Page 11 of How to Bare Your Neck and Save a Wreck
Shane—hisShane—sat there—bound there—limbs limp and head lolling, a slow stream of scarlet sliding through the tube implanted in his vein. On a rocker below him lay full bags of blood. Too many.
Andres could feel each one of them like a punch to the chest, the rest of the world spinning down to that deep red that should have pumped Shane’s life through his body.
Shane, who was left with so little that he’d lost consciousness. Shane, who was stillbeingdrained.
“Mygod.” Andres moved in a haze, knocking into Shane’s feet as he stepped around to his side. The man barely groaned, his lashes fluttering without opening.
Maul grabbed his arm. “He’s the fucking journalist who’s been poking around our territory. We checked and he has no one, we’re safe.”
The journalist Maul had said he’dtake care ofon the phone. So he’d chosen this: the certain death.
The worst outcome.
“You’re killing him.” Andres couldn’t tell how his own voice sounded through the shock. Hollow, probably. It was how he felt, gnawed open and carved out, like he was trying to embody too many emotions at once and his soul was still deciding which ones it could reasonably fit.
“He stuck his neck into our business—he should have expected we’d bite.” Maul narrowed his eyes. “I didn’t think you’d care.”
Andres shouldn’t have cared, notthismuch, not about someone who had such potential to harm their clandestine community already fighting to survive. Someone who’d all but rejected him earlier that night. But Shane… his Cygnus.
Andres could still feel the breath he’d held at the end of the Vitalis-Barron gala, after Shane had watched him threaten and bite a woman with more right to call herself a monster than he did, waiting to see if his little swan would let him leave without protest. His heart had pounded with each moment Shane’s hands had lingered over the handle of the door, but at his core, he’d known what his little swan’s answer would be.
Shane had earned that kiss.
There was no fucking way Andres would let him die now.
He just had to make Maul feel the same. Maul, whose predominant state in life was to take advantage and wrest control at every point imaginable, and who currently had all the power. But Andres had been slapped by the hand that fed him enough times to know how to work around that.
He exhaled, slipping his face into something almost like his usual expression, aloof and sensual and perhaps just a little devious. Hopefully by now, the puffiness around his eyes had faded too much for Maul to notice. “Normally I wouldn’t care about someone like him,” Andres said. “But I tasted this one months ago and nothing has compared since. It’s devastating to see so much potential blood go to waste.”
Maul raised his brow. “I’ll put aside some bags for you.”
“Oh, but you know how much better it is when you sink your fangs into the throat of a pretty human, when they’re warm beneath you and their breath quickens?” How many bagshadShane lost already? God, Andres had to do this faster. “Besides, if you kill him now, you’ll get 7 pints, if you’re lucky, perhaps 9 if you can exsanguinate the rest quickly enough to stay fresh after his heart stops beating. But if he’s alive, being bitten regularly, he’ll produce that in a few months. You cut my parasite gig on that blood bank short, let me at least try it on a single human; I bet I can keep him bleeding for me for a year, at least. Who knows, this could be the next big thing in blood collection.” He should not have said that, fuck, he was going to be putting ideas into Maul’s head.
But by the way the vampire’s eyes gleamed, one edge of his lips crawling upward, it was clearly working. “A long-term supply, huh.” He nodded slowly, eyeing Shane. “But he’ll be your responsibility. And you’re not just taking him for free. If you think you can get blood from him for a year, then he’ll cost you the same as a year’s blood.”
Shit. Maul charged him less for his bags than the average vampire—one perk of running the side of the business that would have let him skim off the top, had he been willfully stupid enough to try—but that was still…
“Round it down to ten grand and you have a deal?”
“Fair enough.”
“I’ll have the money for you by the morning.”
Andres could almost not believe the words coming out of his own mouth. Ten grand was the better part of his savings from the last few years, the safety net he’d been building for when his old Mazda finally bit the bullet. But then his gaze slipped back to Shane like he was the other end of a magnet. Like he was Andres’s. Ten grand, for the life of someone he hadn’t been able to get out of his mind for months; someone who hadn’t even remembered him. Ten grand, for his constellation.
Shane was more than worth it.
A knock broke through the quiet. Maul grunted. Pulling a smartphone off a side table, he handed it to Andres. “This was his. Do what you want with him.” He pulled the curtain closed and through it Andres could hear him greeting the newest customer—it sounded like a line was finally forming.
Andres forced himself into action. Tucking Shane’s phone away, he knelt beside the chair and withdrew the catheter from Shane’s arm. The man’s blood continued to ooze, and the scent overwhelmed Andres like a gust of heat from an oven. He cradled Shane’s arm and lifted the little wound to his mouth. That small taste of him was unparalleled, savory and sharp and a hint of sweet all wrapped into one haunting flavor that felt like a long afternoon in the sun as a human. If Andres had truly been buying him for his blood, ten thousand would have been far too cheap for such a delicacy.
Shane moaned, his whole body flinching away from Andres’s touch with a feeble twitch that seemed more instinctual than conscious.
“My poor little swan, what have they done to you?” Andres muttered.
Andres held him still, pressing his fangs into Shane’s skin slowly and gently to push a dose of the blood-regenerating vampire venom into his body. This time the sound Shane made was sweeter, addled by the momentary intoxicant. It passed as soon as Andres’s fangs had left him.
He’d need more before the night was over, but that would be enough to keep him alive.
