I found her scent before I found her.
It came to me in slow waves, curling through the narrow cracks of the old door like mist curling around gravestones, laced with whiskey and salt and the faint, aching trace of storm water soaked into cotton. Beneath it lingered the tender sting of sorrow—tears she hadn't yet permitted herself to release, heat still clinging to the memory of them, like breath-fogging glass that no longer reflects anything alive. It was not the scent of a woman who came seeking answers. It was the scent of someone unraveling, pulled here by something deeper than logic, heavier than want.
My study was never meant to be found. It was carved into the marrow of the house, secreted away behind ancient wood and older magic, bound by symbols even my kind had long stopped speaking aloud. It had taken decades to bury it properly beneath silence. But she found it anyway. She always finds what should remain hidden.
The door creaked open, the sound drawn out like a wound, and in its place stood Addie.
Her hair clung to her neck in damp coils, still damp from the rain, or from whatever she had drowned herself in before stumbling into this moment. Her eyes were glassy—not from drink, though she reeked of it, but from something sharper, more dangerous. A soul stretched thin across too many truths. Her shoulders were set like stone, her body braced as if expecting an impact, though she had been the one to walk into the storm. Her mouth was red, but not in the way women paint themselves beautiful, it had been bitten, worried into rawness by teeth that hadn't known how else to hold the silence inside her.
She didn't knock.
She didn't hesitate.
She crossed into the room as it had always belonged to her, and in the silence that followed, I found I couldn't deny her that.
"You lied to me," she said, her voice a thread pulled too tight, quivering between defiance and hurt. There was no tremor in the words themselves, but they carried the weight of something fragile, and it struck harder than a scream.
I didn't speak.
My fingers remained stained with the ink and blood pressed into the crumbling pages of the text I had been deciphering—a relic bound in human skin and old grief, filled with the rites of those who once drank from veins beneath eclipsed moons. I closed the book slowly, as if by doing so I could delay what had already begun. A brittle stem of dried nightshade served as my placeholder. A mark for the page where damnation slept.
Still, I said nothing.
Addie moved closer, each step deliberate, like she was walking into a confession, her body rigid with the control she no longer wanted to carry.
"You don't sleep," she said, voice low and thick, words falling like stones. "You don't eat. And I've never seen you blink."
The room seemed to constrict around her—walls drawing closer, shadows bending toward her breath. My pulse remained silent, absent beneath my skin, but something deeper responded, something old, something that had long forgotten the sound of fear and remembered only hunger. Not the kind that seeks blood, but the kind that longs to be known.
"What are you, Silas?" she asked.
And for the first time in centuries, I did not know how to answer.
Her words did not fall softly between us, did not arrive with the gentleness of someone seeking understanding or mercy. They were not shaped by wonder or confusion. They were sharpened, honed to a point with the precision of pain carried too long, wielded not to wound but to cut open the silence between us. At that moment, she was not asking me what I was—she was offering herself to the truth, no matter how cruel it might be. She was permitting me to bleed in front of her, to strip away the last mask I still wore in her presence. And something inside me—something ancient, something that remembered being human long after the humanity itself had faded—answered before thought could intervene.
I crossed the space between us in a single breath and caught her wrist with a grip that trembled at its edges, not from weakness, but from restraint on the verge of breaking. I turned her toward the wall, not with violence, but with the inevitability of gravity pulling stars into collapse. Her spine struck the plaster with a thud that echoed through the bookshelves, a sound like thunder muffled in the belly of the house. Books shivered in place. Dust rose like memory.
Her breath caught in her throat, not from fear, but from challenge. From readiness. Her body remained exactly where I held it, unwavering, and when she lifted her chin, it wasn't submission I saw in the set of her mouth—it was demand. She tilted her head back with the calm defiance of someone who had already decided to lose. Her gaze met mine, unblinking, steady, and in that gaze, I saw no illusion, no false hope, no innocent belief in safety. Only the raw ache of a woman asking to be consumed.
