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Lady Catalina was the third noble that morning to toss Prince Gabriel a covetous glance. He’d been handing his shortsword back to the weapons master when her satin fan had taken a tumble from the spectator boxes to clatter onto the flagstones.
It was a scorching hot day in the castle. Gabriel had plucked up her fan and returned it to her without much thought, but evidently the gesture had meant something to Catalina. The breathy pitch of her giggle told him she’d be pining for a dance with him at the Adalhard’s next grand banquet.
Gabriel fought back a long-suffering sigh.
He was no stranger to coquettish glances. Certainly, his father would have arranged for a betrothal in good time —that responsibility would fall on Sameon now, Gabriel supposed, nodding to passers-by as he slipped into the castle interior— but that did not stop the various courtiers and nobles from vying for his attention, attempting to win a glance or a touch.
He had taken a courtier up on their offers of a romantic tryst on two separate occasions; a woman he’d bedded, all softness and fluttering hands; then, not long after, a visiting prince from Cordonia had introduced him to all manner of wondrous things a person could do with their mouth when they’d drunk too much wine in the secluded bathhouses.
They had sated some distant, passing curiosity in him. But neither had captivated him in the way he’d read of in his volumes of poetry. None made him wish to sing to the heavens, or sail to the farthest reaches of the earth that he might win for them a treasure to prove his love.
Not a soul had captured his curiosity whatsoever… save for the cruel-mouth smirk of a creature who had no soul to speak of. One Prince Gabriel knew he could never have.
It wasn’t simply forbidden. It was unthinkable for Gabriel to have such feelings for a vile, blackened demon such as the one that now lay chained in the solar, and yet…
And yet.
Ever since his father’s death, when the vampire hunters had rallied and he and Sameon had taken up arms themselves, Gabriel kept catching glimpses of one of the creatures in particular.
Always sulking, just out of their reach. Too fast, too strong, too clever to catch. He was at once darkness and light; the slippery pitch black of moonlight and the bright glittering of wicked laughter.
At every hunt, Gabriel had seen him.
Fighting with a brilliant grace. Evading them with a smile that radiated smug superiority. Occasionally he would dispatch some of the soldiers when he found himself vastly outnumbered, but most of the time, he simply disarmed them, tripped them, tricked them, left them stumbling about one another in the darkness.
It was as if he thought it a game.
It had been three years since Gabriel had come of age and joined the ranks of the hunters, and in that time, he’d seen the man more often than any other vampire. Sometimes Gabriel wondered if he simply liked showing off.
His steps faltered on the smooth tile. When had he begun to think of him as a man? He was a creature, a— a demon, a monster… He was…
He was…
Playful and cruel and smug and intelligent and reckless and everything a monster was not.
All his life, Gabriel had been told the vampires had no humanity, that they’d been human once, long ago, but that their curse had warped them, twisted them, cast them into damnation and stolen their souls.
They killed without remorse and thought only of themselves, of their hunger.
So why had this one spared Gabriel’s life?
Gabriel spun on his heel, his feet carrying him not towards the baths, as he’d been intending, but instead, climbing the spiralling steps higher and higher until he reached the end of a long corridor, skirting the guards flanking the archway who let him past with a brief nod, and storming toward the large, silver-barred door at the corridor’s end.
He paused before the door, silver key clutched between his trembling fingers, his thumb pressing against the curlicued “A” so hard it was bound to leave an imprint on his skin.
He heard a faint clinking sound, a rough brushing of fabric, and somehow he knew; the vampire was staring right at the door.
‘I know you’re there, little princeling,’ the vampire crooned. ‘I can smell your blood. Like nectar and battle hymns and pure, golden honey.’
Heart hammering in his chest, Gabriel turned the key in the lock, and stepped inside.
***
It was cruel, how beautiful the solar was as a prison.
The marble-floored room at the top of the western tower was dominated by an elegant skylight, the entire ceiling a gilded masterwork of glass and crystal. The humid air hung heavy and perfumed, the walls lined with planter boxes bursting with a riotous bouquet of hot-house orchids in brightest pink, orange-spotted tiger lilies, leafy palms and climbing vines and yellow-white hibiscus.
The flowers glowed beneath sunlight that streamed in through the glass, catching off hanging crystals and refracting off of the water in the low, central fountain, until the whole room was set to dazzling.
Perfect if you were a courtier who wished to relax and capture the glow of summer, even in the colder months.
Nightmarish if you were a creature to whom sunlight was poison.
‘His Golden Highness visits the monster himself? My, my. Whatever did I do to deserve such an honour?’
The vampire lay chained in the centre of the floor, his head slumped against the blue mosaic of the fountain, his fingers drifting idly in the water. At a glance, one might think he was at ease.
But Gabriel saw the shallow rise and fall of his chest, saw the sweat that slicked his brow and turned his eyes bright with fever. Sun poisoning. Sapping away his considerable strength.
Even shackled and weak, he was beautiful.
‘Your heart beats like a hummingbird,’ the vampire mumbled, and Gabriel bit back a gasp. ‘So rapid and light. Like you might take flight at any moment.’
He lifted his head to gaze at Gabriel beneath a shock of silver hair.
