Page 163 of Nikolay

“Please. Mark me.” I said. Her satisfied expression filled me with a pride I could not explain.

The need in her gaze struck me harder than any command ever had. I turned my head without a word and bared the column of my neck to her.

She bit.

The pain was white and clean and astonishingly intimate. Then pleasure chased it at once, darker and deeper than I had expected from receiving rather than taking. My rhythm broke on a groan I could not disguise. Maddie held me there with surprising strength, drinking only a little, enough to seal the exchange, enough to send a second wave of bond-lightning through every nerve I possessed.

I thrust deeper, helpless now against the force of it. Her body answered with another shuddering climax, and I came with a low, ruined sound that felt torn up from some place in me language had never reached. The bed creaked under us. Our breaths tangled. Her mouth was still at my throat when release took me fully, and the combination of blood, pleasure, and completed bond was so overwhelming I briefly lost every boundary between prayer and body.

After, I lowered us carefully back to the mattress.

For a few moments neither of us moved beyond the involuntary tremor of overstimulated flesh. My head rested against her shoulder. Her fingers wandered weakly through my hair. The room smelled of sweat, sex, blood, old paper, and lamp heat. It smelled, impossibly, like home.

Then it came.

Not another climax. Something quieter and far more devastating.

Her love moved through the completed bond with no obstruction left to catch or distort it. Contentment followed. Not surface contentment. Bone-deep belonging. The simple, unquestioning sense that she had arrived where she ought to be and had brought me with her. It poured into every hollow place I had carried across centuries—every old loneliness I had mistaken for discipline, every hard empty chamber pride had defended as principle.

My eyes closed.

The Goddess, I thought with a humility so complete it felt almost like fear, had blessed me above all men.

And I would never doubt her wisdom again.

I woke to amber light pressing through the curtains and the soft, impossible fact of Maddie half draped over me as if she had always belonged there and my body had simply spent three hundred years preparing to understand it.

The estate lay quiet around us. No voices in the corridor. No urgent knock at the door. Only that deep afternoon stillness old houses acquired when most of their inhabitants had either risen and gone about their business or, in the case of my kind, not yet fully resumed theirs. The curtains glowed honey-soft at the edges.

Maddie’s hair was a warm weight over my chest and shoulder. One of her thighs lay across mine. My arm had found its way around her sometime before dawn and remained there as if it had always known its purpose. The room still held the faint ghost of us—her skin, my blood, sex, old paper, linen gone warm from sleep. Under all of it ran the completed bond, no longer a wild thing or a wound but a low, steady current of contentment that made even silence feel companionable.

I kissed the top of her head.

She made a sleepy sound and burrowed closer. “If that means you’re awake, I’m filing a complaint.”

“Against what?”

“Consciousness.”

“A bold legal strategy.”

“I’m very persuasive when horizontal.”

“That much, I had gathered.”

She laughed against my skin, then tipped her face up to look at me. Sleep had softened her into something almost painfully sweet. Then her eyes focused and the old spark returned. “What time is it?”

I reached for the clock on the bedside table and squinted. “Late enough that my family has already formed several theories.”

“About us?”

“About whether I have died, defected, or finally learned to mind my own affairs.”

“That last one would be the least believable.”

“It would.”

She smiled, then stretched in a way that nearly rendered civilized thought impossible all over again. I contained myself with the grim dignity of a man who had only just regained the ability to reason and did not wish to lose it before conversation.