His own smile flickered, wavering like a candle flame. When it steadied, there was something hard and cold about it. “So I’ve made you angry. I apologized. What more would you have me do? You might be the Lady now, but I won’t sit on command and bark like a good dog, begging for your forgiveness.”

I stared at him incredulously. Bark like a dog? Nobody asked for that! All I would’ve asked from you is manners, the same kind I learned as a servant. If the Sisters’ maids can manage it, so can you. 

“You know I can’t understand whatever that is,” he snapped, then took a deep breath and closed his eyes. “Look. I truly am sorry, Cirrien. Shall we start over?”

I eyed him warily, not trusting him in the slightest.

“It was a long night. I’m tired and I spoke out of turn. Please forgive me.” He opened his eyes, raking a charcoal-smudged hand through his dark hair. Those green eyes stood out like jewels against his sun-darkened skin, half-lidded, but there were no shadows of tiredness beneath them.

There was something about a handsome man who used his face like a weapon that made me trust him even less.

But Bane had apparently commissioned this portrait… it was something the nobility did. I had no desire to pretend to be something I wasn’t, but things were already unsteady enough between us.

Every time I thought I gained ground on actual friendship with him, something yanked the rug out from under me. It was just a portrait, and if it pleased him to have it done…

For Bane’s sake, I would sit through these sessions and endure Miro’s priggish barbs. And one day, when I’d managed to teach this entire keep my language, I would let him know exactly what I thought of him.

But today was not that day, and we had barely started.

I nodded briefly, managed to paste on the smile he requested, and sat quietly as the morning stretched into a long afternoon. Miro kept his nonsense to a minimum after that, but I hadn’t forgotten, nor forgiven, and made no effort to reply to his few adjustments of my position.

My stomach was growling when he finally released me, the faint golden light of the sun falling behind the walls. Despite the coolness of the Rift, the brocade dress was heavy, and sweat had soaked my back.

I kept my farewell short, a mere nod to him before I fled into the keep, without even looking at what he’d managed to get onto the canvas.

Ellena remained to help him with his materials; more joy for me, to be away from her. For all I knew she was feeding him more gossip now, about what I did, where I went—or didn’t.

Like my husband’s bed.

I’d been a servant my whole life; much of our stability was founded on gossip of the people who owned us. I shouldn’t have been surprised that the fact that I was emphatically not in Bane’s bed was a subject of conversation.

And yet, now that I found the shoe on the other foot, it was quite infuriating. What business of theirs was it if we had heirs or not? He would live forever, and one day…

I stopped in the middle of a hallway, not even seeing where I was. The thought was a punch to the gut, kicking the breath out of my lungs.

One day I would die, and he would replace me.

There would be another woman living in my tower. Another woman wearing that white spidersilk gown. Another woman glancing sidelong at that bestial face, learning to read the small tells that meant he was smiling, or worried, or angry.

Bane and Wyn had told me themselves… a vampire only gave his blood to a true mate, one they wanted for all the long centuries of their lives. He had told me I would never taste his.

I was used to feeling invisible and unwanted, but I’d never considered how ephemeral I truly was.

One day, that portrait would be all that remained of me—that, and Bane’s memories.

Replaceable. Mutable. Unheard.

A mere transitory century of Bane’s entire life. And he had not come to find me today, despite the limited fragment of a lifespan I had compared to him—whatever I had left, it was a mayfly speck against his eternity.

Because I was just the first of many. No matter what I did, whatever loyalty I felt towards him… I would only be a ghost to him.

Miro was painting my epitaph in the present.

Despite the heat of the day and the sweaty fabric against my back, I felt cold deep down in my bones.

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Chapter 16 Bane

My wife’s words ran through my mind all through the day, the journal she had written speaking directly to me, a letter from the heart.

I feel like you already know me, but how is that possible?

Because, I wanted to tell her, my people had a story—that the ancestors would guide you to the one you were made for. The one you knew in your heart, even if you had not yet met them in the flesh.

If I’d been asked if I believed in that story last year, I would have said no. Today… I wasn’t so sure. Maybe there was some credence to it.

Or maybe that was simply the hope inside me that I couldn’t quite bring myself to crush.

When I’d returned to my tower in the late hours of the night, the journal had been waiting on my bed. I’d paced back and forth for several minutes before picking up the precious gift with some trepidation, half afraid I would open it to blank pages, a refusal of my gift.

Instead, I’d found pages and pages of Cirri’s words, her fears, her hopes, her dreams.

I’d known my wife was intelligent. I hadn’t realized how much work she had put into learning so many languages, that she’d sold years of life to achieve it, that she wanted to go even further.

And her fears…

She did not fear me or what I was, only my thirst.

The relief I’d felt at reading those words was like shedding the weight of the world. She wished to see more of me. She wanted… my company.

Huddled over the journal, touching the words that she had inscribed with her own hand, I chortled gleefully to myself.

She wanted to be around me.

It was enough to shake the gloom that had hung over me in a fog all through the night. The sun had risen again, against all odds.

And even when I’d reached the postscript of her final entry—I’m so sorry—still that touch of warmth didn’t fade.

I’d closed the journal and opened it again many times. Every time I thought I’d read all there was, there was something more that called to me. Were there hidden meanings between the lines? Was a word carefully chosen, or had she simply written what came to mind at the moment?

Finally, I decided to just leave it open on my lap, almost like Cirri herself was keeping me company.

I kept returning to the passages she’d written of her fear, the primal terror that overcame her at the thought of my fangs.

Even now, sated with blood as I was, the thought of her sweet blood sent a tickle of thirst into the back of my throat… but I couldn’t.

If she feared that I would savage her, she would never come to love me.

There was only one solution, one that involved thirst and pain. I would not allow my teeth to touch her, nor to pierce her skin. It must never be known by others of my kind—they would find it unnatural, an offense against the vows we’d made to each other.

But if it meant that she could love me one day… I would take the pain. I would take the offense of having to feed on criminals and convicts and wolves rather than my own wife, if it meant that I could keep her in every other way.

The journal drove home another point, one not outright stated, but here was where I could read between the lines for myself: there was a secret fire in Cirri, one kept well-hidden from everyone else because of her muteness.