Page 90 of How to Bare Your Neck and Save a Wreck
“Shane? What’s wrong?” Andres asked the question, but his mind had already caught up, reason supplying him with the only logical answer. It settled like a weight in his stomach.
His little swan made a sound, pained and frustrated. “I know you won’t love me less—I know that. I just…” Shane’s voice broke, and when it returned, there was a broken longing in it that Andres hadn’t expected. “If I were to be marked in this way, it should have beenyourfangs.”
“Oh, love,” Andres whispered. For all the pain he’d undergone over the last hours—days? He wasn’t sure—Andres thought the feeling in his chest right then was worse. He lifted his hand once more, not reaching, just holding it out as best he could with the weakness still plaguing his muscles. “Can I see?”
Quietly, Shane handed him his glasses. The hazy edges of the room turned sharp, Shane’s freckles and lashes popping back into existence from the blur of his face, and there, where Andres’s fingers had brushed, lay the small, raised line of a ragged, improperly healed bitemark. Gently, he drew aside the collar of the shirt Shane had borrowed from him, pushing it over his shoulder as he traced scar after scar, a constellation of tragedies that wound their way down Shane’s arm, spanning neck to wrist on either side.
Andres could almost smell the scent of the blood that had dripped from each rushed and ragged bite, not the bright and bold sunshine but a terrified void of fear and misery. The crust of that red life had been washed clean now, and what wounds had remained after Andres’s hasty job at closing the bigger ones were knit into soft pink lines.
“This is my fault.” The words caught in Andres’s chest like a knife. “I should have healed them better. If I hadn’t been so sloppy—”
“You were dying,” Shane interrupted him, the blunt power in his words enough that it seemed he might rewrite the past. “We were both dying, and you still saved me. I’d rather have the scarsandyou, than even conceive of losing the person I love most in all the world.”
The person Shane loved most: that was Andres, absurdly and beautifully. “I love you, too,” Andres replied. He ran his hands along the small lines. So many of them. “You know, I think they are mine, and not because I feel guilty—though I do, and I imagine I will for a while. They’re my marks becauseyou’remy partner. You were there for me and I was there for you. When you see them, when you touch them, let them remind you of how much you’re worth to me.”
The softness of Shane’s smile was a delicacy. His brow knotted, though, and he hesitated before reaching for Andres’s neck, slow and open-palmed.
At first Andres thought the reluctance was simply giving him space in case his body felt the need for it, but with the way Shane focused, the precision with which his fingers brushed skin, the sorrow of the motion...
Shane’s thumb rolled over a line of flesh that felt wrong under the pressure, then a second just below it. “Is this how much I’m worth to you as well?”
Andres’s blood went cold. He found the spot on instinct, two scars, thin and long, as the memory of Maul’s fangs tore back through him. They hadn’t pierced him properly—hadn’t bitten into him to inflict their venom—but that hadn’t stopped the damage from being done. Shane’s hand came over his, though, skin on skin, and Andres closed his eyes, focusing on the present. And, just a little, the look on Shane’s face as he’d held the stake in Maul’s back. Andres smiled. “This is the reminder that I have a partner who would kill for me.”
Shane gave the smallest, sharpest laugh. “God, I did that, didn’t I?” He shook his head. “I don’t condone the death penalty, but he deserved it.”
“He really did.”
Without him, the black-market blood trade would likely descend into chaos, those more loyal to the money than the community all fighting among themselves to become the new Maul. Whether the vampires who came out on top would have the infrastructure to support the giant customer base that Maul had lorded over was another question, and one that would need solving sooner than later. Which meant Andres would have to do it.
He was done with Maul, but he wasn’t done with the blood trade—no vampire ever truly was.
That would have to wait until he could get out of bed, though.
“I think I’ll give that casserole a try now?” His stomach made a sound in agreement.
Shane helped him sit up a little straighter. Once he seemed sure that Andres was capable of eating, he dipped across the room to pull a set of papers off the dresser. “Oh, one more thing, while you eat.” His cheeks brightened as he handed the little stack over. “It needs a final edit, but I… I hope you’re not too disappointed. I couldn’t just leave it at Vitalis-Barron. It needed the whole story.”
Andres’s stomach twisted as his gaze swept over the title:The War on Blood. Beneath it read,Vitalis-Barron, the Black-Market, and the Artificial Scarcity of Life. It was so much more than he’d said he was comfortable with Shane publishing, than he’d believed would do the vampiric community any good.
As Andres skimmed the first page, Shane kept speaking. “Some pointed internet searches show that Vitalis-Barron has been undermining attempts to create vampire blood donation charities and biting centers for years now. It has the direct effect of driving hungry vampires to volunteer for research in the hopes of getting blood or money out of it, while conveniently adding fuel to the system that keeps them trapped in cycles of illegal dealings and poverty. The horror of the black-market blood trade was Maul’s fault, but it was their fault too, and all of ours. The world needs to know it. And, we conveniently get ten pages on howexactlyVitalis-Barron has been utilizing their power over the vampire community.”
The more Andres read of it, the more he realized: it wasn’t about Vitalis-Barron at all. It was about their victims; their pain and desperation, their personhood, their strength. Between the quotes from Tara were those from friends and family and lovers—both human and vampire—who’d lost someone to Vitalis-Barron’s labs. It shouted the names of the murdered like theywould go down in history. And then—only then—did it come for Vitalis-Barron, and it came hard.
By the end, Andres had set his food to the side and given up wiping back his tears, fat, salty drops splattering the paper.
“Is it…?” Shane’s voice quavered and cut out.
“It’sperfect.” With what little strength he had, Andres pulled Shane close.
His partner melted into him, laughing, and then he was kissing Andres, not the quiet, obedient kisses of their role play or the soft, lingering workday ones, but something altogether different and magnificent, a force of affection and desperation to be reckoned with. Andres returned the kiss, weaker but with just as much longing, opening himself up to Shane and letting the taste and feel fill him to bursting. Even the tang of his tears seemed right in that moment, a perfect, beautiful thing shared between their lips and hanging in their common breath.
As Shane finally pulled away, Andres smiled. “I mean it, you did an incredible job. Of course you did.”
“It wasn’t just me, though. I had all the vampires read it—even Vincent left notes in a copy I emailed. I had to be sure it was telling therightstory.”
Andres kissed him again. It was slower, sweeter this time, and he heeded his worn body’s urging to relax by settling back into the pillows after. He eyed the rest of his food but didn’t reach for it. “Natalie…?” He hadn’t wanted to ask. Between his choppy, pained memories, he thought he already knew.
Shane shook his head. “There was nothing when the police went looking. Anthony hasn’t seen her. They probably…”
