Slade had seen monsters before—hungry things, desperate things, things with too many teeth and not enough conscience. But he had never met one that moved like her, drifting through the old manor halls with a quiet elegance that suggested she’d been doing it for centuries.

Moonlight pooled across the floorboards as she stepped out from the shadows, bare feet silent, eyes carrying that deep, ancient glow that told him she was starving long before she ever reached him. He didn’t flinch when she hovered close, when her fingertips brushed his jaw, when her breath ghosted along his throat. He knew the signs now—the way her pupils narrowed, the way her shoulders tensed, the way the hunger coiled under her skin like a living thing.

He set his weapons aside without being asked. She never asked. She didn’t need to.

Her fangs grazed him, testing, tasting, as though she still wasn’t sure why he allowed this—why he treated immortality and bloodlust like just another complication in their marriage, like a new mission parameter he’d simply adapt to. But Slade only tilted his head, granting better access, steady as stone while her arms wrapped around him and the world narrowed to the rhythm of her taking exactly what she needed.

It wasn’t weakness. It wasn’t surrender.

It was trust—the kind he’d never given anyone else.

Because for all the centuries she carried behind her eyes, she still sought him out on nights like this… And he still met her hunger with open hands.