‘Did your training exert you that much?’ He smiled, softly. ‘Or are you simply afraid?’
Knowing it was nothing short of foolish, Gabriel stepped closer. The vampire tracked him as he moved, his head lolling lazily against his shoulders as he watched Gabriel move from the door to the middle of the floor, stopping just shy of where the vampires’ chains would reach.
The heavy peg sunk into the floor had held for years, Gabriel reminded himself, willing his heart to calm. Vampires had been brought to this room to be weakened and interrogated for decades now. It would hold.
He wondered what might happen if it didn’t.
He wondered why he hoped it wouldn’t.
Swallowing thickly, he looked the vampire in the eye.
‘Why did you spare me?’
It had been months ago now, but the details had been hazy to him even as they were happening. All Gabriel remembered was there had been a hunt during which the vampire hunters had found themselves quickly outmatched and outnumbered, and Gabriel had been certain he was about to meet his end by swift means of fang and claw…
Only, his end had never come. Instead, he found himself spirited away in the crushing grip of a silver-haired phantom. He had never understood why.
Now, the vampire smiled.
‘I might ask you the same. For all that you drill with your longsword, your shortsword, your silver-tipped saber, your crossbow, I can’t help but notice you have terrible aim whenever I am around. Three years and you’ve yet to strike me once.’
A drop of sweat splashed from the vampire’s brow onto the lip of the fountain. The sun baked it away almost at once.
‘Surely you’re not that bad at swordplay, little princeling.’
Gabriel took a clumsy step closer. Another.
‘Tell me your name,’ Gabriel breathed.
The vampire crooked him a smile that was pure sin.
‘Cassius.’
Something in Gabriel’s stomach grew warm at the sound of that name, the perfect shape of those lips. Almost without realising it, he took a third step.
‘Why spare me?’ Gabriel asked, once more.
‘Perhaps I’m waiting for the castle’s glorious excess to fatten you up. Perhaps I want your blood to grow thick and rich on a steady diet of suckling pig, and lamb slow-cooked in red wine. Perhaps I want you luscious with cream and candied fruits, so your veins burst in my mouth like melted chocolate.’
Suddenly, he was on him in a burst of speed; one moment, Cassius lay slumped over the lip of the pool, the next, he had darted forward until he and Gabriel stood face to face, the chains straining against the sunken peg behind him.
Fear had Gabriel rooted to the spot. He couldn’t have run even if he’d wanted to. Before him, Cassius’s eyes gleamed quicksilver.
‘But that’s not you, is it?’ he crooned, his voice low and tempting in the quiet space between them. ‘You are not one for Prince Sameon’s balls and banquets. You prefer simple fare, lean meat to build muscle. Your lot is the training ring, your build that of a warrior.’
Cassius traced one slender finger down the length of Gabriel’s abdomen, and Gabriel shuddered. Suddenly he wondered how he must appear; his body, slicked with sweat and dust from sparring; his muscles, tensed and bared to the hot summer air; his hair, damp with sweat and curing into his eyes.
He must look an unkempt youth, not a regal prince.
‘H-he is King Sameon, now.’ Gabriel swallowed, rooted to the spot, unable to step back though logic screamed at him to run.
Cassius simply tilted his head, his eyes on Gabriel’s mouth and an amused smile curling his lips.
‘Can you always move that fast?’ Gabriel asked on a low whisper.
‘It’s not as easy, drowning as I am in this pretty, poisoned chalice.’
Cassius spread his arms wide, his face tilted up to the sunlight. Gabriel found himself mesmerised by the sharp, angular lines of his brow and cheekbones.
‘But I have some strength in me yet. Though, how long it will hold is anyone’s guess. I may yet be ash and shadow after a few more days of this.’
‘Sameon intended to question you,’ Gabriel said, uncertainly. ‘If he wished you dead, why bother capturing you in the first place? He ought to have simply killed you on the field.’
‘Perhaps our young Prince is starved for entertainment and wishes to relish my screams.’
Dropping his hands, Cassius sighed, batting his eyes open once more. He gave Gabriel a searching look, one he all but felt, a cool caress against his bronzed skin.
‘Humour me,’ Cassius said, as the ghost of a smile flitted across his face. ‘Bar anyone else from entering here today. If I am to die in this room, I’d rather the last face I ever see be one as magnificent as yours.’
Even if Gabriel were to kneel before all the angels of the heavens, he could not confess what madness gripped him in that moment. He had no words for what he did, no reason to think he could trust the vampire standing before him.
And yet it was with a clarity of purpose and a swift grace that he took Cassius’s hands in his own.
He turned them, baring the wrists to the skies where shackles of silver burned and seared against the pale flesh of his wrists. He heard the shocked breath that huffed from Cassius’s lips as he turned the Adalhard skeleton key in the lock. The resounding clang of metal as his shackles fell onto the tile. The thunder of blood in his own ears as his nerves overwhelmed him.
Stumbling back, Gabriel hurried for the door. He slammed it shut, Cassius’s dark laughter ringing jubilant off the walls behind him. Glass smashed crystalline and bright, shattering against the floor of the solar.
A curl of fresh wind beneath the door, and then silence. Gabriel resisted the urge to glance back.
Cassius was gone.