Byron tilted the glass and let the thick blood touch her lips. Immediately she could taste it wasn’t fresh—it wasn’t perfect but she would make it work. She imagined kissing her way down Amelia’s sweet neck, her fangs erupting, but taking her time and only lightly grazing her lover’s skin with her teeth, and licking and tasting the sweetness and smelling the scent of her neck.

Then, when she had held herself back as long as she could, quickly sinking her fangs into Amelia’s throbbing pulse point that so tantalized her.

When the thick, warm blood from her glass hit her mouth, her imagination was bought crashing back to reality. Nothing could ever substitute for Amelia.

She opened her eyes to see Alexis watching her intently.

“You can’t keep this up.”

Byron signalled for her glass to be refilled. “Can’t keep what up?”

“Stopping yourself from feeding from Amelia,” Alexis said.

“I can’t ever feed on Amelia. She is too perfect, too innocent to be ruined by the likes of me,” Byron said sadly.

She heard Alexis sigh and take a long glug of blood from her own glass.

Byron sat back in her seat and looked at the human servant. “You may leave now, Francis.” Once he exited she said, “I can feel you itching to say something, Duca.”

“Principe, I owe you everything, my life, my sanity—you gave me your trust and made me your Duca, your second in command. I find it hard to sit here and watch you suffer. You told me a long time ago—humans break, and then they break our hearts. You know, I know how that feels. I understood your attraction to her at the start. She’s beautiful, natural, so feminine, so gentle, but all I can see ahead is pain and hurt, just like I felt.”

Byron gave a hollow laugh. “She is all those things and more, and as gentle as she is, she is fiery when she wants to be. You heard our argument? Have you ever heard anyone talking to me like that, Alexis?”

“Not if they didn’t want their throat ripped out and every last drop of blood drained from their body,” Alexis said only half jokingly.

“I’m falling in love with her, just like I promised I never would, not after—”

Both Byron and Alexis looked down at their glasses of blood, and Byron swirled hers around the glass.

“Anyway, I know how much it’s hurting not to be my true self with her, but she’s in my every waking thought and in my dreams. I simply couldn’t walk away from her. This is why I’ve asked her to my estate. I need to work out how this can work, what I can tell her.”

“How do you tell someone you are a three-hundred-year-old, fourth-generation born vampire? The most powerful vampire in our world?” Alexis asked.

Byron sighed. That was the question, and she’d pondered it over her long life. It was one thing to explain to a human you were a vampire, but the Debreks were vampire aristocracy. Not only the oldest clan, but the most powerful. “I never have found a way to explain, or a reason to. With anyone I cared about, I always ended up walking away when their suspicions became too much.”