20. Alaric

CHAPTER TWENTY

ALARIC

Gideon: How are those blue-balls going, Allie? I thought you’d be interested to know, since you’ve been shut up in that castle during some of the most VITALLY IMPORTANT moments in history, that there is this wonderful invention called contraception – it enables a human women to have sex with whomever she chooses…without falling pregnant.

Do with that information what you will. I won’t tell. Don’t ever say I’m not a good friend to you.

T hat was close.

I’d been lying sleepless in my coffin, staring at Gideon’s text as my mind whirled with possibilities, when Winnie’s voice broke through my dark fantasies. I’d flown from my coffin and managed to drag my weakened body into the adjoining powder room before she saw me, where I stripped down, wrapped a towel around me, and dunked my head in the basin to appear as though I had just taken a shower.

At least my phone was now safely back in my possession. If Winnie had seen Gideon’s text…

…what then?

I grow hard at the thought of it, of what it meant…

This changes everything.

No. It doesn’t.

She is everything, and I am still the monster.

Winnie might have been frightened to see the coffin, but she would run away and never come back if she found me asleep inside it.

That’s good, a sensible voice whispers inside my head. She should run far, far away from this place. From you and the lustful thoughts you have about her every moment of every night…

I hate myself for how much I don’t want her to run.

Now that I know that we could be together without the risk of Dhampir, I will do anything to keep her, anything to make her mine .

Winnie waits for me in the hallway while I stamp down the beast clawing at the inside of my skin, clothe myself, and comb out my coffin hair. When I emerge to meet her, she’s slurping the soup she brought me with a spoon.

“You weren’t going to eat it, were you?” She grins at me as she dunks the bread into the soup and swirls it around.

A beat of fear pulses in my slow heart. Has she figured out my secret? But no, she merely thinks that I’m a human who doesn’t hunger.

If only she knew what it means to hunger…

“Not today. I’m still not feeling up to much.” Burns from sunlight heal much slower than other wounds, and it’s still a few hours until sunset.

Winnie’s face falls. “I’m so sorry. It’s my fault that you’re sick. I wish you didn’t have to save me, but thank you for saving me. I…I can’t tell you what it means to me.”

“You are safe in my castle, Winnie.”

…unless I am in your bed…

She makes a little squeak in the back of her throat. “I won’t let Mirabelle lead me on adventures around the fountain again. I had no idea that it was really a portal to Hades.”

“It’s a cistern to hold water when the castle was under siege. I keep the Hades portal in the basement.”

I hold out my arm to her, and she slides her hand beneath mine and allows me to escort her back downstairs as I explain about the last time the castle was besieged and how it withstood. Her touch whispers against my skin. Mine, mine, mine…

Winnie doesn’t need to know that I was there during the siege, throwing vats of burning pitch over the walls onto the enemy soldiers or slitting the throat of their commander and tossing his body from the window in her bedroom.

Or how the peasants I saved in that siege turned on me decades later when they realised I wasn’t aging and burned me at the stake as a sorcerer. That betrayal still rankles. I had to wait out a generation as a shadow in the wilds, subsisting on animal blood and wayward girls taking the woodland paths to visit their grandmothers, before I could return and claim back what’s mine. It took me years to scrub the human reek out of the castle walls.

“So your family lost the castle for thirty years, and then took the castle back?” Winnie follows my palatable version of the story. “You should give tours. This is so interesting, and you love history. You make it sound as if you were there.”

I nod. It’s on the tip of my tongue to tell her the truth, but Reginald is wrong. I’ve not lied to Winnie the whole time she’s stayed with us, and she doesn’t suspect what I truly am. If I have to say goodbye to her, we can make it another ten days without her learning that monsters are real.

Ten days where I can enjoy her company and pretend that her bright smiles are for me.

But if she could be mine, then perhaps…

…perhaps she deserves the truth.

We pass by the kitchen so Winnie can drop off the soup bowls and make herself another coffee. I swallow down my cresting hunger, thinking of the fine vintage Reginald stores for me in the cellar, but I can’t risk having a glass now, not when I’m weak and Winnie has me so twisted up.

