Why did he kiss me?
The question circles through my mind like carrion birds above a battlefield, returning again and again to pick at the corpse of my understanding.
Was it punishment? Some elaborate humiliation I don't yet comprehend? Or worse—was it pity?
Prince Dorian is elsewhere whilst Lydia makes increasingly barbed comments about human fragility and the Ashfords speculate loudly about how many days I'll survive the marriage bed.
"Perhaps he'll be gentle," Corin muses, swirling blood in her crystal goblet. "Draw it out over weeks."
"My darling wife always was an optimist," Callum counters, his hand finding hers with practised synchronicity. "I say quick and clean. Before dawn."
Lord Vesper leans forward from his seat, voice pitched low but carrying. "Careful, Ashfords. Even you can't speak so freely about the Prince's marriage bed."
Corin's laugh tinkles like breaking crystal. "Can't we? Tell me, Vesper, who holds the deed to your estate in the Northern Territories?"
"You know very well—"
"We do. Just as we know who truly killed your sire. And where his ashes are scattered." Callum's smile never wavers. "Such fascinating stories in those old documents."
Lady Ravenna sets down her goblet with deliberate force. "Still using your grandfather's collection as a weapon, I see."
"Not a weapon," Corin corrects, examining her nails. "Insurance. Three centuries of contracts, marriage agreements, death certificates. Every secret the nobility thought they'd buried, all carefully catalogued in our vaults."
Lydia's voice cuts through the sudden silence. "You go too far."
"Do we?" They speak in unison now, that disturbing harmony that makes even vampires shift uncomfortably.
The temperature drops. Frost creeps across the table's surface.
"Enough." Dorian's voice comes from behind me, though I never heard him return. "Lord and Lady Ashford have been valued allies of House North for centuries. Their... record-keeping has prevented several wars."
"And started a few others," someone mutters from down the table.
"Only the profitable ones," Callum agrees cheerfully. "After all, someone must ensure the proper documentation when territories change hands."
His gaze finds mine, and I understand suddenly why even Dorian tolerates their provocations. They are the vampire world's memory, its conscience, its carefully maintained record of every sin and secret.
"Though after that display," Corin continues, as if the tension never existed, "perhaps we're wagering on the wrong outcome entirely. A kiss instead of a claiming? Either our prince has developed a sense of theatre, or..."
"Or he's following older traditions," Callum finishes. "The kind we have in our very earliest archives."
They're watching me with the patience of creatures who've seen every story play out before, who know every ending because they've catalogued them all.
Yet something in their synchronised attention suggests this story—this kiss, this breach of protocol—might be new even to them.
When the clock strikes two, Dorian rises without warning and the hall falls silent.
"I bid you all goodnight," he says, voice carrying no inflection. He doesn't look at me. "Vassier will escort my wife to her chambers."
And then he's gone, leaving me alone amongst the monsters.
The vampires exchange knowing glances. Lydia's laugh cuts through the silence—bright and vicious. "How disappointing for you, sister. Your wedding night, and already abandoned."
I rise on unsteady legs. "Perhaps he simply prefers his meals properly aged."
The Ashfords laugh at that, but it's the laugh of predators enjoying the mouse's final dance.
Vassier appears at my elbow, silent as death itself. I follow him through corridors that seem to shift and breathe, past portraits whose eyes track our movement, up stairs that groan like living things in pain.
My chambers remain as they were—drowned in red, pulsing with that strange warmth that feels too much like flesh. On the bedside table, there is a goblet.
"His Grace requests you drink this," Vassier says, indicating the goblet. "For your wedding night."
The liquid inside glows amber in the candlelight. It smells of fruit and copper, sweet and metallic simultaneously. Pomegranate, I realise. But wrong somehow. Fermented.
"What is it?"
"Pomegranate wine, Your Grace. A tradition for new brides of Wintergrave."
He leaves before I can ask more questions. I approach the goblet carefully, as if it might strike. The wine's scent grows stronger—intoxicating and repulsive in equal measure. Why pomegranate wine?
I know what it does to them, to vampires. The whispered stories passed down through generations of human staff. It satisfies their hunger like blood, created by alchemists a long time ago from rare pomegranate trees of the royal garden. But it also weakens them, makes them ill.
The thought arrives like ice through my veins.
I tasted pomegranate on his lips. Sweet and wrong and burning with the same fermented tang that rises from this goblet.
Dorian North, vampire prince, lord of ancient bloodlines—he drinks poison. The same poison they're offering me, though surely it must work differently on human flesh.
The wine calls to me. Just a taste, perhaps. Just to understand. I lift the goblet. The metal is warm, as if someone just released it from their grasp. The wine clings to the sides like syrup, like blood, like something between the two.
Mira bursts in. "Don't drink it!" She's breathless, panicked. "Whatever that is, don't—"
"How did you—"
"The servants' passages. They connect everything." Mira crosses to me, takes the goblet from my hands. "The cook told me. Marjorie—she's been here forty years, human still, somehow. She says the pomegranate wine is what they give brides they don't intend to turn. It's not poison, but it's not... right."
"What does it do?"
"She doesn't know exactly. Only that the brides who drink it change. Become docile and stop fighting." Mira sets the goblet down, away from us. "Sometimes they beg for things. Terrible things. Marjorie thinks it makes them want what vampires want. Makes them crave—"
She stops, unable to finish.
Blood. It makes them crave to share blood.
"He's not coming tonight," I say, the realization settling like lead in my stomach. "He's waiting to see if I'll drink it. Testing me."
Or perhaps offering mercy in his own monstrous way. Drink, and the fear goes away.
Thunder rumbles outside. Through the windows, I see the storm has worsened. Lightning illuminates the grounds in sharp, violent moments—dead gardens, twisted trees, and there, at the edge of the forest, a figure in black watching my window.
Dorian.
He stands motionless in the rain. Even from this distance, I feel he’s looking up at my chambers.
I cross to the window, meet his stare across the storm-torn darkness. Then, deliberately, I take the goblet and pour its contents out the window. The wine falls like liquid amber through the rain, splattering on the stones below.
For a moment, neither of us moves. Then he turns and disappears into the forest, leaving me to my wedding night—alone save for Mira, the storm, and the terrible understanding that I've refused the only kindness he knew how to offer.