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  More tears, self-loathing and self-pity in equal measure, prick at Adrian’s eyes as he shakes his head, like he can shake the memory away, escape it like dispelling smoke.

  He’s not that kid anymore. Not a helpless victim.

  That’s why he should have done something more to stop Xavier biting him. But he didn’t.

  He loved it. He can feel his body craving it again already, long-suppressed addictions flaring back to full life.

  I want it. I need it. I need him to hold me down and drain me, fuck me, use me like a doll.

  Recoiling from his own thoughts, Adrian pushes his self-pity down and away, locking all of it up out of sight. There’s no use feeling sorry for himself, and he knows that. It doesn’t do any good. That’s why he’d stopped letting himself do it a long time ago.

  Now, more than ever, he needs to focus. He’d never managed to get away the first time, never escaped the vampire who haunts his nightmares even now, almost a decade later. He’d just gotten too old to still be interesting.

  But that vampire and this one are very different. Just because Adrian had never gotten away the first time doesn’t mean escape from Xavier is impossible. There’s still a chance that Adrian can do this.

  Okay, what does he know so far that could be helpful? It’s obvious that Xavier likes being absolutely in control of his environment. Everything is on purpose — everything, it seems, except the fact that he’d decided to bring Adrian home with him.

  Right, that’s a start. That means Adrian is a break in his routine, and that there might be weaknesses connected to that interruption that he can exploit to get out of here.

  He needs to start planning.

  9

  XAVIER

  He sleeps better than he usually manages, and awakens feeling refreshed. Xavier showers quickly and dresses for work, then goes to unlock the bedroom suite where Adrian has spent the day.

  The young man is already awake, a high flush on his cheeks, murder in his expression as he watches Xavier step inside.

  “I apologize that there’s nothing available for you to eat,” Xavier says as he bends down and unlocks the handcuff keeping Adrian in place. “I’ll bring back more food with me when I return in a few hours.”

  “Oh, that you’ll apologize for,” Adrian says, sitting up with a wince as his muscles remember how to move beyond their former confines. “Just let me go, and that way I can worry about my own damn food instead.”

  Xavier ignores the sarcastic suggestion, locking the door to the bedroom again behind him as he leaves. Despite Adrian being kept within the one room at the other end of the apartment, Xavier opts to use the elevator again in order to travel upstairs. He doesn’t want Adrian to have any inkling that there’s also a concealed staircase directly connecting the two levels.

  Emelie is on a call when he arrives, speaking rapid Greek into her Bluetooth headpiece for several minutes. She’s smiling when the conversation ends, which Xavier assumes is an indicator that the negotiation went well.

  Emelie speaks numerous languages and is constantly in the process of studying more, often with Winter in the next seat over, learning beside her. Xavier speaks passable Italian and Yiddish, both holdovers from his human life, but should really make an effort to learn other languages as well. It’s clearly a skill that helps keep things running as smoothly as possible.

  “You look like you’re in a good mood,” Emelie remarks brightly, perching on the edge of her heavy oak desk. Though she almost never conducts meetings from here in her home office, the furnishings are nevertheless all formidable, dark wood and gleaming brass and leather. Choices which, like her ice-pale hair, are designed to make her seem more intimidating, less like a little girl playing at being a vampire queen. “Usually you’d brood over something like Katerina’s troublemaking much longer than this.”

  Xavier shrugs. “The matter’s largely out of my hands, isn’t it? If you were telling me the truth, then you remedied the practical logistics quickly, and the larger issue of Katerina’s continued insubordination is your concern, not mine.”

  “Exactly — it’s my concern, so if anyone should be brooding it would be me. And yet every time before this one, it’s been you.”

  “Maybe that’s because you never brood,” he replies in a dry voice.

  “Yeah, that’s one of my better qualities,” Emelie agrees cheerfully.

  “Forgive my bluntness, but perhaps if you brooded a little more often, you wouldn’t be facing months or maybe years with an eyepatch. Taking things more seriously might be wise.”

  Emelie laughs. “Sorry, Xavier. Lecturing me won’t work. I’m still going to notice that you’re in a good mood this evening, so you might as well tell me the reason. If you don’t, I’ll start telling you about all the cute things my humans have done, and I know you find that insufferable.”

  “I don’t find your humans insufferable at all. They’re both rather good company. I leant them a Blu-ray set not two weeks ago.”

  “I didn’t say you think they’re insufferable,” Emelie corrects him. “I said you find it insufferable when I start talking about them like I’m a proud sports coach with a little league team, which is true.”

  She touches her still-ruined eye, concealed behind its simple black patch. “And you think if I cared less about them, then I wouldn’t have this.”

  Emelie’s perceptiveness is, as usual, spot-on. Xavier doesn’t dislike either of her pet humans. Rowdy, smart-mouthed Lennon, with his broad grins and twin loves of anime and working out, and intense, thoughtful Winter, who loves Emelie with the same feverish obsessiveness that she loves him — which is why it’s impossible for Xavier to truly resent him for the injury Emelie sustained while protecting him from Katerina’s attack.

  “I think,” Xavier answers Emelie delicately. “That they are your weakness, and at the moment weaknesses are dangerous.”

