Page 61 of A Vow of Blood and Tears

I kept my farewell short, a mere nod to him before I fled into the keep, without even looking at what he’d managed to get onto the canvas.

Ellena remained to help him with his materials; more joy for me, to be away from her. For all I knew she was feeding him more gossip now, about what I did, where I went—or didn’t.

Like my husband’s bed.

I’d been a servant my whole life; much of our stability was founded on gossip of the people who owned us. I shouldn’t have been surprised that the fact that I was emphaticallynotin Bane’s bed was a subject of conversation.

And yet, now that I found the shoe on the other foot, it was quite infuriating. What business of theirs was it if we had heirs or not? He would live forever, and one day…

I stopped in the middle of a hallway, not even seeing where I was. The thought was a punch to the gut, kicking the breath out of my lungs.

One day I would die, and he would replace me.

There would be another woman living in my tower. Another woman wearing that white spidersilk gown. Another woman glancing sidelong at that bestial face, learning to read the small tells that meant he was smiling, or worried, or angry.

Bane and Wyn had told me themselves… a vampire only gave his blood to a true mate, one they wanted for all the long centuries of their lives. He had told me I would never taste his.

I was used to feeling invisible and unwanted, but I’d never considered how ephemeral I truly was.

One day, that portrait would be all that remained of me—that, and Bane’s memories.

Replaceable. Mutable. Unheard.

A mere transitory century of Bane’s entire life. And he had not come to find me today, despite the limited fragment of a lifespan I had compared to him—whatever I had left, it was a mayfly speck against his eternity.

Because I was just the first of many. No matter what I did, whatever loyalty I felt towards him… I would only be a ghost to him.

Miro was painting my epitaph in the present.

Despite the heat of the day and the sweaty fabric against my back, I felt cold deep down in my bones.

Chapter 16

Bane

My wife’s words ran through my mind all through the day, the journal she had written speaking directly to me, a letter from the heart.

I feel like you already know me, but how is that possible?

Because, I wanted to tell her, my people had a story—that the ancestors would guide you to the one you were made for. The one you knew in your heart, even if you had not yet met them in the flesh.

If I’d been asked if I believed in that story last year, I would have said no. Today… I wasn’t so sure. Maybe there was some credence to it.

Or maybe that was simply the hope inside me that I couldn’t quite bring myself to crush.

When I’d returned to my tower in the late hours of the night, the journal had been waiting on my bed. I’d paced back and forth for several minutes before picking up the precious gift with some trepidation, half afraid I would open it to blank pages, a refusal of my gift.

Instead, I’d found pages and pages of Cirri’s words, her fears, her hopes, her dreams.

I’d known my wife was intelligent. I hadn’t realized how much work she had put into learning so many languages, that she’d sold years of life to achieve it, that she wantedto go even further.

And her fears…

She did not fear me or what I was, only my thirst.

The relief I’d felt at reading those words was like shedding the weight of the world. She wished to see more of me. She wanted…mycompany.

Huddled over the journal, touching the words that she had inscribed with her own hand, I chortled gleefully to myself.

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