“I’m going to ask a simple question, and I need a simple answer…” I trail off as I meet his eyes. You don’t have to ask, a small voice whispers from the back of my mind. You don’t have to know. Because what Ruvan says next might change everything. This fragile peace. This affection. It will be different if—if— “Are bloodsworn and wife the same thing to the vampir?”
Shock relaxes the muscles in Ruvan’s face, one by one. His lips part slightly. They try to form a word and fail. I want to run, to flee from what’s happening. I regret this choice I’ve made.
“It’s complicated,” he says finally. The bond between us seems to hum uncomfortably. He’s dodging my question. A half-lie.
“It’s not, really; it’s a simple question. Yes or no?”
“The vampir existed long before the blood lore—long before becoming bloodsworn with someone was even possible…” Ruvan trails off, breaking his eyes from mine. I take a small step forward and re-summon his attention. I dip my chin slightly and muster all the intensity I can manage. Ruvan sighs before continuing. “But after the blood lore was created by King Solos, it became common to become bloodsworn in place of other ceremonies, as it is a deeper binding than any other vow.”
Blood rushes through my ears, propelled by my hammering heart, and renders me deaf. My fingertips tingle; my arms have gone numb at my sides. They’re heavy. My whole body has become cumbersome. My spirit wants to fly away, to leave this place, to unhear what he said.
As the words settle on me, Ruvan’s expression shifts slightly as well. His eyes flash with pain that he quickly buries. His face goes blank, passive. The insurmountable wall of the vampir lord I first met returns.
“So we’re…you and I are…we’re married?” I finally manage.
“Believe what you will.” He tries to move past me.
I catch his wrist, holding him fast. We face different directions, arms barely touching, unable to see eye-to-eye at this exact second. “What do you believe?”
“It doesn’t matter.”
“It does to me.” It’s the only thing that might matter.
“Floriane—”
“Stop dodging around our bond and just tell me the truth, please.”
“I didn’t have a choice. I went out in the night of the Blood Moon, knowing I might die, knowing that the people I cared about might die, because I thought that the curse anchor lay in the heart of the master hunter.”
Davos, dead on the ground. Wide-eyed and bloody. Ruvan’s words from that night echo back to me. Tell me where it is. Words I didn’t yet understand. Drew flashes across my mind, searing pain across my chest. He’s still alive, he has to be, I refuse to believe otherwise. But if he isn’t…what will that mean for Ruvan and me? Another question surrounding us that I don’t have a good answer to.
“I was foolish, going against my adviser. Callos told me the curse anchor couldn’t be in a human but I didn’t believe him. And then, you… In you I saw the only chance we had. The Blood Moon is one night, and if I was wrong and Callos was right, we needed a human. I took you because I didn’t have a choice. Because”—the arm I’m holding goes limp—“every vampir is hoping, waiting, for someone to end this long night. And we’re running out of time. We only have so much blood to sustain the enchantment on all my slumbering kin. Every five hundred years between Blood Moons thins our resources more and more to the point of nearly breaking.”
His voice has gone ragged. Hair falls over his shadowed eyes as he hunches over. My grip slackens on him.
“I had to keep you alive. You know I did. You understand, don’t you?” Ruvan says softly. “It didn’t matter if keeping you alive meant making you my bloodsworn or how my people would view our bond—the lord of the vampir taking a human hunter for his bloodsworn. It didn’t matter how I felt and, in that moment, Floriane, I didn’t care how you felt. I’d decided that if it meant the curse would end it would all be worth it.”
“But then the curse didn’t end,” I whisper what we both know. I push us toward the here and now. Toward what we’ve both been ignoring without being fully conscious of the fact. “The anchor wasn’t in Davos, or in the workshop. So where—what—does that leave us?”
He straightens, looking back at me, eyes darting all over my face. His lips are parted again and he drags his trembling thumb lightly over mine. I wonder if he even realizes it…or if he’s moving on his own. On instinct. On the needs we’ve been both indulging and suppressing, night after night and day after day.
“Still trying to break the curse,” he whispers.
“That’s not what I meant.” I shake my head slowly. I hear the voices of the people of the hamlet. Their disapproving stares become too much for me. Suddenly, I’m just the forge maiden again. Carrying the weight of their expectations. “I can’t… I can’t be married to a vampir.” My voice has gone small. “I’m the forge maiden; I’m to be wed to a man of the master hunter’s choosing.”
His grip slackens. His hand falls from my grasp as he studies my expression. “Even if you don’t want to be?”
“It’s never been my choice,” I whisper. “The one dream that I would indulge, rarely, would be to dream of choosing my life and my partner. If I were to wed, I’d do it for love.” Every word is harder to say than the last. “I thought I had a choice here. I was telling myself that here I could be the woman I wanted—do what I wanted. But I couldn’t, could I? You took that from me as much as they did.”
His eyes widen slightly. Ruvan speaks with haste. “It’s not as if your kind recognize our bloodsworn. They don’t even need to know.”
“But I know.” I touch the mark at the base of my throat. It’s hot, as hot as this need—this frustration—that burns within me whenever I look at this exquisite sculpture of a man. “I know that I am…” I shake my head and muster the courage. My eyes meet his. “That I am your wife!”
Ruvan’s expression is still utterly unreadable. He approaches one slow step at a time, closing the entirety of the space between us. I inhale sharply and all I breathe is him—the smell of the fire that crackles in his room, the moss that grows on the castle walls, old leather and wood and the spirit of this very castle itself manifests in the air around him. It’s intoxicating. It’s agonizing. I’m dizzy.
“If you want, you can be nothing to me,” he whispers roughly.
“But the bloodsworn—”
