Chapter 3 The Weak Spot You Can't Sleep Through

Nomon's POV

I drank at a deliberately slow pace.

That foolish woman had no idea. She thought I was testing how far she could be pushed. The truth was simpler: I did not want her inferior blood fouling my clean floor. That was the only thing I had cared about, from beginning to end.

And yet, careful as I was, one glaring drop of blood slid down the vein at her wrist and fell onto the stone tiles of the balcony.

Ugly. Nauseating.

In that moment I wanted to crush her throat with my bare hand.

It was as though countless venomous wasps were raging and clamoring through my veins — precisely the way I had felt fifty years ago, when I wanted to kill Nick.

I forced the violence down, but my fangs had already lost their patience. They cut into her skin more greedily, wringing the fluid out of her body.

I had to admit it: the woman's bone structure was genuinely fine. Bitten until she convulsed, drowning in pain, she still wore that mask of cold obedience, clamped in place.

A bitch who made a man want to tear her apart.

She stared at me without blinking, and the light in those blue eyes was stubborn and defiant — as though she were silently taunting me, seducing me into destroying her completely.

For a woman like her — lofty, self-righteous — any male creature could feel only one thing: the most primitive of beast instincts.

The urge to rip off the disguise, slam her down on the floor, gag her with a necktie, and grind the toe of a leather shoe into that tender patch of skin above her belly…

What the fuck?

My mind jolted. I tore my teeth free and flung her hand away.

I hate this woman's blood. Beyond that nauseating texture — ants crawling through my veins — the worst of it is a hormonal sweetness utterly against all reason.

Damn it. It had woken a violent craving that had slept in me for five hundred years.

My short gray hair, which I groomed into meticulous order with beeswax, had been clawed into a scattered tangle.

This was bad. That impulse to degrade and destroy a woman… how long had it been since I had felt it at all?

I straightened my back, and let my gaze settle, by chance, on a small insect caught in a spiderweb at the edge of the balcony. It struggled uselessly against the sticky threads.

No. I would not be that fly.

The stupid bug reeled my reason back in.

I drew out a handkerchief and, with an elegance that carried its own disgust, wiped at the blood seeping into the cracks between the bricks, all the while looking down at Alaina, curled on the ground and nearly spent.

In my head I was appraising the "tool" the Sanctuary had sent me.

Her throat moved, almost imperceptibly. She was still conscious; she was holding her breathing and her heartbeat down by force. Anyone capable of staging a convincing faint under my nose, and staying this composed while doing it, had been through the cruelest kind of training.

I would test her.

"If you had said nothing," I said, my voice low as the dark note of a cello, "I might almost have taken you for a vampire hunter."

For one instant her steady heartbeat faltered. Just once — like a goatskin drum struck hard in the quiet of the night.

Excellent. And only that once.

Her profile was reflected in the marble floor. I could see the pores on her eyelids dilating with tension, her lashes trembling: she seemed about to open her eyes, then ground them shut again on sheer willpower.

I did not even notice that my own unnatural smirk had appeared in the shadow of the marble at the same moment.

Without these eyes of a Progenitor — able to slow motion hundreds of times over — I might truly have been fooled by this shrewd woman.

She is good at hiding herself.

Like Pandora's box: the tighter she locks it, the deeper she buries it, the stronger the urge to smash it open with a hammer.

I wanted to undo that lock.

The thought had barely crossed my mind before my hands, no longer mine to command, lifted her from the floor and dropped her onto the soft bed.

She "slept" deeply. It made no difference. However hard a woman is, she has a fatal weak spot.

I peeled her clothes off her, piece by piece. My fangs pressed to the cold nipple, now grinding softly, now biting hard. When she still clenched her teeth and endured it, I leaned in out of pure spite and sucked, gnawing that red bud until it swelled and flushed with blood.

My cold fingertips slid up the skin of her inner thigh, over the pubic bone. The pads of my fingers sank at once into soft flesh that was wet and hot. I pressed a little harder, reaching deeper, and the small, clenching walls wrapped around my knuckles without delay.

So flirty. A tempting little thing.

Flirtier still was the hunter's-issue Sanctified Firearm — which pressed without warning into the hollow of my ear.

Drawn in by her body, I had not caught even the tiny sounds of her drawing the gun and cocking the hammer.

The instant the cold muzzle touched my skull, heat flared low in my body, and my blood carried such excitement that it felt ready to burst, my heart pounding like a war drum.

Two thousand years of living… what in hell was this feeling?

A mad image flashed through my mind: letting her put a bullet through my head, and then being locked in chains, made her prisoner.