  “I may be younger than you, but I wasn’t born yesterday,” she tells him.

  He remembers a time when she might as well have been born yesterday, those earliest nights of her unlife, when she still looked like an ingenue instead of a femme fatale, barely more than a girl, vulnerable and frightened of this dark new world she’d been thrown into — but clearly smart, clearly brave.

  Xavier had known almost from the beginning that she would be his Queen someday, though even he couldn’t have guessed that they would be here less than three decades later.

  Emelie is his ruler, and he is her faithful servant, yet underneath that faith is a deeper, warmer bond between them. No matter how she changes her hair and her clothes and the decor of her study to appear a little harder, a little sharper, she’ll always feel a bit like a little sister to Xavier.

  “What’s that supposed to mean?” he asks her, because he’s seen her pull this trick on others — Emelie is good at pretending to know more than she really does, as a method of fooling people into admitting more than they mean to.

  Unfortunately, this isn’t one of those times, as is made plain when she replies easily “I know there’s a human in your apartment as we speak.”

  Xavier nods. “Yes. I decided not to kill him yet.” Then, a beat later: “Don’t give me that look, Em. Humans aren’t my weakness the way that they’re yours. It’s not important.”

  She raises the one eyebrow currently at her disposal. “If you say so.”

  The conversation topic moves on after that, to her long-term plans surrounding weapons importation, but Xavier feels unsettled by the unresolved nature of their talk.

  Why does he have Adrian in his apartment? Why doesn’t he kill him right now, and thereby make a point to Emelie about how easily they’re thrown aside?

  Xavier doesn’t know why the thought feels so distasteful to even entertain, and that bothers him.

  10

  ADRIAN

  Trapped in loveliness again, Adrian decides to do like he usually does and try to make the best of a bad situation. In this case, that means taking the lo
ngest, hottest shower he can stand, the temperature and pressure enough to make his skin go pink and tender.

  It should relax him, but it doesn’t. Oh well, at least he feels clean now. That’s something. When he was younger, sometimes after he got bitten he wound up feeling like the dirty feeling was never going to come off, but now all it takes is some good body wash and substantial amounts of hot water and Adrian feels like himself again.

  He stays in the shower until his fingertips turn to prunes, enjoying the luxury of it despite himself. He can’t help but wonder if it’s even possible to use up all the hot water in this kind of place. Back in his own apartment, showers are always perfunctory, short things, since the hot water’s such a limited resource and he’s gotta share it.

  After he starts to get bored of just standing around getting wet, Adrian shuts off the shower, dries himself off, and puts the sleep clothes back on.

  He stands in front of the mirror, briefly entertaining the thought of punching it or using a lamp or something to break it, so he can slash his wrists and kill himself out of spite. It would deny Xavier the chance to be the one to kill him.

  But that sort of stuff has never been something Adrian’s capable of. He’s never been the kind of person to give up hope completely. And anyway, he’s lived through worse than this before and come out the other side, right?

  Well, no. He hasn’t. This is way, way worse than the stuff that happened back then. Sure, being a temporary, voluntary pet so that he and his brother had enough money to live comfortably was the worst thing that had ever happened to him until now. There’s no question of that.

  But now he’s being held captive in a locked luxury suite, like some bad mashup of Flowers in the Attic and Dracula, his wrist aching from where he’d pulled at the handcuff holding him to the bed through the day and his throat aching from yelling. By any objective measure, his current situation is by far the worst one that Adrian has ever been in. Way, way worse than what happened before.

  But… it doesn’t feel worse. He’s an adult, now. He can think of a way out of this, find a way to fight back. He isn’t a defenseless kid anymore, helping his brother curry favor with a bunch of rich vampires.

  Hours and hours later — long enough that Adrian’s had a second shower, and thinks if he got any cleaner at this point he’d start squeaking when he moved — Xavier unlocks the door to the suite, motioning for Adrian to follow him out.

  “I bought groceries,” he tells Adrian. “And a serving of tandoori chicken, so that you didn’t have to wait while something cooked before you could eat.”

  The chicken is already on a plate on the table, and looks like it’s absolutely top-notch quality. Adrian’s mouth starts watering immediately, his empty stomach clenching.

  He presses his lips together, determined to keep what tiny shreds of agency he can. “No thanks. I’m not that hungry.”

  Xavier sits down opposite the serving, taking out his phone and unlocking the screen.

  “If you continue to refuse,” he says evenly, not looking up at Adrian. “Then the next time I handcuff you to the bed, you will be naked.”

  The threat startles an immediate laugh out of Adrian. Xavier looks up from his phone screen, surprise breaking through his placid expression.

  Adrian just laughs even harder. He can’t help it. The combination of perfectly calm discipline in Xavier’s face and words, coupled with such a humiliating, petty threat, is surreal and hilarious.

  Xavier, for his part, looks completely perplexed by Adrian’s sudden amusement. His expression reminds Adrian of the way more than one ex-boyfriend has looked at him over the years. In a world where everything was different, Adrian can easily imagine Xavier numbering among that long list of exes, in fact.

