she said softly, and shook her head. Then, because she was constitutionally incapable of staying serious for long: "Though I'll admit, there's something about the way he—"

"Don't," I said. My voice came out flat and cold enough that she actually stopped.

She closed her mouth. The look she gave me then was almost respectful.

I pushed away from the bar and walked toward the exit. I needed to find him. I needed to explain, to fix whatever I had just accidentally shattered, even though I didn't fully understand what it was.

But when I pushed through the door into the cool night air of the forest clearing — the space was empty. The black car was gone. The only sound was the wind moving through the old trees, indifferent and unhelpful.

I stood on the gravel, hugging myself, staring at the space where the car had been. "He actually left me here," I said to no one. The irritation and the genuine panic arrived at exactly the same time. "I don't even know where we are."

I paced, my heels crunching against the gravel. "Who is Elara? Why does one name do that to him? What did I touch?"

"Do you really want to know?"

I went still.

That voice hadn't come from the clearing. It hadn't come from the restobar behind me. It came from the tree line — from somewhere in the deep dark between the old trunks, where the neon light from the sign above me didn't reach.

A figure stepped out of the shadows. He was dressed in a suit that probably cost more than every piece of furniture I had ever owned, but his bearing had nothing civilized about it. He moved with a particular kind of ease that didn't come from confidence — it came from the absolute certainty that nothing in his immediate environment could hurt him.

"You don't belong to someone like Sterling," he said, coming closer. "You're too fragile for a monster like that, little thrall."

I stepped back until my shoulders found the exterior wall of the building. "Who are you?"

He walked into the dim fall of the neon sign's light, and I saw his eyes. The hunger in them was undisguised and specific, the way a predator's focus is specific — not general appetite, but targeted interest. His fangs caught the light when he smiled.

But he was different from Vale. If Vale was a controlled, sub-zero winter, this man was something decaying — the dark, wet rot of a forest after a long rain.

"Lucien Devereaux," he said. "Bloodthorne Clan."

"And you're Aria. The Nightborn prince's newest acquisition."

I moved to step sideways and bolt. He was in front of me before I completed the thought, cutting off the angle with a speed that made my stomach drop. He pressed me back against the rough exterior wall — not strangling, not striking, but pinning me with his presence alone, his forearm braced against the wood beside my head.

I bared my fangs on reflex, though my fledgling attempt at menace probably looked exactly as unimpressive as it felt.

He let out a low, appreciative hum. His fingers brushed my cheek — the back of his hand, almost gentle, which was somehow worse than violence would have been. He tucked a loose strand of hair back behind my ear with the proprietorial ease of someone handling something they intended to take.

"Fresh transition," he murmured, leaning in until his face was close to my neck, his voice dropping to something private and deliberate. "I can smell his mark on you. Though it's faint. Makes me wonder if Sterling has actually tasted you yet, or if he's still playing the long game."

"That's none of your business," I said, my voice steadier than I felt.

He smiled. It didn't reach anything behind his eyes. "It becomes my business when I'm curious about why he chose you. Of all the humans in all the cities he's moved through — he chose the girl who walks into a bar and speaks the name of the dead." He leaned even closer, his lips near my ear. "So I'm going to find out for myself whether you're genuinely remarkable. Or whether you just have a face he couldn't resist."

I felt the tip of one fang graze the skin over my pulse point. My whole body locked. I squeezed my eyes shut, coiling every muscle, preparing to scream or fight or both simultaneously—

Something hit the ground nearby with enough force to shake the gravel. Lucien was suddenly gone from in front of me, and the sound of him impacting a stack of wooden crates several meters away was deeply satisfying.

"Stay away from her, Devereaux."

Damien. Standing in the clearing with the particular stillness of someone who had already decided how this was going to go. He didn't look at Lucien. He looked at me.

"Now, Ms. Sinclair."

I didn't ask questions. I moved toward the car he had brought — different from Vale's — fumbled with the door handle, and got inside with more haste than dignity.

"Find me when you want the truth, Aria!" Lucien called from somewhere behind us, his voice carrying the lazy confidence of someone who had just remembered he wasn't the one at a disadvantage here. I could hear him getting to his feet, the crunch of debris beneath him. "I can tell you things Sterling will never have the courage to say out loud!"

"Walk away, Lucien," Damien said.

"We were never friends, Damien. Don't perform loyalty for an audience."

"No," Damien agreed, moving to the driver's door. "If I were performing loyalty, your throat would already be open. Get out of my sight."

A brief silence. Then Lucien laughed — a dry, hollow sound — and said nothing more.

Damien got in, put the car in gear, and we pulled away from the neon glow of the restobar and back into the dark of the forest road.

Neither of us spoke for several minutes. The engine hummed. My breathing slowly returned to something functional.

"Who was Elara?" I finally asked, my voice quiet, directed at the window and the dark trees passing beyond it.

Damien said nothing. His knuckles were pale on the steering wheel.

"I'm not asking to cause more damage," I said. "I need to understand what I did. I didn't go looking for it — I touched his hand and the memory was just there. I saw a garden. I saw a woman with copper hair. I heard her name like it was being spoken directly into the center of my brain, and I had no idea what it meant."

Damien was quiet for so long I thought he had decided not to answer. Then he pulled the car to the side of the road, cut the engine, and turned to look at me.

His expression, usually so carefully controlled, held something I hadn't seen in him before. A grief that had been carried so long it had become part of his posture.

