Page 12 of The Stars and the Stage
Maddox held the back of their head, guiding them toward his exposed neck. Venom pooled at the tips of Diego’s fangs. Their body instinctively obeyed, senses honed to every shudder of his muscles, every pulse of his veins. Their nose brushed his skin first, burying in the hair that curled beneath his ear. Their lips touched, and finally a fang.
Then all they could see were his younger hands, knuckles white around those damned pliers.
Diego’s whole body tensed. They jerked to the ground. Their heel caught the back of Maddox’s knee, and he wobbled. They took full advantage, letting them both fall onto one side. Diego rolled them. As they came up on top, they twisted the knife from Maddox’s grip and lodged a knee into his chest. They aimed the blade at his throat.
What Diego had done had barely been strenuous, but they were both heaving—exertion or emotion, Diego didn’t know. Maddox stared up at Diego, and his lips quirked. A trail of blood dripped from a scratch on his neck. Where Diego’s fang had cut, they realized.
Again, he hadn’t been the one to flinch—Diego had.
They were the one who couldn’t handle this, not Maddox. But as the murmurs of the crowd finally broke through their tunnel vision, they knew they could not let it look that way. As sovereign, they were the event’s entertainment, and a weak, scared ruler who hid from the consort they were clearly attracted to would make for a terrible show.
Knife still in one hand, they leaned forward to draw its harsh metal along the cut, catching a droplet of red. They brought the blade to their lips and tapped their tongue to it, so lightly that they couldn’t be sure what was taste and what was merely smell, before smearing the red between their fingers with a scoff. It took all of their strength not to shake apart or run or to collapse into Maddox’s arms.
Instead, they sneered. “You dare too much, my dear consort. Try something like that again and I will strip you of more than those fancy garments.”
They didn’t help him up. But he seemed not to mind, following them back to their table with a look that bordered on adoration. As they sat, he drew the backs of his fingers against the side of their arm. “You’re trembling.”
“I’m fine.”
“Haveyou been feeding?” He spoke low enough that the rest of the room couldn’t hear—except perhaps Valentine, who didn’t count—but Diego still worried they were coming too close to breaking character. And it was only the act that was keeping Diego together at the moment.
“Enough,” they snapped. “Now sit,consort. Before I make you kneel.”
Maddox huffed, but he sat obediently, his head bowed. He collected his dinner knife as soon as Diego set it on the table, before stealing their wine glass to down its contents. With the emptied cup in front of him, he began cuffing one sleeve. They didn’t realize what he was doing until it was too late.
As calmly as if he’d done it a hundred times before, he slit open the vein in his wrist and angled it to drip in a slow but steady stream into Diego’s cup.
They couldn’t decide which they were more: impressed that he’d gone through with it, or pissed they hadn’t been asked first. But maybe they weren’t really that pissed at all, the fire in their chest a kind of thrilled anger, giddy and eager with just enough spite to make them mean. Because as sweet as the gesture was, they couldn’t accept it. Diego might drink blood from a cup on the regular, but the lord of the vampires would never concede to that so easily.
Diego made a show of ignoring him, kicking back their chair and waving to Valentine. “You know, I think I’m hungry after all,” they called, loud enough for the room to hear. “Bring me someone who’s willing to do as they’re told.”
In response to the obvious slight, Maddox merely offered them a smile, and kept bleeding. He watched with an expression Diego couldn’t quite read as the silver-haired gentleman from the first night of the event offered himself up, kneeling for Diego to casually peel back his sleeve. They pressed their lips to the man’s wrist first, letting their gaze meet with Maddox’s before sinking in their fangs. Maddox twitched—not a flinch, but a little jealous tightening. He lowered his eyes to the cup beneath his wrist, and still he kept bleeding.
Diego wondered, if perhaps they were being cruel to him.
It didn’t matter, they decided as they let their prey return to his seat with a compliment and a kiss, their hunger sated without ever hitting the craving that coiled in their belly. Maddox wouldn’t possibly bleed himself for their sake again. Especially not after Diego continued to ignore him, making him resolutely bandage up his wrist without the aid of a vampire’s healing administrations, and asking Valentine to send the cup to Diego’s favored vampire for the evening.
Maddox would get the message, surely.
When he left the moment the night ended, without a proper goodbye to anyone but Valentine, much less the offer of that date he’d been begging Diego for all week, they were certain he’d receivedsomekind of message indeed. They feared he might have interpreted it asfuck off, you’ll never have me, and worried, too, that it would be the right conclusion, even if the thought of losing his presence during events already made their chest ache. It left them such a distracted mess during their Wednesday night prep that they began running lines for the wrong event entirely before Valentine finally told them to take the practice off.
He’d sprinted after them as they stormed out, wrapping them up in the soft, timid embrace of his that always managed to make them feel like a complete person instead of a fragment of fire and wants. When he’d asked what was wrong though, Diego had just shrugged. They weren’t ready to admit to anyone—especially their partner who was so clearly invested in Maddox—that they were terrified they’d accidentally driven him away. That they were stillenoughin love with him, that they genuinely wanted to know if they could fall in love with himagain.
But when the doors opened again on Thursday night, and Maddox was the third guest to stride through them, somehow Diego’s fears only shifted. Because if he was here, then he was stilltheirs, at least within the fiction. And Diego didn’t know what to do withthat, either.
Ten minutes before the meal was to be served, he sat down beside them, unwound the bandage at his wrist, and cut. He had learned nothing, clearly—and that—that was his fault, wasn’t it? It was his fault that Diego called forward another human from the guest list, granting them venom and a kiss in exchange for their blood as Maddox looked on, spilling his life source into a cup Diego couldn’t accept. They gave it away again, and Maddox rebandaged his wrist without question.
He played out the rest of the night as though he’d done nothing out of the ordinary, though the other guests had clearly noticed. Gossip spread like wildfire. It varied in intensity, but always in Maddox’s favor: he was valiant and Diego was torturing him. That belief didn’t stop new humans from offering themselves up as substitutes though, nor Maddox from continuing to bleed for the one vampire he knew would refuse to drink of him.
It was too much—too much dedication and care and stupid, stubborn sacrifice. All for Diego. And each time that Maddox lost a little more blood, he asked for no vampire bite to aid in replacing it, nor saliva to help with healing. His own body was mending the recut flesh worse and worse. He tried to hide it from Diego, covering his winces and turning his increasingly more marred skin away from them, but they could see the way he was favoring it by the end of the weekend, how he’d stopped using his fingers whenever possible.
“You’re going to hurt yourself,” Diego finally hissed at him, as he held his bleeding wrist over their now nearly-full cup for the fourth night in a row. He tried to shift the wound so they couldn’t see it as he pulled it back to bandage, but Diego grabbed his arm, scowling at the gnarly oozing line, the edges swollen and his skin red for an inch on either side.
“That’s my choice.” He tried to tug it free, but Diego refused to let him.
“Stop moving,” they chided, a little too gentle for their character. If Prince Maddox had so wooed the court, though, then perhaps it was time for his charms to finally start rubbing off on their sovereign. “If it scars, it’ll be harder to bite through later.” They gave a little huff and snapped a finger over their shoulder. “Valentine, attend to this for me.”
Maddox reached for Valentine’s hand with his free one, wrapping up his fingers tenderly and squeezing, but he held them at a distance, his attention fixed on Diego. His expression was a destructive thing, his intensity so soft and melancholic. “Am I still not worthy of your care?”
