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She had thought, after finally being thrown out of Araminta's home, that her new employment at Cavender House might actually be a blessing in disguise. A distant country home, a gentleman known for his penchant to overindulge in drink and revelry and for inviting others over to do the same, a place where no one would ask questions even if something seemed awry for fear of incurring said gentleman's interest… it had seemed the perfect place for a creature like her to remain unnoticed.
She had been a fool.
Of course Cavender's appetite would extend to the maids in his employ. Of course his friends would follow in his lead. Of course they were all well-studied in the art of getting extraordinarily drunk and keeping their wits somewhat about them rather than passing conveniently out among the detritus of their debauchery. Of course he would be among their number, somehow, friendly enough to have driven all the way out to the country to join them for drinks but not enough to join them in their harassment of a maid, apparently.
Perhaps he had not known the intended source of their entertainment, that night. Perhaps he was not particularly friendly with these men beyond the requirements of his social standing.
Perhaps he was an idiot.
She was being unkind. He had, after all, intervened on her behalf, without knowing or recognizing a thing about her. The not-knowing stung, and she had not fed in so long that her body felt weak and irritable on top of that, but neither of those was his fault. She would have been fine walking in the woods alone at night, but there was no possible way for him to know she was anything other than what she appeared to be: just a maid in an unfortunate situation, unremarkable and in need of protection. Sitting next to him in his curricle while he sought to drive her right back to London was agony when she could feel the searing warmth of him next to her, taste the life in him on the back of her tongue, but even that had eased when it began to rain.
When the men had gathered at Cavender House, Sophie had counted heads. There had been enough of them that she could get away with small sips from some of them in the dark of night, leaving none the worse for wear in the morning, no evidence of her feeding beyond the small pinpricks her eyeteeth would leave behind and the minor weakness that drink would excuse. It would not have been simple, and it would not have been quick, and there always came the risk when feeding off drunks of becoming intoxicated herself, but it would certainly have been more humane than most of her feedings in London. Araminta had taught her the precise limits of her hunger, the exact point at which even the barest dregs of humanity to which she desperately clung would abandon her in favor of pure, bestial bloodlust.
If she had been capable of it, the experience of waking in the cellar of Penwood House in the aftermath of one of her own feedings would have turned her stomach. Fortunately for her, whatever transformation had damned her to her existence made such a reaction impossible, so when she did come back to herself, clear-headed and sated, all she could do was set her jaw and get to scrubbing the blood out of the stone, gather whatever remained of Araminta's prey, and not think about who it had been and whether they had screamed.
Mr. Bridgerton shivered next to her. Likely it was from the rain, but she scrubbed the thoughts from her mind all the same. They had no place in his presence.
He did not speak to her now, despite his earlier threat. It seemed all of his concentration was on guiding his horses through the rain, which was coming down hard with no sign of stopping. It had cooled him enough that they were probably the same temperature now, which was bad. Humans were not meant to be so wet and so cold for so long. He would be lucky to get away with catching a mild chill. She hoped the caretakers of his country cottage were well-equipped to care for him, and perhaps vital enough to allow her to take care of herself as well. She would probably be able to survive another few days without tipping over into a frenzy, but she did not want to return to the unwavering press of humanity that was London in such a weakened state if she could help it.
Mr. Bridgerton did not possess keys to his own house.
Hope, she decided as she climbed through the window, had no place in her life. Someday she would learn the lesson and it would stick.
It was a noise that woke her.
She disregarded it, at first. Her senses were sharper than usual with the gnawing hunger that was steadily worsening as more time passed without a clear source of food. Whatever poor, pathetic creature was passing by in the night would not have woken her if she had been able to feed as planned, but the temptation to sneak out and try and ease some of her discomfort with substandard prey was outweighed by the force of the storm that still raged outside.
Then the noise came again, and she realized that the poor, pathetic creature that had made it was, in fact, down the hall from her inside this very house.
She hastened out of bed, only remembering to pull on the dressing gown out of sheer habit, and hurried down the hall. His weak, wounded noises meant she did not hesistate to throw open the door to his bedroom, and though the flash of lightning through his uncovered window highlighted his pale form splayed out atop his sheets, the very first thing her starving senses brought to her attention was the scent of fresh blood.
She stopped in the doorway, caught off-guard. Surely he had not been bleeding the entire way here? She would have smelled it on him earlier, hungry as she was.
But the rain had washed away most of his scent and filled her senses with the smell of wet earth and the drenched wool of his overcoat instead. Now, in the enclosed space of his bedroom, blood was all she could taste on the air, fresh and old mingling to overwhelm her.
Another flash of lightning, brighter than daylight, shook her out of her focus. In the darkness that followed, she took him in again.
He was pale, the same color as the mess of bleached linen sheets in which he was lying. The line of his body was stretched taut in agony, the tendons in his neck standing out as he unconsciously tossed his head and grit his teeth against the pain. The stain of blood on the shirt he had failed to remove was concerningly large.
He let out another anguished whine, the sound strangled at the back of his throat, and it spurred her into motion.
She rushed to the other side of the bed, nearer to his wound, calling his name as she did. He was too out of it to respond, lost in either fever or pain. Fear cut through her as she removed his shirt to look at the slash on his side.
Blood was flowing out of him, generous and steady. It took all of her willpower not to lean down and put her mouth to the flow, to drink deeply from him until she'd had her fill. Instead she managed to stop herself mere inches from the opening, breathing in the thick, rich scent and trying to sate herself on the smell of him alone.
She brought the discarded shirt up to staunch the bleeding. It could not have been this bad the whole ride here, she thought. He must have jostled it worse in the throes of whatever agony had caught him. She hoped it wasn't fever, or at least not fever brought on by infection.