We head to the drawing room that I’ve been using as my ceramic studio. Winnie pulls over two chairs and sits them opposite each other. “I realise that you’re too sick to help with the physical work today, but can you sit and tell me what to do?”

I nod.

“Good. Before we start with this room, I think it’s time to do step 2 of the Winnie Wins System – Intention.”

Winnie perches on one of the chairs and indicates that I should take the other. My knees brush hers, and the contact with her warm skin reminds me of the fire licking at my skin when the peasants burned me.

“I’ll do whatever you ask of me.”

Yes, ask me, beg me, whisper my name like an incantation.

If you knew the things I would do to you now in the chair, that tight skirt bunched up at your waist and your beauty laid bare for me, if only you would ask…

Winnie’s dark lips form an O of surprise. For a moment, I believe she hears my lustful thoughts. But no – she expected me to fight her on this activity. But I think she is describing a ritual, and I’ve lived through centuries where rituals and magic were real and dangerous.

I want to see what Winnie Preston does with magic on her fingers.

I also need to remain seated, so that I can hide my arousal in the folds of my shirt.

Winnie takes in a breath, her chest rising so her breasts brush around her lavender shirt, and I see the twin peaks of her nipples hard against the fabric.

She’s cold , I remind myself as I force my gaze to her face, as I try in vain to stop myself from committing the perfect peaks of her nipples to memory. Reginald hasn’t lit the fire yet.

Despite the lack of a fire or the fact that the kiln is cold, the room has never felt so hot or so small – a vast, impossible space shrunk to the inch between Winnie’s knees and mine.

“—an intention is an idea or belief that you hold to be true,” Winnie is saying. I nod and nod and nod but I don’t think I hear a word. “You carry it through your life and come back to it when you feel lost or overwhelmed. Intentions guide our actions so we can live by our values.”

Sweet Winnie, if you knew about my intentions for your body right now…

“I can give you an example.” Winnie’s eyes flutter closed, her eyelashes tangling together. I lean forward an inch and press my knees to hers. I hoped the contact would ease my monstrous thoughts or quiet the hunger burning in my throat, but instead, it flares higher, burning through my kneecaps and straight into my chest.

“I would like that.”

Winnie’s voice trembles a little as she continues. “I haven’t said much about my mother or how I grew up, but it was…not great. I spent my teenage years staying at my best friend Claire’s house as often as I could and counting down the days until I could move out. I actually moved out on my eighteenth birthday, which doesn’t seem like a great birthday present, but if you knew what…anyway.” She swallows, her throat moving. I’m transfixed by the artery pulsing in her long, elegant neck. “I thought once I was out of her house, all the stress of living there would just disappear. Instead, it got worse. Claire and I flatted together at uni and I couldn’t deal with all the space . I lived with this gnawing sensation in my gut that if I wasn’t vigilant, it would all fall apart. I cleaned constantly and threw out everything that wasn’t nailed down – even an essay Claire printed for her professor once. I was a horrible person to live with. I had these awful nightmares, and I’d wake up screaming and crawl into bed with her.”

I open my mouth to ask her about the nightmares, the ones she still has now, but she keeps talking.

“Claire made me see a therapist, and it helped. My therapist told me that I’d been living in survival mode with my mother for so many years and now that I felt safe, my body and heart were processing the trauma from my childhood. One of the things she taught me to do was to set intentions. My intention is, ‘I deserve to be happy.’ Whenever I’m stressed or spiralling, I come back to that, and I ask myself, ‘What would make me happy right now?’ and I try to do that thing for myself. Does that make sense?”

I don’t know what a therapist is, but it makes my breath still and my unworking heart clench for whatever Winnie has gone through that made her, even for a moment, think she didn’t deserve happiness. It makes me want to tear the world to pieces with my teeth and drain dry any person who hurt her.

“Yes,” I manage to grit out, my hands balling into fists. “I understand.”

“Good.” She smiles that beautiful bright smile. But this time, I see the sadness on the edges. “When I leave you with this beautiful, tidy castle, I don’t want you to fall back into the habits that got you to where you are. You deserve to have this space to be creative, Alaric, but Reginald’s right about one thing – you could become a hoarder if you’re not careful. I don’t want that to happen to you.”

