Page 92 of Vampire Soldier

I understand my brothers now. Why they had changed after finding their mates.

Charlie’s explaining some outrageous theory about how the Cubist sculpture was actually a camouflaged robot queen ready to rise and conquer the modern wing. Her hands move faster than her words. Blake plays along, nodding solemnly, pretending shock. “You mean the triangles were her crown? Of course.”

Charlie gasps like Blake’s solved the plot twist. “Finally. Someone who gets it.”

Blake leans away from a gust of snow and glances back at me. Her smile cracks through the cold like embers remembering how to flame.

“Don’t fall behind,” she says, voice wrapping around my name without needing to speak it.

“You sure you want that? I might argue against Charlie’s modern art opinions.”

“You mean my correct opinions,” Charlie chimes without turning around.

“They were haystacks,” I argue mildly. “Monet was marveling at light variation over time. Context, child. Artistry.”

She pauses dramatically in the middle of a crosswalk, snowflakes catching in her lashes. “Or he really loved beige.”

A laugh slips out of Blake, warm and belly-deep. The sound moves through me like incense. I slow my step just enough to let them drift a little farther ahead—I want to watch this. Watch them. The way Blake tips her head when she listens. The faint bounce in her walk now that the world isn’t bearing down on her chest. The way Charlie skips just slightly at every crossing of her words like excitement is something she’s not trying to outgrow. They don’t know I’ve stopped. That I’m standing still in the slow snowfall, watching my entire fucking life drift ahead of me in wind-chilled coats and fingerless gloves.

I used to believe joy weakened you. Made you soft. An easy mark. But now I know the truth.

It makes you fierce.

Because you’ll do anything to protect it.

I picture the stage at The Place. The blood, the broken glass underfoot. The way Kit looked when I finally saw the last flicker of his madness die. I remember Blake’s knees hitting the floor at my side. Her voice, quiet and shaking: She’s safe, we’re okay.

That night sits somewhere inside me, preserved. A single chamber in my soul, locked and weighted. I don’t open it often. But I never forget it’s there.

Two years ago, I killed for them.

Now I live for them.

“Hey, brooding statue,” Blake calls, half-turned, “you spacing on purpose or courting an ice coma?”

I lift my shoulder. “Just contemplating the poetic tragedy of abandoned haystacks.”

Charlie gasps, scandalized. “Monet again? You have to let it go, vampire dad.”

“Never.”

I cross the street and reach for her hand. She meets it without looking, fingers looping between mine like they were meant to live in that space. That forever-space we’ve carved into each other through battle and blood and every quiet night since.

She squeezes once. That’s all it ever takes. Every part of me that was silent once, that once knew only duty and war and violence, answers back.

I press my mouth to the knit crown of her hat, then lower, brushing a kiss to the crown of her head beneath it. “I love you,” I murmur.

Blake tips her face up toward mine and kisses me.

“Come on,” she says softly, sliding her gloved hand into mine. “I’m officially freezing, and Charlie wants sugar.”

“I want respect for my superior taste in modern sculpture,” Charlie shouts ahead, turning cartwheels in the snow.

“There were no robots in that wing,” I mutter, but quietly. For Blake only.

She leans into me, warm and honey-sweet, her breath misting just enough to kiss my cheek. “So says the vampire who has memorized every Monet brush stroke like it’s gospel.”

“Well,” I say, lifting her hand and kissing the seam of glove and skin, “he studied light. So I studied him.”

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