The door opens before I can knock.
No. Not him. Out of all people in this damn world…
James fills the frame like a verdict. His gray-blue eyes meet mine, and he inhales sharply, the sound barely audible. I see the effort it takes not to move closer. The silence isn’t awkward; it’s perilous.
“Theresa.” His voice is low, strained. “Come in.”
I step inside because the alternative feels like surrender.
The door closes behind me with a soft click that sounds too much like a lock.
“This is your house.” My voice is barely making a sound. “I thought it belonged to a client.”
“Once,” he says. “Not anymore.”
His gaze holds mine. I remember every time he looked at me at work, every time my body betrayed me under that gaze.
“You knew,” I say. “About the Exchange. About me.”
“I did.” His throat works, a swallow that looks like restraint. “And I regret that knowledge cost you fear.”
“You regret that I was afraid,” I say. “Not that you watched.”
“No.” His eyes darken. “I don’t regret knowing you.”
“You do not know me.” My protest is reflexive.
He shakes his head. “I know what I see when you think no one is looking. The part of you that wants a life measured in more than duties.”
Shame burns through me, bright and brief. I hate that he can see me.
“That isn’t a compliment.”
“It isn’t meant to be.”
He gestures toward the sitting room. I follow, though everything in me screams to turn around. Two chairs. A low table. Nothing else. The kind of room where decisions are made and consequences are accepted.
He doesn’t sit right away. “You’ve been trying to understand me,” he says finally. “So I’ll give you the truth.”
“I’m listening.”
“Most people are… faceless, dull. It’s cold and lonely in their company. Predictable people with shallow personalities.” He sighs, gathering strength. “You… you stir me. My attention, my interest. You make me remember what hunger feels like,” he admits.
It rouses some warmth in me — his confession, earnest tenderness. Yet, deeply-rooted cynicism still overpowers me. I laugh, sharp and humorless. “So you decided to buy me?”
“Keep anyone else from doing it.”
“Tell yourself that helps,” I say. “It’s still ownership.”
His jaw flexes. “It’s restraint!”
The word hangs between us like a threat. His hands fly to the air. He’s furious… Because he’s powerless to change my mind? To influence me? To make me understand? I’m puzzled and defensive; he, frustrated. “I wanted to protect you!”
My breath catches. “You sound like someone was gonna kill me.”
“Almost.”
“Almost?!” My question hangs. Like a demand. An interrogation. You. Will. Tell. Me.
He can’t stop himself in time, words leaving his mouth, before he can realize, “They would drink you dry!”
“What?” I’m confused. My thoughts are racing, yet they can’t keep up with what he’s saying.
“The Exchange,” he says quietly, “is a front,” he says, and the word lands with weight. “It allows the right people to find the right… arrangements.” Guilt swallows his last word.
“Arrangements…” I mouth off after him, as if hypnotized. The picture already forms at the back of my mind; the taste, on my lips.
He looks at my throat. Not for long. Just long enough to make the air thicken. “For blood.”
The world fractures. I make a sound that might be a laugh except it breaks in the middle. “You are saying vampires use an auction site to buy virgins?”
“I am saying,” he answers, “that a network exists beneath the site, and it is used by my kind to avoid chaos.”
“Your kind,” I repeat. The words taste like iron. “You want me to think you are a vampire?”
“I want you to know what you already suspect.” He tilts his head a fraction, and for a heartbeat his stillness feels inhuman.
I remember the precision of his movements, the way he never seems to breathe hard, the way fluorescent light makes him look glazed with winter.
“Prove it,” I whisper.
He steps forward. The air drops ten degrees. My breath fogs faintly. His pupils widen, swallowing color. His presence hums — pressure, cold, control.
“That’s enough,” I manage. “I believe you.”
He steps back, breathing steady but too shallow, too careful.
His piercing eyes flick to my hands. “You’re not a thing to be bought and sold. You don’t deserve to be treated like a commodity. Like a box of juice to drink and discard. The thought of anyone else’s mouth on you makes me—” He cuts himself off. “I relish you.”
“And my blood too?”
He pauses, with a look of remorse, longing, and melancholy. “I can’t lie. I watch it, sliding along your veins.”
For a moment, I forget how to breath, making me hear my heart bitting stronger and stronger, faster and faster. I lift my wrist toward him, pulse fluttering just beneath the skin. “Is that what you want?” I almost moan.
The movement freezes him. His pupils narrow to slits; his expression twists — not with hunger, but with agony.
He steps forward and grips my wrist, not hard, but firm enough that I can feel the tremor running through him. His skin is ice. His voice is rough. “Please, don’t.” Is that the first time he feels this weak?
The roles change. Now I, a cold and calculating boss; he, a nervous mess of a secretary. I stare up at him, greedy, drunk on power. “What are you afraid of?”
“That I won’t be able to stop.”
I slowly, seductively close the distance, slow enough to give him time to stop me — and he doesn’t. His chest is still, unmoving. The space between us feels electric, dangerous. I can smell his restraint, the clean sharpness of it.
I rise on my toes. The air between us tastes like metal and cedar. My fingers find his collar, steadying myself as the world narrows to the pulse that shouldn’t exist beneath his skin. His eyes drop to my mouth; mine to his. I lean in. The distance is a whisper.
“Make me a vampire.”
The words leave my mouth and hang there like a challenge neither of us can take back. His breath breaks first. His gray-blue eyes flicker, the first real crack in his control.
He exhales, a sound half yearning, half grief. “Theresa,” he says, careful, reverent. “It’s forever.”
“Good,” I whisper. “I’m tired of temporary.”
We move together — slow, magnetic, inevitable. He tilts his head, lips tracing from the corner of my mouth to my ear, then lower, following the line of my throat as he inhales — slow, deliberate, like he’s memorizing the scent of surrender.
Something sharp flashes in the dark. The night holds its breath.