Her voice cracks.

The idea that Winnie might care about me sends my head spinning and the monster inside me clawing to be free.

“So we’re going to set intentions for your space, and your life.” Winnie places her hands on her knees, and I unclench my fists and copy her. But then she places her hands over mine, and I’m back to fantasies so monstrous that she’d personally light my funeral pyre if she could see them. “What do you want for your life?”

I want you. On my desk, legs spread wide for me.

I want to scrape my fangs over your nipples while you writhe beneath me.

I want my name on your lips again as I drive you wild with my tongue and fingers…

I want to taste you. All of you.

I want to make you mine.

Winnie squeezes my fingers when I don’t say anything. “Remember when I told you that you were a perfectionist?”

I remember every word you speak.

“It may seem odd, but often, living in mess is about control,” Winnie says. “You don’t have to tell me, but can you think of something traumatic that happened to you before you started accumulating stuff?”

I died on the battlefield and woke up in a castle in Germany as a monster.

I was burned at the stake by villagers I saved.

I was tortured by a witch hunter.

I was left to hang from a tree for five days and nights.

I was buried alive and had to wait for the wood of my coffin to rot before I dug my way out.

As the memories flash unbidden in my mind, my fangs push into the flesh of my lip. I can’t open my mouth and risk her seeing them, so I nod.

“The traumatic thing makes you feel like the world is scary and out of your control. We can’t stop people from hurting us.” Her voice cracks. “But your castle and your art are things you control. They make you feel good, and there’s no risk of being hurt. So you build a physical barrier between yourself and the outside world, like the walls of a castle.”

How she can spend mere days with me and yet know my heart?

I nod again. I don’t trust myself to do anything else.

Winnie knits her fingers in mine, and I find myself swallowing back a well of emotion. “Trauma never goes away, Alaric. I still live with mine. The memories come up often, unexpectedly, at the worst possible times. Some people become workaholics, or turn to alcohol, to hide from their trauma. Some, like my ex Patrick, become gym nuts because looking after your body can feel like being in control. And some people build their castle walls higher.

“But control is an illusion . All that stuff won’t keep you safe. Only you can do that. You are enough .” Her eyes glisten with tears as she says this, and I’m no longer certain if she’s talking to me or herself. “You are enough, Alaric. You can’t hide away here forever. You’re too special. You deserve a life outside of Black Crag. No matter how high you build those castle walls, someone will always get in and knock them down.”

Oh Winnie, if only you knew…

“I think that your intention should be about vulnerability. You have to practice being vulnerable again and trust that even if you do get hurt, you will survive.”

Her fingers are so soft in mine, so fragile. I’m not the one who is vulnerable right now. Her blood pulses at her throat, and I’m so hungry, so feral for her that I drive my fang into my lip so I don’t do something monstrous.

I taste my blood and it does nothing to sate my bone-deep need .

“I want…” I close my eyes, because looking at the care in her eyes, the tears she’s crying now for me , is making me worse. “To be vulnerable.”

No one has ever cried for me before.

I want to lick away every tear, to taste their salt on my tongue. I don’t want Winnie Preston to ever have reason to cry again.

“Good. That’s your intention. Every time you feel yourself being pulled under by one of your passions, or you can’t muster the strength to use the system I’m creating for you, look at yourself in the mirror and say, ‘I am safe to be vulnerable,’ and that should help, okay?” She tilts her head to the side. “And if it doesn’t help, you can text me.”

I can text her.

Because she won’t be here.

Because she’s leaving.

“I don’t text,” I grind out, sucking my lip to stop the bleeding. I force myself to my feet and jerk towards the kiln. “I do not enjoy writing with my thumbs.”

“Of course you don’t. Come to think of it, I’ve never even seen you use a phone. Well, I’ll give you my postal address when I have one and you can send me a strongly-worded letter written with parchment and quill. Better?”

The only thing better will be sating my hunger between your thighs… “Much.”