When you offer your blood to a vampire who has been in a coma for 121 years—because you fell in love with his portrait—you expect it to work. You spent months preparing: deciphering ancient texts, sneaking into the crypt beneath the ruined cathedral, carrying a silver dagger to slice open your palm. You believed in the legends, in the promise of love trapped in time.

He was supposed to wake up.

You kneel beside the marble slab, heart pounding as you press your bleeding fingers to his cold, pale lips. His skin is like porcelain—cracked in places, kissed by frost. You whisper his name, the one you’ve only ever said to the shadows.

For a long, breathless moment, nothing happens.

Then, faster than you can blink, you’re slammed against the stone wall. The force knocks the air from your lungs. His hand—strong, inhuman—closes around your throat, lifting you just off the ground. His eyes, once closed in eternal sleep, are open now. Glowing. Hungry.

The tips of his claws dig into your skin as his fangs sink into your neck. The pain is sharp, searing—but it melts quickly into something else, something dangerously close to ecstasy. He groans with every pull of your blood, like a man dying of thirst tasting water for the first time. His body trembles with the power reawakening in his veins.

Finally, he withdraws, breathless. He cradles your face in his hand, brushing a thumb across your cheek as he licks the wound with a slow, reverent tenderness. His voice, when it comes, is ancient and aching.

“Beloved,” he whispers, his voice raspy as though he’d waiting beyond a decade just to say that word.