His eyes narrowed. “Yes.”
“So, bite me.” Oh, dear. That sounded so much ruder than she had meant for it to. If Xavier was a painting by Monet, nuanced and elegant, then she was a picture drawn in crayon by an angry kindergartner.
He lowered his hands, uncrossed his legs and rose to his feet, all in one sinuous, graceful movement. His steady gaze never leaving her face, he walked forward and crouched in front of her chair. Everything he did was at an unhurried pace, all with the same incredibly beautiful economy of motion. He simply flowed like water.
If a wild lion had walked up to her, it could not have been a more powerful experience. A deep shaking started in her limbs and intensified as he took one of her fists and lifted it. Gently but firmly, he pulled her fingers out and turned her wrist up.
His slim fingers felt cool and light on her overheated skin. Bending his head at a slant, he watched her face as he raised her wrist at the same time. In the firelight, his eyes had turned the shade of green bottle glass, bright and glittering, and his skin appeared tinged with a faint wash of color.
She couldn’t look away. How she had ever thought he was plain-looking, she didn’t know. He might not be conventionally handsome, but everything about him, from the power of his presence to his quiet dignity of manner, was unspeakably striking.
Then he put his mouth on the delicate, thin skin at her inner wrist. His lips were cool as well, but not unpleasantly so. Resting his mouth on her like that . . .
It felt almost as if he kissed her.
Any moment now, his fangs would pierce her flesh. Somehow, she managed to swallow the small moan that wanted to escape, biting her lip until her teeth broke through the skin. Why was he doing everything with such excruciating slowness?
She wanted to shout at him. Stop dragging this out. Just do it.
When he raised his head again, a pulse of anxiety shot through her. She managed to whisper, “What’s wrong?”
“Even though everything inside of you has clenched in protest against this, you would still let me drink,” he said.
His voice had gentled again, and to her horrified surprise, her eyes dampened. She said between her teeth, “That’s our bargain, and I’ll keep it.”
“Such fierce determination.” He smiled, folded her fingers back to her palm and set her hand in her lap. “I will not bite you, not when the very thought of it causes you such distress.”
“If you’re not going to bite me, why did you do that?” Her chest heaved as she sucked air, and she flung out an unsteady hand to gesture at him kneeling at her feet.
“To test your resolve. Your commitment, if you will.”
“But if you don’t take an offering, how can we create or maintain a liaison?” she asked, near to tears. “You need blood. I’m supposed to give you blood. You’re supposed to protect me.”
“You can still give blood.” He rose to his feet and walked back to his chair. “I don’t need to drink directly from your vein. We have all the necessary equipment, and Raoul is a licensed phlebotomist. Of course, that means you would forego any of the benefits that humans gain from a Vampyre’s bite, but I assume that will not be a problem for you, at least for the time being.”
“No. . . .” Her forehead wrinkled. She hadn’t slept in a bed in a week, and it had been over twenty-six hours since she had last eaten. An exhausted kind of fog had been slowly but steadily filling her mind, but suddenly it all cleared away and the fear had subsided enough so that she could truly think.
She asked, “Why did you ask me here?”
He smiled, and for the first time since she had met him, he looked genuinely approving. “That is the right question to ask, but it is not the right time for me to give you an answer. How old are you?”
Taken by surprise, she told him, “Twenty-four.”
“You appear to be in excellent health.”
“I am.”
“Do you exercise?”
“Yes, usually I run three times a week, and I like to do weight training at the gym, but I haven’t had the chance—”
“Good,” he said, cutting off her flow of words. “You need to know, this is a very busy time for me. After the Vampyre’s Ball, Julian holds a series of council meetings while senior members of the demesne are still in the area. Usually every year, he hosts some kind of visit from the Light Fae as well, which means I will not have much time to give to your training, at least in the beginning.”
Relief banished a huge amount of her fear, until she felt almost normal. “I understand.”
The light touched the corner of his mouth and the strong line of his forehead. “While I am otherwise occupied, Raoul will be in charge of your training. I warn you, physically it won’t be easy.”
She straightened her spine. “I’m not afraid of hard work.”
He smiled again. “If, at any time, you feel the need to end our liaison, you may do so. If you stay, you will do as you’re told. It’s as simple as that. All of my attendants receive a monthly stipend. While we have an arrangement, I will cover your medical needs, and of course your room and board. Everyone gets time off each month. Should we develop a long-term liaison, eventually I would care for you in retirement as well, although these days, we have a more mobile society than we used to, and people are more likely to want to change professions and lifestyles than they used to.”
“Has that happened often?”
“Not with any of my attendants, but it does happen.” He paused. “Tess.”
It was strange to hear him say her name, intimate in a way that she couldn’t define. She looked at him curiously. “Yes?”
“I will never bite you without your permission.” His voice was soft, even courteous. “I will never take anything from you that you do not want to give, but make no mistake—there are some Vampyres who would.”
Dread had become a familiar acquaintance of hers by now. It pulsed again, sullen like an aching bruise. “I understand.”