"Elara was the only person Vale ever loved," he said. "His only lover. In three hundred years of existence, she was the only one."

Something pressed against the inside of my chest — a weight I had no logical basis for feeling, and felt anyway.

"She died two hundred years ago," Damien continued. "What happened to her nearly unmade the Nightborn lineage entirely. Since the day she was buried, her name has been an absolute prohibition. No one — not family, not allies, not enemies who value their continued existence — says it within his hearing. It is the single most reliable way to end your own life in his presence."

I leaned back against the headrest, staring at the car's ceiling. "And I said it in a bar full of people."

"And you said it in a bar full of people," he repeated.

"Why did I see her memory?"

Damien restarted the car and pulled back onto the road. He took his time before answering. "Because of the blood bond. What he gave you to save your life is ancient and powerful, and it came from the deepest part of him. You are linked to him now at a level most thralls never reach — his memories are bleeding into your consciousness because your mind hasn't yet learned how to close the door between you." He paused. "It may never fully close."

A soul-link. The phrase arrived in my mind from nowhere, and I didn't know whether it was a beautiful thing or a terrifying one. I was settling on both simultaneously.

"Don't say her name again," Damien said quietly, as the palace gates emerged from the fog ahead of us. "For your sake, and for his. He has spent two centuries building walls around that loss. Don't be the thing that tears them down."

I nodded, eyes stinging. "Understood."

“And who’s Lucien? Why is he so interested in me?”

“He’s Master Vales enemy. And their clan is not on good terms with the Nightborns. They were traitors to society that is why they were called rebellious clan.” He explained. “Don’t ever trust Lucien. He is the Lord of his clan. He can do whatever he wants from you so stay away from him.”

I swallowed again. “Okay.” I just answered. Now I know how dangerous the vampire world is.

When we returned to the palace, I didn't go to my room.

I needed to see him. I couldn't close my eyes and let the night end with him believing I had done it deliberately — that I had reached into his history and pulled out his worst wound for sport.

The grand staircase felt longer than usual. Every step up it cost something.

I didn't knock on his office door. I just opened it.

The room was almost completely dark. The fireplace had burned down to its last embers, throwing a dim, amber glow across the floor and nothing else. Vale was at his desk — not working, not reading. His forehead rested against one hand, the other wrapped around a crystal glass of something dark and amber. His shoulders were angled inward in a way I had never seen on him before. He looked like the architecture of a man rather than the man himself.

"Why are you here?" he said, without moving or looking up. His voice was flat and used-up.

"I'm sorry," I said, stepping inside and closing the door softly behind me. "I didn't know. I didn't go looking for it. I would never have done that intentionally."

He took a slow drink. Said nothing.

"I'll stay in my place from now on," I said. "I won't push. I won't ask about the past. I'll be exactly what you need me to be and nothing more." The words tasted like something I was giving up. "I just needed you to know that I didn't mean to hurt you."

The silence stretched between us like a fault line.

"How did you know her?" His voice cracked on the last word — slightly, barely, but unmistakably.

"When I held your hand at the bar," I said. "A garden. Roses. She was running, and she was laughing, and she looked — happy. I felt your memory like it was my own. And then her name was just there, inside me, and I didn't know what it belonged to."

He stood up so quickly the chair scraped back against the stone floor.

"What?"

He was in front of me before I processed the movement — his forearms braced against the wall on either side of my head, trapping me in the small space between his body and the cold stone. Close enough that I could smell the amber liquor on his breath and, beneath it, that particular cold-rain scent that was simply, inescapably him.

"Who are you?" he said, and the question wasn't hostile. It was shattered. It was the question of a man confronting something he didn't have a framework for. "Who are you, actually?"

I breathed. He was close enough that our faces were separated by inches, and his eyes, which had been utterly dark in the bar, were something else now. Still burning, but differently. Not with anger. With something more dangerous and more fragile than anger — the expression of a man looking for something he had convinced himself was gone forever, and terrified to find a resemblance.

His gaze dropped to my mouth. The air between us became a physical thing. My heart struck against my ribs in a rhythm that had nothing to do with fear.

He leaned in. Slowly. The coolness of his skin preceded his presence like a front moving in ahead of a storm. I closed my eyes. I felt the distance between us reduce to almost nothing — a breath, a fraction of an inch.

And then — nothing.

A sound escaped him. Ragged. Quiet. The sound of someone pulling themselves back from the edge of something by sheer, effortful will.

He stepped away from me suddenly, as though proximity had become painful. His back was to me now, both fists closed at his sides, every line of his body rigid with the effort of whatever he was containing.

"Leave."

One word. But it landed in my chest like a blade finding the exact right angle.

I nodded — though he wasn't looking at me — and let myself out into the corridor. I walked back to my room with the unhurried, deliberate gait of someone holding themselves together through momentum alone.

One thing had become perfectly clear by the time I reached my door and pressed it closed behind me.

I was not what he wanted. I was not the thing his hands had been reaching for in that moment before he pulled away. Whatever space existed at the center of his life, it had been occupied for two centuries by someone specific, someone gone and unreachable. And no one alive was going to fill it.

I was a shadow cast by a light that had been extinguished before I was born.

And the worst part — the part that sat in my chest like a splinter and refused to be dismissed — was that somewhere between the bridge and the bar and the cold stone office at the end of that long hallway, I had started to care.