I stepped closer, my body braced against hers, my arms closing in to trap the space we shared until nothing existed but heat and breath and the ragged edge of restraint beginning to fray. My mouth hovered near her ear, close enough to taste the salt still clinging to her skin. My voice, when it came, was rough, worn down to bone and shadow.
"I'm not safe," I told her, and the truth of it pulled something from deep inside my chest. "I'm not sane. And if I touch you again, Addie, I won't be able to stop. I will take and take until there is nothing left of you untouched."
She didn't retreat.
She didn't soften.
Instead, her lips curved slowly, parting into a smile that had nothing of innocence and everything of ruin. It was not the smile of a girl teasing fate, not the glinting smirk of someone curious about danger. No—this was the smile of someone who had already stepped into the fire and made peace with the burn. Her eyes never left mine as she breathed the words that would unmake whatever fragile boundary still held between us.
"Then touch me," she whispered, voice steady, thick with need, a request and a command folded into one.
And I did.
I crushed my mouth to hers, no pretense of softness, no careful approach. Our bodies collided like storms drawn together across centuries, violent and inevitable, mouths parting not for air, but for invasion. Her hands found my shirt, fingers curling into the fabric, pulling me closer as if proximity alone could devour the ache that had built between us since the first moment she stepped into my cursed world. She moaned into my mouth, the sound raw, helpless, caught somewhere between surrender and hunger.
My hands spanned her waist, moved with purpose, fingers mapping the shape of a woman I had never allowed myself to touch, committing each curve to memory with reverence sharpened by lust. Her legs parted to draw me closer. Her back arched to meet me. Every motion was a silent plea for more, for all, for ruin.
And I gave it.
Until the moment before the last tether inside me could snap—before the darkness could pull me past the edge where nothing could be undone—I vanished.
Not into shadows. Not into silence.
But into nothing.
And when I left, I left behind the warmth of her breath, the taste of her on my lips, and the shudder in her body that had begun in longing and ended in absence.
My mouth collided with hers, not in tenderness or question, but in the violent certainty of a man too far gone to pretend restraint, a man whose hunger had long since passed the point of civility. It wasn't a kiss. It was a collision. A claiming. The kind of contact that didn't ask permission because it had already been earned in the spaces between pain and silence, in every look, every lie, every breath we hadn't meant to share. I took her mouth like I had every right to it, like I had been starving for centuries and she was the first real taste of something that might save me.
She didn't pause. Didn't weigh the moment or second-guess the burn behind it. Her lips found mine as they'd always belonged there, parting with the kind of instinct that doesn't come from thought but from need. Her breath poured into me in rough, ragged bursts, sharp and staggering, as if she'd been holding it in too long and now it had nowhere else to go but into my lungs. There was nothing soft about it. Nothing tentative. It was the kind of desperation that comes when silence finally breaks when something buried deep finally claws its way to the surface and refuses to be ignored.
Her hands fisted in my shirt, pulling, anchoring, dragging me closer like she needed something solid to keep her upright. I felt the bite of her nails through the fabric, not cruel, not careless—deliberate. Like she needed to feel the resistance, to know I wouldn't disappear. Like she needed to remind herself I was flesh, not a figment, not something she'd imagined on nights too dark to breathe.
And the taste of her—Christ. It hit me like memory and fire. Salt from the tears she hadn't cried yet. The heat from a rage she hadn't voiced. Fury wrapped in longing. She tasted like a promise born out of pain, like something holy that had bled itself raw and was still standing. There was defiance in her mouth. Not the kind that wanted to fight—but the kind that dared me to stay. Something reckless, something painfully alive. And whatever she was offering, it wasn't safe. It was surrender. Hers. And maybe mine. Her moan rose, caught between us like a live wire—ragged, raw, pulled straight from somewhere inside her that didn't know how to lie—and I drank it in like it could undo all the things I'd buried in my chest to keep myself from breaking.
