Amara’s POV
The gravel bit into my heel as I stumbled further off the path.
I did not cry.
I refused to cry.
I pressed the flat of my palm against my cheek and felt the heat radiating up through my fingers.
The skin was already tight.
Puffy.
A ridge was forming along my cheekbone where the edge of his hand had landed, where his supernatural strength had left its mark even though he’d held back.
If Killian had used his full vampire power, the blow would have shattered bone.
I looked down at my other wrist, the one in the cast.
Then at the scatter of broken crystal goblets in the grass where other guests had dropped them in shock.
My heart was doing something ugly in my chest, a ragged uneven rhythm that had nothing to do with pain and everything to do with rage.
The blood bond pulsed weakly between us, a sickening reminder of our connection.
I walked.
Away from the stone steps of the ancient manor.
Away from the soft warm spill of candlelight out of the ballroom windows where the vampires still danced.
Deeper into the dark where my hybrid vision could pierce shadows that would blind pure humans.
The path curved around a hedge and opened into a small clearing.
A fountain sat in the middle, a stone basin with a cherub on top that had been carved long ago, its face worn smooth by countless nights of mist and rain.
Water ran down its cheeks where its eyes should have been, like tears of blood in the moonlight.
I almost laughed.
I sat on the low stone lip of the basin, on the side furthest from the manor.
I tried to fix my hair.
The gown had been designed to leave my shoulders bare, to display the bite marks that weren’t there.
The long platinum sweep of my hair was pinned up on one side with a little silver comb that burned faintly against my scalp.
I pulled the comb free, welcoming the small pain.
I shook my hair loose.
I tried to arrange it so that it fell forward across the left side of my face.
It fell the wrong way.
I tried again.
I tucked, I tugged, I pressed.
It slid back, as stubborn as my refusal to be properly claimed.
My eyes were burning.
I pressed both palms flat against the cold stone of the fountain and I breathed in through my nose and out through my mouth and I did not cry.
The scent of night-blooming jasmine mixed with the faint copper tang that always lingered around vampire gatherings.
“That’s going to bruise.”
I jerked.
The voice had come from the hedge behind me.
Low.
Young.
Careful.
Not the predatory purr of an elder vampire, but not entirely human either.
I was on my feet before I had decided to be, the cast held awkwardly across my body, my good hand half-curled into claws that my human side couldn’t quite manifest.
“Easy.” A young man stepped out of the shadow, his palms lifted.
His eyes caught the moonlight with the telltale gleam of vampire night vision.
“Easy.
I’m not him.”
He stopped at the edge of the lantern light, where the glow did not quite reach him.
Dark hair that looked almost blue-black in the darkness.
Tall, but not as tall as Killian.
Broad through the shoulders in a way that said he would be broader in a few decades when his vampire maturity fully settled.
He looked to be about my age in human years, though with vampires that meant nothing.
He did not step any closer.
“I’m Jax,” he said.
I did not say anything.
The blood in my veins recognized him as other, not of Killian’s line.
“Sebastian’s brother.”
I let my good hand fall to my side.
Sebastian’s clan.
The Midnight vampires whose territory bordered ours.
“Second heir,” he added, like it was a joke he had told too many times to find funny anymore.
“Sebastian has no progeny yet, so I get dragged to these diplomatic functions.
Lucky me.”
“You’re staying in the shadow.”
“I am.”
“Why.”
“Because Lord Killian is at the window.” He tipped his chin very slightly toward the manor.
“And I would rather he not see me talking to his unclaimed mate.”
The words hit like ice water.
Unclaimed mate.
Not bonded. Enjoying the story? Read on at g.com.
Not sealed.
Just marked territory that Killian couldn’t be bothered to properly possess.
I did not look toward the house.
I sat back down on the edge of the fountain.
Slow.
Careful.
My knees felt unreliable, and the blood bond thrummed with Killian’s distant irritation.
Jax stayed where he was.
“May I,” he said, and gestured at the far end of the stone lip.
“It’s not my fountain.”
He sat.
Far enough away that I could not have reached him if I had tried.
Close enough that his voice did not have to carry to my enhanced hearing.
“That’s a hell of a right hand you took,” he said quietly.
I turned my face further away.
“And the cast.” He glanced at my wrist.
“Let me guess.
Stone stairs.”
“I fell.”
“Down stone stairs.”
“Yes.”
“Classic vampire lord move.”
“It happens.”
“Amara.” His voice was still low.
“It happens a lot, apparently.”
I looked at him.
In the dim edge of the lantern light his eyes were not dark like his brother’s.
They were a lighter color, amber maybe, and they were watching me the way a person watches a wounded animal in the road.
Not with pity.
With the quiet calculation of someone trying to figure out if they could get close enough to help without getting their throat ripped out.
“You don’t know me,” I said.
“No.”
“Then don’t.”
“All right.”
He didn’t leave.
The fountain ran behind us.
Somewhere past the hedges, the faint thread of a string quartet lifted and dipped, playing for vampires who moved too gracefully to be human.
“I watched you in there, you know,” Jax said, after a while.
“With my brother.
With Killian.
