Chapter 2

It wasn’t until the second half of the night that we finally fell asleep.

Adrian’s health probably really wasn’t very good. I kept hearing him cough softly in the night. I thought he was awake, but every time I turned to look, his breathing was even and steady. He wasn’t.

At dawn, he woke.

He had only just coughed twice when I handed him a glass of water.

He took it and looked at me with a smile.

“Ella is very thoughtful.”

He praised me softly, drank the water in one go, then reached out and pulled me into his arms.

Adrian’s body temperature was much lower than a human’s—an unchangeable vampire trait—but when I leaned against him, he didn’t feel cold. He felt like cool silk in summer, refreshing and comfortable.

He carried that forest-after-rain scent.

According to everything I’d been taught growing up, that scent should have made me sick.

But it didn’t.

If anything, I was getting addicted to it.

Adrian said he wanted to introduce me to the clan.

I nodded, without telling him that before this, I had already infiltrated Nightthorn territory several times—all on assassination jobs.

I probably knew the layout of this old mansion, the security routes, and which window latches had gaps better than his own guards did.

Adrian changed into a dark shirt. He had seemed perfectly fine in the bedroom just moments earlier, but the instant he stepped outside, it was as if half his vitality had been drained away.

His back bent ever so slightly. His steps slowed. As we passed a window that wasn’t completely covered, a shaft of sunlight cut across it, and he instinctively turned his head away, a faint crease appearing between his brows.

The butler immediately stepped forward to support him. “My lord, slowly.”

He waved him off, voice weak and mild. “It’s fine. I’m doing fairly well today.”

Doing fairly well?

Twenty minutes ago, when he had me pinned against the sink kissing me, he hadn’t looked half-dead at all.

My suspicion deepened.

There were six or seven people sitting in the receiving room. All vampires—pale skin, irises red or silver.

The moment I walked in, every one of their nostrils flared slightly.

They smelled the werewolf on me.

Several gazes fell on me—surprise, scrutiny, and undisguised disgust.

“This is my mate, Ella.”

Lucien’s—no, Adrian’s—voice wasn’t loud, his tone wasn’t sharp, but the room fell silent.

“From today on, what she says in this clan is the same as what I say.”

No one objected.

Not because they accepted me, but because they were afraid of Adrian.

For most of the meeting, he leaned back against the sofa. Someone brought him a glass of deep red liquid, and he took slow sips, wearing the expression of someone doing his best merely to remain alive.

The moment the door shut behind the last person, Adrian let out a long breath and reached for a piece of candy on the coffee table, leisurely unwrapping it and tossing it into his mouth.

That deathly pallor had faded considerably at some point. In its place was a loose, lazy ease, the look of a man in a very good mood.

He noticed my stare, turned his head, and smiled at me.

The smile was open and clean. Nothing like the frail invalid who had looked ready to turn to ash a second ago.

“Your acting is excellent,” I said.

Not just excellent. You’ve got range.

You’re one person in front of them, and someone else entirely in front of me.

He didn’t deny it. He broke the candy in half and offered one piece to me.

“My body really does have some problems. That part isn’t fake. Sunlight affects me more than it does most bloodborn,” he said. “But it’s not as serious as they think.”

He paused.

“A vampire lord who looks like he could turn to ash at any moment—who would fear him? Sometimes appearing weak is more useful than being strong.”

I took the candy and bit into it. Blood orange.

After a moment of silence, I asked the question that had been pressing on me the whole time.

“You were originally supposed to marry Vivian. Why? Did you like her?”

“Who said I liked her?”

“If you didn’t, why insist on her for the alliance?”

“Because Dominic wanted to mark her.”

He looked straight into my eyes. There was a faint curve to his lips, but no warmth whatsoever in the smile.

“And between Dominic and me, there’s a hatred that cannot exist under the same sky.”

That night, he told me about the past.

Many years ago, the Nightthorn clan had been insignificant. Adrian’s father died young—killed by werewolves—and Adrian had taken on the weight of the entire clan while still in his teens.

Back then, the Silver Ridge pack was at the height of its power. Dominic’s father, the old Alpha, saw Nightthorn as insects barely worth a glance.

When Adrian was fifteen, he was abducted off the street by Silver Ridge.

The pack had been secretly developing something called wolfsbane—not the plant, but a compound extracted from Alpha blood, lethally toxic to vampires. They needed living vampires to test dosage and toxicity.

Adrian was locked in the basement beneath Silver Ridge territory for three full months.

Strapped to a chair, injected with wolfsbane again and again, bled, observed, catalogued.

He spoke with eerie calm, like he was reading from someone else’s experiment report.

“Dominic was sixteen at the time,” Adrian said. “Every time they changed the dose, he stood there watching. Sometimes he pushed the syringe in himself.”

“Eventually, I escaped. But the aftereffects of the wolfsbane never left my body completely. That’s why my tolerance for sunlight is much worse than that of most bloodborn.”

He lowered his head and coughed twice, then raised his eyes to meet mine, expression steady.

“Dominic probably never dreamed that the child he once had tied to a chair and stabbed with syringes would one day sit across from him negotiating marriage terms.”

I was silent for a long time.

I knew exactly what it felt like to be restrained, injected, treated like an object.

Because Dominic had done the same to me.

At thirteen, he gave me the first shot of poison himself. He said it meant I would never be able to run.

And suddenly I understood.

Adrian and I carried the same kind of wound.

We had both been hurt by Dominic.

We had both survived.

“So when you asked to marry Vivian—”

“I knew he wanted to mark her, and that she kept stringing him along,” Adrian cut in, coldness flowing into his voice. “The marriage proposal itself was a knife in his heart.”

Then he turned and looked at me. His expression softened all at once.

“But now, I’d say it’s a good thing Vivian never came.”

My mind began racing.

Adrian had a grudge against Dominic. I wanted to be free of Dominic.

If we worked together, killed him outright, I could get the antidote and end it all.

Besides, Adrian looked infinitely more reliable than Dominic.

And in certain respects, he was exceptionally gifted. Vampire stamina and technique really were in another league from a wolf’s.

He was much more beautiful, too.

I hadn’t even finished sorting through that line of thought when Adrian rose to his feet and held out his hand to me.

“Come on, Ella. We’ve got somewhere else to go.”

I chewed the last of the candy and took his hand.