My face was very hot.

I couldn’t look away. I really did mean to announce myself, or back away, but I found myself frozen.

The woman bent down against the bed, the pillow slightly—but only slightly—muffling her rising cries of pleasure. Vale’s movements grew faster, harder, flesh slapping against flesh, leaning against her and falling over her back.

I watched, unblinking, as he held her down, mouth going to her shoulder as they came together. He made a sound only then, a rough exhale that made the hairs rise on my arms, and I had to strain hard to hear it over the sound of her.

They collapsed together, and with their breath, I let out my own. My fingers loosened around the doorframe. I hadn’t realized I’d been clutching it.

Vale whipped around.

“Lilith.”

For just a split second, he actually looked shocked. Frazzled.

Then his face hardened, going smooth and angry. He turned his back to me and rose from the bed, yanking a crumbled-up pile of fabric from the floor and giving me another distracting view of his backside.

“What,” he snapped, “are you doing here?”

“You didn’t answer the door.”

My voice sounded a little weaker than I would have preferred.

The woman made no attempt to cover herself. She rolled over and stretched. I realized that she was covered in blood, especially around her throat—the dark color of the bedsheets had hidden that from me before. She smiled, revealing pointed teeth.

“You invited a human friend, Vale?” she said, with a deep inhale that had me stepping backwards.

Vale shot her a warning glance that made her smile disappear.

“A mouse,” he sneered. “No, a rat. An uninvited pest.”

He shook out the robe he’d picked up with a single violent movement, then threw it over his shoulders.

“I knocked,” I said. “You didn’t answer. I came when I said I would.”

“Oh, so did I,” the woman said, laughing softly to herself, and Vale shot her another unamused stare.

“What?” she said. “You don’t want to share?”

“Let’s not make any more a mess of my home than we already have. Can you give us a moment?”

She sighed, then sprang from the bed, lithe as a cat. She grabbed a piece of fabric from the bedside table and wiped the blood from her chest and throat. “I should be going, anyway. Thank you for the hospitality, as always, Vale.”

She threw on a plain black shirt and trousers, which had been sitting on the ground, then strolled past me with nothing more than another long, curious stare, which started at my feet and ended at my face.

Vale stared out the window, silent, until her footsteps had long since disappeared. Then, finally, he turned. He now wore a dark red, velvety robe, which he had loosely tied around his waist, so it revealed a long strip of his chest—covered in curly black hair—but, almost disappointingly, nothing below his waist.

My lips pressed together.

The robe was so…

“What?” he snapped.

“What?”

“You’re laughing at me.”

“I’m not laughing at you. I’m laughing at—”

I closed my mouth. Telling people that I was laughing at their clothing, I realized, was probably not very polite.

“What?” he bit out, irritated.

“The robe. It’s just… it’s very vampiric.”

His lips went thin. “Yes, well. I am a vampire. So I see now why you’re at the top of your field.”

I stifled my laughter.

Right. Work.

“I’m here for your blood. It’s been a month, as we agreed.”

“And payment?”

I reached into my bag and withdrew a rose, carefully wrapped so not a single petal was bent or crushed. He outstretched his hand, and I hesitated, to which he heaved an irritated sigh.

“What? Now I scare you?”

He didn’t scare me. It just smelled like sex in here. I crossed the room, eyeing the bloody, rumpled sheets as I passed. Vale took the rose and stared at it, unimpressed.

“The one you gave me last time seems to be totally unremarkable,” he said.

“You’ll have to be patient.”

“I’m not a very patient man.”

“I don’t lie, Lord Vale. They’re special. I promise.”

“You can just call me Vale,” he grumbled. “I suppose that once someone has seen my bare ass, we can drop the titles.”

He dropped heavily into a velvet chair next to the window. “Let’s get this over with.”

“Here?”

“Yes, here. Is that a problem?”

I glanced again to the bed, and he let out a low, silken chuckle.

“What? Are you really so distracted by sex?”

It was distracting, but I wasn’t about to admit that. I dropped to my knees before him and withdrew my equipment from my bag. When I took his arm to guide the needle into his veins, I was acutely conscious of every patch of my flesh that touched his.

He laughed again as I thrust the needle through the resistance of his skin.

“I can hear your heartbeat. Is that nervousness or excitement?”

I could hear my own heartbeat, too, and I wished it would calm down. Even I wasn’t sure which it was, but neither was welcome.

“I think it’s amusing that you wandered into my house without a care in the world,” he said, “but the sight of fifteen seconds of sex triggers your nerves. I will never understand humans.”

“I’ve had plenty of sex.” And the minute I said it, I cursed myself for it—why in the gods names did I just say that?

Vale now looked very, very amused, and I absolutely despised it.

“Have you, now? Did some gawky farm boy from next door take you for a ride?”

My lips thinned.

Eron had been gawky, and he was a farm boy, and that summer when I had been sixteen and curious, we had indeed explored each other in the deserted moments behind the barn, when no one else was around. I didn’t want to die a virgin. I was certain, then, that I wouldn’t live to see the winter, so I saw all of Eron instead.

But fifteen years later, I was still here, and six months ago, I swept Eron off the church floor after his funeral, when his mother was too hysterical to do it.

“You know, I did wonder at first,” I said, “why you didn’t kill me when I came into your house. Now I understand it’s because you’re a bored, lonely man, desperate for any kind of company.”

I didn’t look away from the vial, his blood dripping and rolling against the glass. But I felt his stare, and in the moment of silence, I wondered if I’d hit my mark.

“As you just witnessed,” he said, coolly, “I can get all the company I want.”

“Company that got what she wanted from you and then left without saying goodbye.”

“We got what we wanted from each other. It wasn’t conversation that I was looking for.”

And yet… he was sitting here talking to me.

“What do you need this for?” he asked. “The blood?”

“As I told you—”

“My blood isn’t a cure for anything, I promise you that.”

“It appears, L—” I caught myself. “Vale, to be a cure for death.”

He scoffed. “No human encounter with vampire blood has ended particularly well.”

That tone piqued my curiosity almost enough to make me forget my irritation at his insults. I peered up at him. He was looking out the window now, the cold moonlight tracing the outline of his jawbone, especially strong from this angle.

“Were you Born or Turned?” I asked.

There were two ways to make a vampire. Some were birthed, just like the rest of us. But more interesting was Turning—the process of drinking a human’s blood, and offering theirs, to create a new vampire.

I’d thought a lot about it these last few weeks. What that must be like. What other animal could do that? It was a transformation as impressive as a caterpillar becoming a butterfly.

His gaze shot to me, insulted. “Born. Obviously.”

“Why is that obvious?”

“Being Turned is… undesirable.”

I knew only a little about vampire anatomy. It was difficult to study them when they were so reclusive. And when so many of the humans who went to Obitraes never returned.