Page 47 of Falling for a Villainous Vampire

The real him isn’t actually like that at all.

Underneath a thousand years of iciness, he’s tactile.

He likes to touch. He wants to feel things under his fingertips, and has no fear of trying to do just that. In fact he only draws back when he sees my expression—tense, I would imagine. Or, at least, tense enough that he can’t make out anything I don’t want him to see.

Like longing.

Like the need to step forward and let him trace my smile, the dimple I never show, the hint of that gap between my teeth I always hated. God, how I hated it. I used to close my lips in every photo to hide it. I still do, in truth—the picture over my byline makes my mouth look like a mean line.

Instead of what it actually is:

Soft and pouty, for the lower.

And a love heart, for the upper.

Perfectly pretty, Phone once told me, and I had laughed. But I don’t laugh when he says something similar. Something even more terrible, honestly. “Someone left an imprint of a kiss there and now that curve waits for them to come back,” he whispers, near enough to me that I want to tell him to move away.

But I can’t, because he wasn’t the one who stepped closer.

“There’s no one to come back,” I say, though Christ, when I do.

Every inch of me somehow screams, That isn’t true, that isn’t true. And I find myself looking up into those sea-in-winter eyes of his, drowning in them, one hand reaching up to touch him in the same way he is almost touching me. “Halsten,” I say—only I don’t say it that way at all.

I slice it in two.

“Sten,” I whisper. Like some term of endearment, like a name made short by long use, by familiarity. But there is none, not like that; I’ve never even said the whole thing to his face before he lost every memory he ever had.

He doesn’t react that way, however.

“Sorceress,” he says, in a tone that sounds almost as if he’s asking. He’s waking up, and wants to know if this is the person standing in the darkness over him. A sorceress he knows, or knew. One who makes his eyes search my face, and his hands almost go to me, and then a second later, he corrects himself.

Freya, he says.

And when he does my soul just drops inside me. I know that name, I think. The same way I know Madison and Mathilde and Maisy. It’s me, it’s something I was once called, I’m sure of it. But the question: How does he know it? He doesn’t remember a thing, certainly not all the way back to before my soul ever existed.

It’s impossible.

I must be mistaken.

He looks so confused, I’m sure that’s the case. We can just move on.

Or at least I think so, until Phone cuts in. “What did you just say?” she asks, and oh no, oh god, Don’t answer, I think at him, Don’t answer, I don’t want to know. I almost go to say that to him, in fact, when he responds with a halting “I’m not sure.”

Then, thank god, thank god, there’s a bang, before he says anything else.

Though this gratitude dissolves, somewhat, when I register what it is.

That was the door. That was the door slamming shut. And my need to not think about that weirdness simply cannot compete with the immediate understanding that something has just trapped us inside the library within a library. I feel it immediately—the magic I used to make the key dissolving, that sense of the door becoming a stone wall once more. An automatic thing, but still unsettling, no matter how much I try to reassure him about it. “I’m sure it was just an accident. The wind, some supernatural being who didn’t know we are in here, maybe even Tabitha seeing the open door as something else,” I say as he steps toward the entrance.

Teeth bared, too.

Like he’s going to bite whatever it is.

Though, Christ, he still doesn’t look as frightening to me as he used to. Even his throat-ripping stance fills me with this funny, shivery warmth—and so much so that I hesitate to grab his arm. I end up just snagging the sleeve of the sweater I made him. “I’m sure it’s nothing, come on. You’re being ridiculous,” I say.

But he doesn’t look away from the direction of the door.

“It is not ridiculous to know that danger haunts you.”