My hand found her waist, fingers digging into soft skin through the thin barrier of fabric, and I held on. Not gently. Not carefully. With pressure meant to be remembered, to be felt hours later when she closed her eyes and tried to forget what I made her feel. She didn't shy away. She leaned into it, into me, her body trembling with something that wasn't fear. It was demand. It was needed. And it matched the rhythm already thudding inside me, deep and slow and full of warning.
I wanted to lose myself in her. Wanted to press into every inch of her skin and leave no part untouched, no place unclaimed. I wanted to stain her with memory, make her ache with it, make her remember exactly what kind of monster she'd let into her arms. I wanted to disappear inside her, not to hide—but to belong, even if only for a breath. Even if only in the way broken things belong to each other.
But something shifted. Not loud. Not dramatic. It was a small thing at first, a tension curling at the base of my spine, a flicker in my jaw, a sudden awareness that the thing inside me—the part I had trained and buried and locked away—was starting to stir. Not in hunger. In warning. Because there was only so much of me I could hold back. And she was calling to all of it. The line I had spent centuries holding—between desire and destruction—began to strain, the brittle edge of control cracking beneath the force of her pulse. My senses exploded, flooded with her. The heat of her skin, the way her blood moved just beneath the surface, the scent of her breath tangled with the whisper of fear she refused to speak. Everything about her called to the darkest parts of me, the parts that had gone too long without feeding, without release, without a single reason to stop.
My jaw twitched.
Pain lanced through the bone as my fangs pressed forward, no longer held back by will or discipline but summoned by the ache of having her this close, by the unbearable sweetness of her living heat pressed to my hunger. The monster in me surged toward the surface, teeth ready, throat tightening, not for breath, but for blood.
Her breath caught.
Not in terror.
Not in retreat.
She felt it—felt the change in me, the unraveling—and she didn't pull away. She stayed. Her hands remained locked in my shirt, her lips parted, her eyes wide but unblinking. She accepted the danger like it was a gift, like she had known from the beginning that this would happen, and had decided to bear it anyway.
But I couldn't.
I tore myself from her with the force of something ripping free of its chains, violence turned inward. My body shuddered with the effort, every nerve screaming in protest, the loss of her a wound deeper than anything fang or blade could deliver. I stepped back into the cold hollow of the study, away from the heat of her breath, from the light in her eyes, from the one thing in all these centuries that had made me feel alive again.
And in the space I left behind, I felt the echo of what might have been.
And the silence of what I could never allow.
I vanished, not with grace or caution or anything resembling control, but with the brutal suddenness of something fractured, something ancient and half-feral being wrenched out of a moment it was never meant to survive, torn from her skin and breath like a dream so perilous it had to be ended before it rewrote the rules of my damnation. The silence I left behind was not the stillness of peace but the hollow echo of absence, a silence too heavy, too raw, too filled with the shape of her to be anything but agony. The taste of her remained on my tongue, metallic from the bite of her desire, warm from the fire between her lips, real in a way nothing had been in centuries, and it clung to me like a curse I had willingly accepted.
She reached for where I'd been, her hand moving through space that had once held my weight, my heart, my hunger, and though she touched nothing, I felt her all the same. I felt the ache in her palm, the sharp disappointment in her breath, the way her heart slowed beneath her ribs like she was holding something fragile inside her and didn't know what to do with it now that I had gone.
Across the house, I stood alone in the shadows I had called home long before she ever walked through my door, my body a storm of restraint and rage and aching want. My chest heaved though breath was a luxury I hadn't needed for lifetimes, and my fists curled tight at my sides as though clenching them hard enough might anchor me to this crumbling edge of control. Every nerve burned with the echo of her skin, her voice, her smile that hadn't feared the monster, and all of it pressed against me like a memory I hadn't earned the right to keep.
Because she made me want.
Not in the shallow, animal sense I had grown used to silencing, but in the old way, the impossible way, the way that made me long for things I had buried so deeply I no longer remembered the names for them. She made me want to feel, to remember, to risk, to reach back across the centuries of blood and silence and ask the question I had spent an eternity avoiding.
She made me want to be a man again.
And that—that—was the most dangerous thing of all.