Page 32 of Maksym

He continued, quieter. “I will not pretend the promise is untouched by what I have already done. I can only make it and keep it from now on.”

“Drinking from the vein?” I asked, because the room had become too thick with things neither of us could fix.

His gaze lowered briefly to my hand on the glass. “It is the most satisfying method.”

My body remembered his wrist. Not as memory exactly. Memory belonged to the mind. This was lower. Teeth. Tongue. Warmth. The taste of him forcing death back from me. Shame and need braided so tightly I could not separate them.

I set the glass down.

“Define satisfying.”

His jaw flexed. For the first time, he looked as if he would rather face an execution chamber than answer a direct question.

Interesting.

“It nourishes more efficiently,” he said. “The blood is fresh. Living. The donor’s body responds, and ours responds to that. There are compounds in vampire venom that make the act pleasurable for human donors when done properly.”

“When done properly.”

“Yes.”

“And improperly?”

His eyes went flat. “You know the answer.”

I did. My wrists ached, though the wounds had closed.

“Vampire to vampire feeding is different,” he said after a moment.

I should have stopped him. I did not.

“How?”

“It carries a sexual component.”

The air changed. Or I did.

I became aware of everything at once: the robe against my skin, the cooling place at my throat where his mouth had been, the smell of snow and dark earth across the table, the blood wine moving through me like a secret my body had agreed to keep from my mind.

I kept my voice level. “Does it?”

“Yes.”

I waited.

He looked at the decanter, then back to me. “Between vampires, feeding is intimate. Pleasure can be controlled or intensified depending on the relationship. Between mates...” He paused.

It was the smallest pause. I heard it anyway.

“Between mates,” I said, because apparently I was determined to walk barefoot across every shard of glass available.

“I understand it is transcendent.”

There were words a person heard and words that entered through the skin. That one did the latter.

Transcendent.

A religious word. A dangerous word. The kind people used when they wanted to excuse losing themselves and call it salvation.