His gaze turned hard and piercing. “It’s important you do, because if you choose to leave, some might approach you and offer a liaison merely because you have resided within these walls for a time. I would advise against doing that. Anyone who would choose to offer for you would not have your best interests at heart.”
She swallowed. “I see.”
“One more thing. If you are not able to give a direct blood offering, freely and willingly, by the end of the trial year, our liaison will be over.”
She clenched her jaw, but she couldn’t keep quiet. “Forgive me, but isn’t that a contradiction? First you said you wouldn’t take anything I didn’t want to give, but now you just said otherwise.”
He lifted one eyebrow, and when he spoke, his voice had chilled. “There is no contradiction. Everything you do here will be by your choice, and you are always free to go. I will not coerce you into doing something you do not want to do, but there are also requirements of this job that you must fulfill if you want to stay on permanently. You don’t get a free pass, and you don’t get to change my rules just because you might not like them. I will give you ample opportunity to come to terms with the blood offering, during which time, I expect you to get over it and move on. Does that clarify things for you?”
Folding her lips tight, she forced herself to breathe evenly until her unruly temper had subsided enough for her to answer. “Your job, your rules. Got it.”
“Good. Now there is one more thing you will do for me before we’re done for the night. Come with me.” He rose to his feet.
Curious, she stood to follow him, but he only led her to the large desk across the room.
Standing to one side, he gestured to the chair. “Please sit.”
Complying, she glanced at the large dark screen of the desktop in front of her. It was easily a ten thousand dollar machine. A discreet, thoroughly modern keyboard tray had been added to
the antique desk. “What now?”
“Now you will prove to me that you can really do what you claim you can do.” While he talked, he pulled an iPhone out of his pocket and moved his thumb rapidly over the screen. “The Nightkind demesne website is Evenfall dot gov. You said you can break through a firewall, so go break through it.”
She had lost count of how many times her adrenaline had surged over the last twenty-four hours. Gripping the edge of the desk, she said, “No, wait. I didn’t say that.”
“I asked if you could break through a firewall.” His hard gaze bored into her. “You said you were good at it.”
She shook her head. “That was your choice of words, not mine! I just agreed because at the time I didn’t want to get into a big discussion about it.”
He cocked his head, and his expression carried a cool challenge. “Are you saying that you lied in the interview?”
“No!” Frustration made her voice go shrill. “Look, you have to understand what you’re asking and what can actually be done. There’s no such thing as breaking through a firewall, because there is no wall.”
“Explain.” He crossed his arms.
Running her hands through her hair, she tried to come up with the right words to adequately describe a complicated technical concept quickly. “You don’t break through a firewall like you would smash a window to get inside a house. A firewall is a complicated list of configured rules that either lets things pass through or blocks them. One way you can breach a system is if you discover something has been misconfigured. Do you understand?”
“I understand perfectly. You’ve got ten minutes.” He held the phone up to his ear. “She’s starting now.”
Son of a bitch. He meant it.
Son of a bitch.
Galvanized into action, she yanked out the keyboard tray and toggled the screen on, as she muttered under her breath, “Ten minutes? Excuse me, but you’re fucking nuts. It takes time to look for this kind of thing.”
“Nine minutes now.” He didn’t sound in the least perturbed by her agitation or her swearing.
Her mind raced through various possibilities. She had one potential rabbit in her hat that she might be able to use on such ridiculously short notice—she would bet everything in her inaccessible bank accounts that he was on the inside of the Evenfall security network. That would mean the network firewall would be configured to recognize his IP address and his email program.
Maybe she could get lucky. The quickest way to bypass firewall security was from the inside, through a client-side attack. If she could hack his email, she could send a rough, simple malware program to exploit the breach. He said he wanted her to “break through” the firewall. He didn’t say how, or what she should do when she did, or that it had to be an elegant job.
“Six minutes.”
“Shut up,” she hissed. Her fingers flew across the keyboard.
She hadn’t hacked in a while. It felt good, running hot against the clock. It felt crazy, and she wanted to laugh like a lunatic, except she had already sworn at one of the scariest men she had ever met, and she thought she should keep her mouth shut for a few minutes.
He said, “Time.”
She sat back. “You’ve got mail.”
Sleek as a panther, he moved up behind her. She was intensely aware of his closeness as he leaned over to look at the screen. As he did so, the cell phone he held in one hand buzzed. He thumbed it on. “Yes, Gavin?”
On the other end, she could clearly hear a strange male voice demanding, “Did you leave your email program running while you set her to hack into the network?”
“Of course I didn’t,” said Xavier. “I locked it down.”
“Well, I want to fucking know how she fucking sent a blast email to fucking everybody from your email address.”
She pulled back so Xavier could take control of the desktop, open his email account and click on his new mail.
In big red letters, the body of the email said:
YOU SUCK.
“This went out to everybody,” Xavier said.
“Fucking yes. All six hundred and thirty fucking people in the fucking network.”
