Page 171 of Nikolay

Blood slave.

Not blood donor. Not willing feeder. Not one of the more modern evasions lesser predators sometimes used when they wished to commit atrocity while preserving the veneer of commerce. Blood slave was the old term. The honest one. Ownership. Captivity. Human body made into storehouse and property.

Outlawed.

Not merely by law but by principle. By family decree. By the foundations my father had laid in blood and discipline more than a hundred years earlier, when he decided that any vampire who needed chains to feed deserved neither territory nor title. We had built order on that line. We had enforced it. Hard. Publicly. Repeatedly. The practice was not only illegal in Kozlov’s dominion. It was an insult to the very idea of civilization among predators.

Something changed in my face then. I knew it because Taras, from just behind my shoulder, went quiet in that specific manner he reserved for the instant before violence became probable. One of the guards shifted his weight and then thought better of it.

My jaw locked. I felt it happen. I did not move much. I did not need to. Stillness, in men like me, often frightened more effectively than overt threat.

“Who?” I asked.

The question came dangerously soft.

Her lashes fluttered. Fear moved through her at once, visible and immediate. Not because of me, I thought, though I would not have blamed her if she feared every supernatural thing she saw. No. This was trained fear. The kind that heard a question about ownership and braced for punishment before reason arrived.

“It—” She swallowed and winced at the effort. “Please.”

Not now, then. Not here.

I altered course without hesitation.

“You are safe,” I said.

Those words I did not offer lightly. Not ever. Safety was expensive. If I gave it, I intended to pay for it personally.

I reached for her hand.

Her fingers were small and trembling and colder than they should have been in the desert dusk. Dirt marked the knuckles. Her nails were ragged, one broken to the quick. I closed my hand around hers to help her up.

The world split.

There was no gradual recognition, no tender unfolding, no suspicious pause in which I might have mistaken sensation for sympathy or outrage for possession. It detonated.

The mate bond hit me like a fist driven straight through the center of my chest.

Warmth and pain and absolute belonging crashed through me in the same instant, so violent in its arrival that my breath simply stopped. Not caught. Stopped. The brick path, the warehouse wall, the neon stain on the horizon, Taras at my side, the guards behind me—all of it went briefly secondary to the incandescent fact of her hand in mine and the impossible, unquestionable certainty of mine.

Mine not as property. Never that. Mine as fate’s insult and gift. Mine as answer. Mine as the one soul in all this diseased and elegant world, the Goddess had apparently hidden behind a terracotta planter outside my club after I spent an hour telling Taras catastrophe knew better than to trespass west.

The force of it ran through every chamber in me at once. Chest. Throat. Teeth. Spine. It carried hunger with it, yes, but not merely blood hunger. Something older. A savage protective instinct so immediate it felt preexisting, as if my body had been waiting all its life to be told precisely whom to kill for.

Behind me, Taras gave a short involuntary exhale.

Then, with great feeling and almost no volume at all, he said, “Fuck me.”

The twin bond had carried enough of it across for him to know.

I did not look at him.

I could not have if ordered.

The woman swayed when I pulled her upward. She rose only halfway under her own power before her knees threatened treachery again. I caught her with my free arm and brought her against my chest by necessity, one hand at her back, the other still wrapped around her wrist and palm as if releasing either might alter reality.

It did not.

The bond burned on.