Page 12 of Unholy Gambit: Checkmate in Blood
No surge of violence.
Just… stillness.
Just her hand. Her warm, human hand.
She was the only person in his long, vicious life who could touch him without invitation and make himwantit.
She’d removed her hand by the time he’d thought it through, but the warmth lingered.
And her thoughts, wondering if his human-looking teeth turned into fangs, assuming they had to, for him to pierce human skin and drink. Wondering if the fangs acted as straws to suck the liquid in, or whether they only provided the holes he sucked the blood through. No other human had jumped straight to those thoughts, skipping the fear and going straight to logic.
It was so utterly her: curious, fearless, dissecting the unknown instead of flinching from it.
He wrapped his cool fingers around her wrist, her pulse thundering under his calm one, and pressed a kiss to her palm, his gaze meeting hers, the connection between them like a love letter written in blood — tender, permanent, carved into his marrow with some arcane ritual dagger, an ancient primal magic he couldn’t possibly fight. Older than empires and sharper than any blade.
He kept calling herhis, but the truth clawed at his mind. He irrevocably belonged to her in a way he didn’t understand. It was a binding older than both of them, and it was impossible to run from, even if he’d wanted to.
And he didn’t.
He returned her hand to her lap and retrieved a bottle of wine and water from the cooler.
The interior light would come on when he opened the door, but it couldn’t be helped. He turned that off in his personal vehicles.
He rolled the window down instead, to pour all but a few ounces out of both bottles, settled them into the cup holders, rolled the window back up, and then looked away from her to let his fangs go long so he could puncture his ring finger and let a couple of drops darken the wine.
She’d wondered about his fangs, but in his experience, now wasn’t the time to show them off. Logic or not, fangs are the stuff of horror movies, and she’d been hit with too much tonight.
Which meant retrieving her blood clinically. Medically.
And probably not sharing with her how much he was looking forward to even the tiny taste he was about to get.
He opened the glove compartment, retrieved the lancing device, tore the wrapping off a sterile lancet, inserted it, and told her, “I can see exactly where to poke, if you’ll trust me to do it.”
She nodded and handed him her left hand.
The one he’d just kissed. Warm. Soft. Pulsing with life.
He pierced her ring finger, caught six beautiful crimson drops in the water bottle, then lifted it and drank.
And the world tilted.
His grip tightened on the bottle before he could stop it.
Something shifted. Ahalfa click of a key. The beginnings of something unraveling.
He didn’t understand it, but if he let too much time pass between the two drinks, the oath wouldn’t take.
“Just before you drink the wine, I need you to say ‘I will keep your secrets’, and then think about the secrets you’re promising to keep while you swallow it.”
He paused, considering how best to explain this to her genius intellect. “You aren’t promising not to tell anyone, you’re promising to keep the secrets. You can’t hint about them, write them down, text them, whisper them to the trees — nothing. Say it back to me, please.”
“I will keep your secrets.”
He nodded and handed her the wine bottle. She said it again and drank, and he could hear her thoughts: vampire, part-demon, the man from her dreams, the monster-slayer who saved her. The one who’d taken her memories. The one she’d waited all her life for.
The magic clicked into place and he felt the oath taking hold. Digging in.
The key turned the rest of the way, and it all made devastating sense in the space of a heartbeat. Her blood unlocked the truth and put it all together — an exabyte of fragmented data snapping into a clear structural diagram that explained every-fucking-thing in a micro-second.