Xavier told the man on the other end of the line, “I’ll call you back in a few minutes.”
“You’d better.”
After that, silence filled the room. Angling her head away, Tess slowly slid the chair a few inches farther away from him. Out of the corner of her eye, she saw his hand come toward her. He took hold of the back of the chair, and as he pulled her closer again, he swiveled her around to face him.
When she lifted her eyes to his face, they felt as heavy as a ton of bricks.
His gaze was rapier-sharp.
She felt one of her shoulders creep up toward her ear. In a quiet, shaky voice, she said, “You didn’t give me any time to finesse.”
“No, I didn’t, did I?” he said. “You just tied Evenfall’s IT administrator into gibbering knots.”
His voice had turned gentle again. While she suspected that gentleness of his was not always a safe or good thing to hear, this time he didn’t appear to be angry with her. Not quite angry. She didn’t think.
When the silence became too prolonged, she said, “So . . . Did I pass your test? Am I still staying?”
“Oh, indeed you are,” he told her. Finally he looked away, and only then did she realize how intense his gaze had been, like a spotlight, and how much the pressure eased from her chest when she was released from it. “Tomorrow you can explain to Gavin just how you did what you did, but for now, I believe I’ve asked quite enough from you for one evening. That will be all for tonight. Raoul has seen to your needs?”
Relief tried to turn her legs to noodles. She swallowed and said, “I— Yes.”
“Then I’ll say good night.”
As he stood back, she rose to her feet and almost turned to go, but then paused to look at him again. “Xavier?”
He looked at her, slim eyebrows raised, looking as surprised as she was that she chose to linger in his presence. “Yes?”
A Vampyre’s gaze was supposed to be mesmerizing, but he hadn’t used it to force her into doing anything. According to his promise, he never would. Until she had reason to do otherwise, she might as well take him at his word.
She met his gaze. “Thank you for this opportunity. I really mean it. I’ll work hard and do everything you or Raoul ask of me.”
He smiled again, and it must have been her imagination that said there was something slightly wistful about it. “Very good, Tess.”
Awkwardly, she returned his nod, and she left the room with a huge sense of relief and an equal amount of disquiet.
Outside in the hall, Raoul waited. When she appeared, he escorted her to the attendants’ house without saying a word. If he had heard anything of what had happened in the study, it didn’t show in his bland expression.
The tension from the last fifteen minutes faded and exhaustion rolled over her, as inescapable as the tide. Light-headed and shaky, she could have sworn she could still feel where Xavier’s lips had rested on the thin skin of her wrist.
If she hadn’t been so afraid of him, so tensed for the bite, it might have been . . . pleasurable.
If he weren’t a Vampyre intent on feeding from her, his actions could have been construed as . . . caring.
She rubbed the area with a scowl.
She was grateful he had refrained from taking blood, and she was still frightened of him, but mostly he just confused her. He prompted her to think of things she didn’t want to consider. While she had caught glimpses of his sharp, powerful personality, overall, he had shown her a depth of courtesy, thoughtfulness and feeling that she simply had no idea what to do with, even when she had been challenging or downright rude.
No matter how much she wanted to, she couldn’t put him in a simple concept
ual box. He didn’t fit. He was too big, too complicated. The very fact that she couldn’t simply label him and be done with it made her uneasy. It hinted at an unknown future, one where she learned new things and made adaptations, and became a stranger to herself.
She shook off the uneasiness. She could handle learning and adapting, as long as it meant survival. For now, supper was waiting and she could take time to settle into her own room, and put all thoughts of Xavier del Torro out of her mind.
• • •
Left alone, Xavier paced the room in long, quick strides, while his mind raced. As he reached the sitting area, he glanced at the book he’d been reading, but a quiet contemplation of Descartes’s intelligent, ordered philosophy wasn’t in his foreseeable future.
To save wear and tear on the book’s spine, he closed it without bothering to mark the page. He and Descartes’s writings were old friends, and he would reread all the old passages soon enough.
He went back to his desk and checked his email. Already there were fifty-six replies to the blast email. Like an apologetic cough, the program emitted a discreet ding and the number of unread replies updated to seventy-two.
Something shook through him, and he burst out laughing. He dialed Gavin’s number again, and Gavin answered without a greeting. “Never mind, I figured out how she fucking did it. Your computer is compromised. Are you coming to Evenfall this evening?”
“Yes, I’ll be leaving soon.”
“Bring it with you. I’ll wipe the hard drive and reinstall everything while you’re here.”
“Remember what I said,” Xavier told him. “I don’t want you to say a word to anyone about how this happened.”
“Don’t worry, I won’t fucking say a fucking word. No matter how many fucking email complaints I get. Jesus Christ, I just got ten more— Come on, people. All the email said was YOU SUCK. It didn’t contain a bomb threat.” Gavin sounded completely out of patience. “Look Xavier, I want to meet her when I’ve got time, but for now, just keep her away from my network, you hear?”