Page 24 of Claim of Blood
Who would come looking?
If Adam had killed him, he’d have served his purpose, wouldn’t he? The bait dangled. The trap sprung. A sacrifice already calculated into the cost. He could almost hear his uncle explaining it in clipped tones over dinner.“Necessary. Clean. Tactical.”
Felix might look. He’d try. He always tried. But would anyone else?
Leo swallowed hard. A strange, hollow ache bloomed in his chest—not fear, not grief, just... absence.
“No,” Adam said. His fingers didn’t pause in their slow, steady strokes through Leo’s hair. “That would only delay the inevitable. They would investigate. And grief makes hunters more dangerous, not less.”
Leo gave a little shiver at the certainty in his voice. Heat curled low in his belly, a pulse of raw want that made him press his face more firmly into Adam’s thigh, desperate to hide the sudden flush creeping up his neck.
His body shouldn’t react like this. Not to this.
But it was. And everyone in the room could smell it.
Adam’s hand tightened in his hair—a silent acknowledgment, or maybe a warning. Leo couldn’t tell, and the not knowing only made the heat worse.
“Then what?” Ilona demanded. “We cannot hide him forever. The moment they realize he’s missing—”
“They won’t find him,” Adam said.
Leo’s skin prickled with the weight of it, but this time the shiver felt different—a strange, aching sense of safety. That voice. That certainty. No one had ever spoken about him like that. Like he mattered. Like someone to be kept.
He didn’t know what that made him feel—safe? Owned? Grateful? Sick?
“You can’t know that,” Nathaniel said. “These aren’t ordinary hunters. They’re von Rothenburg. Old blood. Connected.”
“I’m aware,” Adam said, his voice sharp enough to silence the room.
The voices blurred after that into logistics and timing, destruction of evidence and wait-and-see strategies. Always waiting. Always surviving.
Leo tuned it out because it didn’t matter, not really. Not when Adam’s fingers were still threading through his hair, not when the bond pulsed in time with his heart, syncing with the heat in his spine. Every breath he took was full of Adam’s scent—warm, old, grounding.
Without breaking the rhythm of conversation, Adam shifted. One hand left Leo’s scalp, trailing down to his bare shoulder, firm and guiding. Leo allowed himself to be moved, his body pliant as Adam gently repositioned him. Between Adam’s thighs now, his back resting against the curve of the ornate chair. The vampire’s legs flanked his hips, warm despite everything Leo had been taught to believe.
He should have resisted. Should have pulled away, pushed back, done something.
Instead, he exhaled and let himself sink. Into the warmth. Into the presence. Into the bond that coiled tighter every time Adam touched him.
The voices blurred around him, no longer words so much as sound rising and falling like waves brushing the edges of thought. But one sentence cut through, clear and cool:
“We need to discuss the Solstice,” Emilia said.
Leo stirred faintly, cheek still pressed against Adam’s thigh. The word stirred something sharper than the others—the memory of Stefan’s voice. The Summer Solstice. Something will happen then.
The council’s tone shifted. Where the previous conversation had been sharp-edged with threat and strategy, this was something else. Purposeful. Like priests debating sacred rites.
He caught fragments in his haze: a ballroom, a celestial alignment, the coven preparing for a ritual. The pack coordinating patrol schedules.
His mind drifted to his family’s archives—shelves upon shelves of meticulously documented vampire lore. But that was just it. They were meticulously maintained, curated, edited.
Of course, they didn’t include this. Leo’s thoughts sharpened, bitter. They only ever showed him what he needed to believe in the cause, what he needed to stay loyal.
His family didn’t teach—they curated. Selected stories with surgical precision: tales of hunter bravery, glorious sacrifice, supernatural tyranny barely held at bay. Every vampire account ended in horror, every shifter in carnage, every witch in corruption. They fed him legends instead of truth, just enough history to make him obedient and just enough bloodshed to make him hate.
And he’d swallowed it all. Trusted it. Trusted them.
But nothing he’d seen since arriving in Porte du Coeur matched the stories. The vampires here weren’t monsters—they were builders, organizers, patrons. They had neighborhoods and marketplaces, furniture that seemed to hold memories.
