Page 11 of Unholy Gambit: Checkmate in Blood
But she assumed he was in her head, so she kept her conclusions neutral on purpose. Smart girl.
Frustrating, but smart.
He kept going. “There are rules against turning demons into vampires, and for good reason. When testing became available a few decades ago, my numbers came in at thirty-two-and-a-half percent demon, just under a third.”
He held her gaze. This was his truth. Not many people knew, but he wasn’t going to look away out of shame. She’d have to accept him for what he is, and she couldn’t do that unless he told her.
He tuned into her thoughts, catching the initial rush, relief tangled with defiance, accepting his explanation while rejecting the idea he was evil. In her eyes, he’d saved the innocent child from the truly evil predator in the room, and it took a monster to defeat the monster.
The adult Aury understood this was the view of the five-year-old Aurélie, but it slotted neatly into her martial logic. War ishell. The good guys have to turn hard to defeat the bad guys. Chess is a strategy game. Real life needs strategy to survive, but it isn’t a game. You can’t walk away from the board when the game is over if your legs are shattered.
And damn, but that last thought threatened to wreck him. He wanted to hold her, protect her, but she needed to stay in her head for this, to logic through it instead of feeling her way through it.
She drew in steady, measured breaths, letting her pulse settle while her mind reordered the chaos, focusing on the order of things even with the supernatural truths layered in. He caught the change in her scent as the fear thinned, the warm spice of her skin edging back toward calm.
Her adrenaline levels dropped, and he continued.
“Legally, it meant I could live. Barely. If I hadn’t already been alive for centuries, hadn’t already proven my control, I doubt I’d have been allowed to remain a free vampire, living in society.”
In her thoughts, he saw her mind doing the math. This made him a hybrid monster from nightmares and horror films, and yet, she was completely calm. Logical.
“You saved me. That means you aren’t a monster. You’re a good guy.”
“You tried to defend your mother from an evil vampire. You threw yourself at the fucker and beat your little fists on…”
He shook his head, looked into her eyes and took the biggest risk of his long, violent life. “I think I fell in love with you in that moment, when I’ve never felt love foranyone. Not even my parents and siblings. My family was necessary to my survival, so they were important, but it was transactional. I conformed to the family’s rules because I needed food, shelter, clothes.”
And didn’t that sum up the centuries he’d lived.Fuck.
She shook her head and sidestepped the emotions, not because she didn’t feel them, but because she needed to deal with logic in this moment, while preparing for the oath.
He knew what the next question would be before she asked it, but he waited to hear it before answering.
“You had to cut my mother’s lower arm off because of the bite marks, right?”
“Yes. Normal procedure would’ve been to kill you and your mother and then burn the house, but you had to live, and you needed your mother. Neither of you could know of vampires, so I had to change both your memories.”
She had a flashback to her mother at the stove with both arms, laughing, moving with an ease that would vanish…after.
And then the after: her mother sobbing in their large, spacious kitchen when she couldn’t open a jar a few months later, couldn’t properly feed her child without the help she’d sent away the day before. Aurélie had been in a hospital bed in an adjoining room, and she’d asked her mother to bring her the jar. She had two good arms, stronger from having to move herself around with her legs out of commission. She’d popped the lid with a twist, and in that small, ridiculous victory, they’d become a team.
The memory made her legs ache in the present day, a ghost-pain deep in her bones layered over the steady throb she’d already felt in her knee from the activity at the Haunted Swamp. She was hungry, too, so he said, “That’s enough information for you to know the kinds of secrets you’re promising not to share.”
“And if I decide not to do the blood thing?”
“These rules aren’t mine,” he said quietly. He knew she’d mostly decided to do it, but he still needed to answer fully, so she’d understand the stakes. “People way more powerful than me have decided any human who knows our secrets must be either blood-oathed, dead, or worse. If you won’t properly swearthe oath, I’ll have to make you forget everything I’ve told you, along with seeing me tonight. I’ll have to remove myself from your life. I hope that isn’t what you want to—”
She put her hand on his mouth and shook her head. “Let’s get started.”
His body stilled.
Her fingers were warm. Steady.Human. The scent of her skin just under his nose short-circuited something primal in him. He’d felt that heat on his arm earlier, but this was intimate. Unfiltered. Direct.
He searched his memory — seven centuries of touch, sex, violence, survival. He couldn’t recall a single person ever touching him in this manner.
Not without dire consequence.
And yet her touch, even an aggressive one, covering his mouth to literally shut him up, didn’t provoke him. Didn’t trigger the usual defense reflexes, honed by centuries. No flare of warning, no instant fight response.
