The great hall transforms for tonight's banquet—crimson silk drapes every surface like flayed skin, candelabras weep wax onto tables laden with food only I will touch.
The vampires have arranged themselves in careful hierarchy, a tableau of beautiful monsters pretending at civilisation whilst hunger prowls beneath their perfect faces.
I enter wearing the black gown Mira laid out—mourning colours, though I'm not certain what I grieve. My old life, perhaps.
Or the girl I was before I knew how blood looked on my husband's lips.
The rose haunts my thoughts as I descend the stairs. Those missing thorns trouble me more than their presence would have. Each small wound in the stem where something sharp once grew—evidence of careful attention, of time taken.
He'd held that rose in his cold hands and methodically removed every defence it possessed.
Why?
The obvious answer: so I wouldn't prick myself. But nothing here operates on such simple kindness.
Perhaps he removed them because he recognises something of himself in those absent thorns. A dangerous thing made safe for handling.
Is that what he's trying to become with his pomegranate wine—something that can exist without drawing blood?
Or perhaps—and this thought chills me more than the others—he removed them because he doesn't want me capable of even that small violence. No thorns to prick my finger, no blood to well from my own choosing.
Every drop of my blood belongs to him, to spill or preserve as he sees fit.
Dorian doesn't acknowledge my arrival, but I feel his awareness like cold fingers trailing down my spine. Three nights married, and already I know his patterns.
The Ashfords wave me over. Between them sits a girl—human, young, perhaps sixteen. She wears servant's clothes but finer than most, and there's something wrong about how she sits.
Too still. Too accepting.
"Our gift to the gathering. Loved our gourmet wine," Corin says, stroking the girl's hair. The girl doesn't react. Her eyes hold a drugged glaze—that terrible compliance I nearly drank myself into. "Fresh from the villages. Isn't she lovely?"
"She's a child," I say.
"She's sustenance," Callum corrects gently. "And willing sustenance at that. Aren't you, dear?"
The girl nods, smiles. That horrible, empty smile of those who've forgotten they should fear death.
The banquet proceeds with grotesque pageantry. Vampires toast with blood-filled goblets whilst I push food around my plate, appetite murdered by the copper scent that permeates everything.
Then Lord Ashford stands, raises his goblet. "A toast," he declares. "To our gracious host, His Grace Prince Dorian North, who proves that even monsters can master restraint."
The room ripples with dark laughter. They all know what he means—Dorian's untouched bride, his refusal to feed properly, the pomegranate wine that substitutes for what he truly craves.
"Though perhaps," Lady Ravenna adds, her smile cruel as winter, "our prince might honour us with a proper demonstration. It's been so long since we've seen him feed as nature intended."
The room stills. I feel the shift like pressure dropping before a storm. Dorian's jaw tightens almost imperceptibly.
"The girl is here for that purpose," Corin offers sweetly, gesturing to the servant between them. "Unless our prince has forgotten how?"
It's a challenge wrapped in silk. The vampire nobility questioning his strength, his control, his very nature. And I understand with sick certainty that refusing would be worse than accepting.
Would mark him as weak. Would mark us both as prey.
Dorian rises with liquid grace. "Bring her forward."
The girl walks to him without hesitation, that pomegranate smile never wavering. She kneels at his feet, tilts her head to expose her throat. The room holds its breath.
I watch my husband transform. Not physically—nothing so obvious. But something shifts in his posture, in the set of his shoulders. The restraint he wears like armour cracks, revealing glimpses of the monster beneath.
His hand curves around the girl's throat, gentle as a lover's touch, positioning her just so.
"Please don't," I say, the words escaping before I can stop them.
Every eye turns to me, but I only look at him. Dorian's gaze finds mine across the space, and what I see there stops my heart—not hunger but desperation, not shame but terror.
As if he's standing at the edge of something irreversible.
"The lady objects to nature itself," Lydia observes with poisonous delight. "How wonderfully naive."
But Dorian doesn't look away from me. Holds my gaze as he lowers his mouth to the girl's throat. I see the moment he surrenders to it—the careful control shattering like ice beneath spring water.
His teeth pierce skin with surgical precision, and he drinks.
The girl sighs—pleasure or pain, impossible to tell. The room watches in reverent silence as their prince feeds, as blood trails down pale skin.
But something shifts. The controlled sip becomes desperate gulping. His grip on the girl tightens from gentle to crushing.
"Enough, brother. Leave something to others," Lydia says, but there's worry beneath her casual tone.
He doesn't stop. Can't stop. The girl's eyes roll back, her body going limp, and still he drinks. The neat wound tears wider as control dissolves entirely.
"Dorian!" Lydia's voice cracks with real fear now.
He wrenches himself away with such violence the girl drops like a broken doll. Servants scramble to tend her, to see if she still breathes. She doesn't. But I can't look away from my husband's face.
His eyes burn pure red—no iris, no white, just crimson from edge to edge. Black veins spread from beneath them like ink through water, covering his face in a web of corruption.
His fangs extend fully, too long for his mouth, blood dripping from their length. When he breathes I hear the rattle of something breaking inside him as he starts approaching me through the ballroom.
"Run." The word tears from his throat, barely human.
His body convulses. Whatever war he's been fighting, he's losing. He takes another step toward me. Then another. But I don't move.
Every instinct screams for flight, but something else—something suicidal or brilliant or both—keeps me rooted.
He stops inches from me. I can smell the copper on his breath, see myself reflected in those pure red eyes, feel the barely contained violence radiating from his trembling form.
His hand rises toward my throat, shaking with the effort of not grabbing.
"I'll kill you, little wife" he whispers, and it sounds like glass breaking in his throat.
"No," I say, quiet enough that only he can hear. "You won't."
I don't know why I say it, don't know why I believe it. His hand hovers at my throat. The entire room seems to lean in, anticipating the violence, the inevitable conclusion.
Some of the vampires look hungry. Others, like Lydia, look terrified. The Ashfords watch with identical expressions of fascination.
Then, with effort that seems to shatter something fundamental inside him, Dorian steps back. His hands drop. The red begins to fade from his eyes, leaving them hollow, exhausted, more dead than I've ever seen them.
He turns and walks from the hall without another word.