It had been three days. Three days of looking at your own hands and seeing a ghost’s hands layered over them. Three days of hearing the echo of a language you’d never studied on your own tongue. Three days of looking at Vlad—Vlad, not just the Count, not just the myth, but your Vlad—and feeling a love so vast and so ancient it threatened to crack your ribs open.

He was… careful. Exquisitely, painfully careful. As if you were a manuscript of priceless vellum, newly restored, and he was afraid his touch would smudge the ink. He could finally kiss you now, a real kiss, one that held the weight of recognition rather than the ache of longing. And God, could he kiss. Each one was a sentence in a story four centuries long, a punctuation mark of devotion and desperation. But it was a story that had paused for four hundred years, and you were done with the pause. You were ready to tear through the pages to the end.

Tonight. The castle itself seemed to hold its breath. A storm was brewing over the Carpathians, and the wind sang a low, throbbing note against the ancient stones. You stood before the great fireplace in your chamber, the firelight painting your skin in shades of amber and gold. You’d chosen a chemise of the finest, almost translucent linen, something you’d found in a trunk that smelled of cedar and forgotten roses. It was Elisabeta’s, and yet it was yours. The fabric was a whisper against your thighs, a tactile memory of a life lived before.

The door opened without a sound. He stood there, a silhouette of black broadcloth and pallid skin against the dark wood of the hall. He’d been giving you space, time to adjust to the cacophony of two lives in one mind. But his eyes, those ancient, burning eyes, told a different story. They were the eyes of a man who had been drowning for centuries and had only just found the shore.

“You are still awake,” he said, his voice that familiar, gravelly baritone that did things to your spine.

You turned fully to face him. The fire caught the red in his eyes, the demon he kept so carefully leashed for you. He took a step into the room, and the air thickened, charged with the static of the coming storm and the one brewing between you.

“I’m making up for lost time,” you said, your voice softer than you intended. “Starting now.”

You closed the distance between you, your hands coming up to frame his face. It was cool, like marble, but thrumming with a latent, terrible power. You rose on your toes and pressed your mouth to his.

It was not the careful, reverent kiss of the past few days. This was hunger. This was a reclaiming. You poured every memory of loss, every dream of this moment, every frustrating second of his gentlemanly distance into it. Your tongue traced the seam of his lips, and with a groan that seemed torn from the very foundations of the castle, he opened for you.

His arms banded around you, crushing you to him. It was not the embrace of a lover, but of a man clinging to a spar in a tempest. His desperation was a physical thing, a tremor that ran through his entire frame. Four hundred years of celibate mourning, of a love preserved in the amber of his grief, were shattering in an instant.

“I have waited,” he gasped against your mouth, his hands roaming your back as if to memorize you through the thin fabric. “God, how I have waited. The centuries… they were an open wound.”

You led him to the bed, a vast expanse of dark silk and shadows. The storm broke outside, rain lashing the stained-glass windows, lightning illuminating the room in sudden, stark flashes. In each flash, you saw him—his face, a mask of agonized ecstasy, his eyes burning with a feral light.

He laid you back with a reverence that warred with his obvious need. His kisses trailed from your mouth to your jaw, down the column of your throat. He paused there, where your pulse hammered a frantic, human rhythm against his lips.