Most hybrids in that room wouldn’t have stood up to a pure-blood lord.
I don’t think I would have.”
“I didn’t stand up to him.”
“You spoke to a rival clan leader he despises and you didn’t apologize for it.” Jax shrugged.
“Close enough.”
I pressed my fingertips gently against the swollen ridge of my cheek.
It pulsed back at me, a counterpoint to the blood bond’s steady ache.
“Listen.” Jax’s voice dropped further.
“I’m going to say something, and then I’m going to shut up about it, and you can do whatever you like with it.”
“What.”
“Our territory borders yours on the east.
Not far.
If you ever needed to cross that border, and you made it onto Midnight land, we have laws about sanctuary.”
I went very still.
Sanctuary laws were ancient, sacred among vampire clans.
Even Killian would think twice before violating them.
“You don’t know what you’re offering,” I said.
“I think I do.”
“You don’t.”
“Then tell me.”
I did not tell him.
I stared at the worn stone cherub with the water running down its face and I thought about a cell phone I did not own and maps of clan territories I could not read and a mother who could not walk from the bed to the kitchen anymore.
“I don’t have a phone,” I said.
Jax was quiet for a moment.
“Okay,” he said.
“Okay, that is useful to know.”
“I’m not asking for one.”
“I know you’re not.”
The curtain twitched at a window above us.
I caught the movement with my hybrid vision, sharper than human sight.
I did not lift my head.
I did not have to.
I already knew.
“He’s watching,” I said.
“He’s been watching for a while.” Jax did not move.
“Every time I thought about coming out, he was back at a different window.
He lets you stay out here, but he doesn’t let anyone come near his territory.”
“That sounds about right.”
“Is that what it is, then.” His voice was careful.
“Is he that possessive of unclaimed bonds.”
“He is that possessive of everything.”
Jax let out a breath through his nose.
We sat there in the dark.
I did not know how long.
The quartet swelled and went quiet several times.
The lanterns on their hooks swayed when the wind came through, casting shifting patterns across the garden.
Every so often, without looking, I could feel the weight of Killian’s predatory gaze shift from one window to another, like a searchlight moving along a prison fence.
At some point Jax stood.
“I’m going to walk the other way around the hedge now,” he said.
“So it doesn’t look like we were together.”
“All right.”
“Amara.”
“Yes.”
Remember that.”
“I heard you.”
He slipped back into the shadow of the hedge and was gone with vampire silence.
I sat alone.
I sat alone for a long time.
The music inside changed.
Slower now.
The kind of song that played at the end of an evening, when even vampires grew tired of pretending to be civilized.
Car doors started to open and close on the far side of the manor.
Engines purred to life.
The side door opened.
I did not stand.
Two figures came down the stone steps together, moving with inhuman grace.
Sebastian.
Jax behind him, a step back, the way a second heir walked behind his clan leader.
Sebastian saw me.
He stopped where he was on the path.
His eyes went to my cheek and his whole face changed, fangs threatening to extend.
“Amara.”
I pulled my hair forward again.
Uselessly.
He crossed the gravel in a few vampiric strides.
“Please,” I said.
“Sebastian.
Please don’t.”
He stopped short, recognizing the fear in my voice.
“Did he do that.”
“Please.”
“Tell me that is not what I am looking at.”
“You’re going to make it worse,” I whispered.
“Please.
Please go.”
Sebastian’s jaw worked.
His hands clenched into fists.
“He has no right,” he said.
Quietly.
Carefully.
The way a vampire speaks when he is holding back fangs.
“Bonded or not.
Lord or not.
He has no right to put his hand on you.”
“Please.”
“If this was because of our conversation at the table—”
“It doesn’t matter.”
“It matters to me.”
I retreated further into the shadow of the hedge.
The lantern light could not follow me there.
My face went dark.
“If you stand here,” I said, “he will come out.
And it will not be me he hits next time.”
Sebastian was silent.
Jax stepped forward and touched his brother’s elbow.
“Sebastian,” he murmured.
Sebastian did not look at him.
He was still looking at the place where I had been, where now he could only see the line of my gown and the pale shape of my good hand against the dark.
“All right,” Sebastian said at last.
“All right.”
He stepped back onto the path.
Jax leaned in close to him and spoke quickly, low, words I caught only pieces of with my hybrid hearing.
East.
Border.
No phone.
Sanctuary laws.
Sebastian listened.
He did not nod.
He did not have to.
They walked slowly back toward the front of the manor.
Sebastian paused on the drive to clasp hands with another clan leader who was departing, to exchange the ritual pleasantries that kept vampire politics from erupting into war.
He was the picture of a guest leaving a pleasant diplomatic gathering.
I watched through the hedge.
The side door opened again.
Killian stepped out.
He did not look at the drive.
He did not look at Sebastian, or at Jax, or at the other clan leaders making their unhurried way to their cars.
He did not look at the lanterns or at the roses or at the cherub with water running down its stone face.
His predatory eyes cut straight through the dark.
They found me in the shadow of the hedge where no lantern reached, and they locked on with the intensity of a true vampire lord claiming his territory.