  (Maybe some people would say that the list of exes is too long, considering that Adrian is only 22, but sowing wild oats is hardly the worst thing anyone’s ever done in their youth, right?)

  The more Adrian thinks about it, the more he can see the things Xavier has in common with guys he’s dated — too serious, too tight-wound, but practical and thoughtful in his own reserved way.

  Like, for instance, he didn’t have to go out of his way to get something healthy and nice like the tandoori chicken for Adrian to eat — after all, he obviously knows where the pizza place is — but he did.

  Wasn’t that just the story of Adrian’s life, though? ‘If everything was completely different, things would be great.’

  “Okay, okay, I’m eating,” he assures Xavier, sitting down. “You could put your phone away at the table, you know, even if you’re not actually having dinner like I am. Do you know how bored I am with my own company? I don’t even like Twitter and I’m jonesing so hard to refresh my feed, it’s actually pretty sad. If I don’t have some kind of conversation I’m going to wilt and shrivel and die, like a plant without sunlight.”

  Xavier ignores him, continuing to type rapidly on his phone, not looking up. Adrian wishes it was possible for him to ignore how hot the guy is, but he can’t stop himself remembering how good the bite felt, how it made his whole body sing.

  He starts talking again, desperate to distract himself from that train of thought.

  “Hey, do vampires use Twitter? Facebook? Ooo, do you guys have some special secret social network that’s just for you guys? Wait, hey, now that I think about it, I’m pretty sure the first time Lee met one was over Myspace, but that says a lot more about both of them specifically as people than it says anything about your species as a whole.”

  Xavier continues to ignore him. Adrian sighs. “This chicken is really good, you know. I mean, obviously you don’t know. But I can inform you that it’s good. Thanks for that.”

  More silence.

  Adrian’s frustrated that he can’t get a response out of Xavier, of course, but he didn’t really expect anything else. What’s really bothering him is how with every passing second, he feels increasingly afraid that when the meal ends he’ll find himself with his wrist wrapped in the implacable steel of the cuff again.

  He puts down his fork.

  “Please don’t chain me up again. I’ll be good,” Adrian says, humiliated to have to beg for something so simple.

  At this, to Adrian’s surprise, Xavier does put the phone aside.

  “I’ll give you the benefit of the doubt. It won’t happen a second time.”

  Adrian nods enthusiastically. “Scout’s honor. Not actual scout’s honor. I was never a scout. Which I guess makes the expression kind of mean the opposite of what it’s meant to mean, cos a fake pledge of honor is kind of like promising that you’re not going to do the thing you say, right? Not that I’m doing that! I mean, I am promising. But I’m promising to be good, not promising to break my promise. Um.”

  Xavier’s lips quirk in a smile. “I knew what you meant.”

  Adrian falls asleep shortly after the break of dawn, his wrist free of the cuff, and dreams of teeth in his neck. For the first time in his life, it isn’t a nightmare.

  11

  XAVIER

  It seems unnecessarily cruel to keep Adrian confined to the bedroom, rather than the apartment as a whole. It’s proofed against any unsanctioned entry or exit, after all — without the key fob, there’s nowhere he could go, as both the elevator and the stairs will be closed off to him.

  So when Xavier unlocks Adrian’s door shortly after sunset, he tells the young man “You’ll have access to the whole of the floor from here on out, provided you give me no cause to revoke the freedom. There’s a television equipped with an extensive media library that you may use if you wish.”

  Adrian visibly brightens at the prospect of stimuli beyond his own company. “How about a library-library? You got any books here?” he asks.

  Xavier shakes his head. He keeps meaning to begin a collection of books, but keeps putting off the task for some night in the future that never seems to arrive.

  “That’s a bummer. Books would make all this much easier to cope with,”
Adrian says, clearly mostly talking to himself. It’s not surprising he’s fallen into the habit of doing so, after so much time alone in his own company — although Xavier gets the sense that this was how Adrian behaved long before his current misadventure began.

  “Wait here for a few minutes. I may have a temporary solution,” Xavier tells him as a plan begins to form. “Do you have any particular favorite genres?”

  Adrian shrugs. “I’m a pretty big Stephen King fan, so I guess that kind of stuff?”

  Xavier nods. “I’ll return presently.”

  He goes upstairs, leaving Adrian to begin exploring the layout of the rest of the apartment.

  Winter is in Emelie’s study with her, as he often is first thing in the evening. She’s doing her usual glance over her inbox, checking for anything immediately important before the later, more thorough weed-through that Xavier will do later to find the ones that need further action.

  “Do you have much in the way of Stephen King novels?” Xavier asks Winter, who taps his chin with one finger for a second before nodding.

  “Yeah, I think I’ve got a few. I mostly get longer novels like that digitally now, so I don’t have to find the shelf space for them after. But I’ve got a couple of his older ones in paperback, if that’s okay.”

  “That should be fine. I appreciate the help.”

  Winter leaves the study for a few minutes, returning with a copy of It in his hand. “Whoever it’s for has probably read this one already, but it was the first one I found.”

  “Hm, yes, whoever could it be for. Doesn’t really seem like your kind of thing,” Emelie says archly, not looking up from her laptop.