It was a medical necessity. She had to know how bad things had truly gotten. And her saliva would help, would it not, to heal the wound? One swipe of her tongue. That was all it would take.
She cut her own frantic indecision off by leaning forward and licking over the slightly sticky blood that had seeped out of his wound onto the skin surrounding it. She did not allow herself to savor the taste beyond what she needed to evaluate whether it was tainted by the bitter flavor of infection. As far as she could tell, it was not.
That was a relief. She had no idea where she would even begin to look for medicinal supplies in this enormous house. She already felt awful about roughly yanking the loose sheet from underneath him so she could strip it into rags and begin packing his wound. The fresh linen became saturated with blood far faster than she wanted to see. He was bleeding too heavily. The faster she bound him, the faster she could go searching this house for a needle and thread, crude a solution as it would likely be. She was no physician.
It took most of the rags she had made to simply absorb the blood loss. The constant, steady flow was eroding her control. She had to concentrate harder and harder on wrapping the final bandage around his midsection, but there was a voice in her head begging her for another taste and a different one reminding her that she knew exactly how much a human body could stand to lose before it reached the point of no return. She ignored them both in favor of tying him off.
She collapsed back onto the edge of the mattress, exhausted. She did not need to breathe, but she had not yet shaken the habit, especially not in moments of great distress. She calmed herself slowly, and on each inhale she became more and more aware of the still-fresh blood in the shirt that was now a crumpled heap of ruined fabric at his side.
It would be undignified. She would be debasing herself, no better than the animal Araminta had accused her of being, if she did it. But what was dignity in the face of necessity? There was no one else here, and she did not know how long it would be until that might change. Her vaguely-formed plan of leaving for the village before dawn was no longer an option, not while he remained so unstable. She reached for the shirt. She set her mind aside and found the wettest part of it, where the blood remained fresh, and brought it to her mouth to suck.
It was her turn to let out an undignified sound. His blood was already slightly sour with age, but it was still infinitely better than the nothing she'd been surviving on for the past week. It would sustain her for a little while longer. She was used to stretching her resources farther than they could reasonably go.
At some point, it hit her awareness that he had not made a sound in quite some time. He had not shifted, in fact, from the awkward position in which she had left him after tying the final bandage across his waist.
His pulse was alarmingly faint. She could no longer follow the thread of it along his throat. Already he was colder than any human should be, though enough of the warmth of life still stubbornly clung to him to entice her closer. At the precipice of life and death, he did not threaten to burn her the way he had when he had been brimming with vitality at his mother's masquerade. Despite her efforts, she alone was not enough to save him.
She had mere minutes to make a decision, and either way it would affect him forever.
It was no decision. He had been injured saving her. If he truly wished to die, she would grant it to him herself, after, but she thought about damning him to an eternity of an existence like hers and she thought about allowing the light in his eyes, that charming laugh, the kind, gentle, warm everything of him to fade from the world entirely and only one of those thoughts made her feel truly sick with horror.
In one swift motion she shattered one of the frames on his bedside table. She lifted one of the larger chunks of glass and used it to slice open her own palm, cupping it as blood began to trickle out. She coaxed his lips open with the thumb of her other hand, cradling his jaw and allowing her pooled blood to drip down into his mouth.
He jerked his head away from her with one last burst of energy. The blood would taste wrong on his tongue, she knew—more bitter than medicine, burning worse than alcohol. She climbed on top of him to hold him steady, pressing her palm flat against the lower half of his face to force her blood to drip directly into him. The sharp points of her knees dug into his upper arms with enough force that she would have worried about leaving behind bruises if he was going to wake up human the next day. The hand at his jaw moved down to hold the long line of his throat, and after a long moment of the weight of her pressing him still and her palm over his mouth forcing him full, she finally felt him swallow.
She remained atop him until she felt him do it again, and then a third time. She did not know exactly how much of her blood was necessary for it to take, but there was little more she could do for him now without weakening herself beyond the point of no return.
She did not remember much from her own turning other than that it had felt long and slow and excruciating. If it did take, then this moment of respite would be brief for both of them. It would not take long for him to begin thrashing in his sheets anew, more of those animal sounds escaping him as the transformation took him over.
She sat in the armchair at his bedside and seriously considered what she had just done.
She had made him—
No. Logistics first. That, she could confront on its face.
Now there were two mouths to feed, and he would need more than her. Not just this first time, but every time. He was so much bigger than her. She would need to factor that into her considerations, at least for as long as he remained with her. Her sire had certainly not stayed with her for very long, but she would not abandon him. She would do him that small mercy, at least. She would show him how to feed without killing, where to find the perfect prey, and she hoped that he would retain enough of his kindness to not hate her for doing this to him until after he was strong enough to leave her.
He had been the sun itself.
That was what she had thought, that night on the terrace. It had been the blazing, living heat of him, startling even through her silk gloves and the thin linen of his shirt, but it had also been the light in his eyes as he spoke of his family—such love and devotion even after he had confessed to her his lack of belonging in his own home. It had been his delighted smile, and it had been the quiet awe in his voice as he called her the most intriguing person he had ever met. The way he had begged so sweetly for the merest scraps of her so that he might find her again.
That night had been the closest she had felt in years to standing still and basking in the sun's gentle warmth, not a worry in her head so long as she was in his presence. And now she had condemned him to eternity in the darkness. A life devoid of life itself. There was no kindness in the world that could forgive her for it.
Benedict Bridgerton stirred again on the bed, a groan escaping him as he rose from the dead, and all she felt was a sick churning dread in her gut that would never resolve.