My throat worked. I crushed the absurd thought down hard.

No. Absolutely not.

My eyelids snapped open, the gray irises bursting into blood-hungry scarlet, and the crushing aura of a Progenitor flooded the room:

"Put the gun down."

My fingers dug deep into her soft flesh with rage. I had already worked out the rules for the games to come:

Keep a pretty dog in the castle. On sunny days, collar and leash of leather, a walk on the grass, then throw her a bone — and if she fails to fetch it back before it hits the ground, give her a punishment she will never forget…

Suddenly my brows knotted hard.

A pain shot up from between my legs, sharp enough to shatter bone.

Before my brain could react, my fangs were stopped hard by a pair of wet, soft lips.

While she kissed me, her eyes kept cutting sideways to the ancient clock on the wall.

I knew she was buying time. I knew it was a trap. And I kissed her back anyway, damn me for it. Her tongue carried a faint sweetness of blood like an aphrodisiac, forcing me deeper, inch by inch, into her throat.

That one second.

Something inside me was switched off in that instant.

Strength, the frenzy in my veins, my mind — even my breathing — all of it cut out at once, as though the power had been switched off.

Fuck. I had taken the game too far.

As I pitched forward, head swimming, I heard the crisp metallic click of the firing pin. A silver Sanctium round, trailing the smell of death, cut through the air toward the center of my brow.

In my world, bullets are not fast. One pressed into slow motion advances frame by frame through the air. A slight tilt of the head would have carried me clear of the trajectory.

I even had the half-second to spare that would have let me crush her throat. But then it came to me: this woman's blood was poisoned, yes — but at that dose it could never have brought me down completely.

More to the point, her muzzle was aimed at my brow, not at my heart — the one shot that kills a vampire.

She did not want me dead.

The Sanctuary was planning something, and they meant to use this woman to take me alive.

It was the only explanation that held together.

An instant before the bullet grazed the corner of my eye, a mad curve hooked the corner of my mouth, and I wrenched my own neck bones around — head twisted to a grotesque, impossible angle — and met the bullet face-on with my brain.

Squelch.

The cold round burst inside my gray matter and bored out a charred, smoking hole.

Ha… After so long alive, this was the first time living had struck me as this interesting.

Someone in this world actually meant to subdue me? To take a Progenitor alive?

And she had come within a hair of succeeding.

I was holding a card that would have won the hand, and I decided not to play it. I gave her a blood-smeared smile, leaned to her ear, and rasped:

"I'll play along… Take me with you, Alaina."

Her pretty blue eyes flew wide, her mouth left hanging open, and her whole face was a mask of disbelief.

I could hear her heart hammering like something mad. She seemed to say something to me, but I could no longer make it out.

The numbness ate its way through my brain, and I sank into a dead, silent darkness.

…

When I came to again, everything in sight was black.

I could not move. Heavy iron chains locked my wrists and ankles down, and every bone in my body screamed with tearing pain. From the crown of my head to the soles of my feet, I must have been pinned through with thick Sanctium Stakes.

I was in a cramped, sealed space. I knew the texture well. A coffin.

And outside the coffin I smelled Alaina's distinctive scent, and another — a little beast reeking of cheap rose perfume.

"Alaina, didn't we agree? This mission was to take the Progenitor alive. You were not to hurt him!"

"Mm. I know." Alaina's voice was cold as ice. "Now let Nomon out. Show me how to take him alive without hurting him."

As she spoke, she kicked the lid of my coffin, hard.

Hearing the dull thud of the wood, I could picture the temper on her face.

"Have some manners!" the little beast cried.

"Have some confidence," she said. "I have been more than polite to you." Set against the edge she used on me, her tone toward this beast could almost be called restraint.

"You handled this mission abominably! The master said you get only half your antidote this month."

Outside the coffin, Alaina's heartbeat missed a beat, then broke into a wild race, like a sudden downpour of rain.

"Stop being so arrogant, Alaina." The little beast's heartbeat sounded light and pleased, like something that had just done a good deed worth a reward. "The master said you will take it quietly this month. If you do not behave, next month you will not get even half."

Alaina's footsteps receded, each one heavy as though she were dragging a chain.

After she left, my coffin was hoisted up and set in motion. Footsteps drummed thick and close on every side. By rough count, the Sanctuary had put at least a hundred high-ranking hunters on the escort.

Inside the dark coffin, I opened my mouth slightly and laughed without a sound.

Antidote? Half? So the equation must run —

Hunter × (Antidote ÷ 2) = Chain

Alaina, my little hunter. So you are a dog with a chain around your neck after all.

This game was getting more and more interesting.