CHAPTER 1: THE OFFERING
Elara's POV
They came for me on a night when the moon hid its face and the rain fell so hard it felt like the sky was trying to wash the entire dying city into the ground.
I'd been expecting them because in the lower district everyone knew how debt collection worked and my father had stopped paying three seasons ago. The knock came just after midnight and I was already awake because sleep didn't come easy when you knew vampires might drag you underground before sunrise. My father sat at our broken table with his head in his hands and didn't look up when the collectors entered and I didn't expect him to because shame had eaten through whatever courage he'd once possessed.
Two of them stood in our doorway wearing black too fine for our crumbling building and masks that hid everything except eyes that held no pity. The taller one unrolled a scroll and read in a flat voice that my father's debts had reached the threshold where the Crimson Court would accept me as payment and I had ten minutes to gather what I wanted to bring. I didn't cry and I didn't beg because I'd watched other girls get taken and the ones who fought just got hurt worse before the inevitable happened anyway.
My father finally raised his head when they fastened chains around my wrists and I saw tears on his face but they meant nothing now. Tears didn't erase debts and they didn't save daughters and they certainly didn't change the fact that he'd gambled away my life for temporary relief from his own misery.
I grabbed my mother's worn leather bracelet from the shelf and slipped it over my chained hands and that was all I took because everything else here was just a reminder of how little I'd ever mattered.
The rain soaked me within seconds and the streets ran with water that smelled like rot and desperation. My neighbors watched from behind shuttered windows and I saw relief on their faces because tonight it was me and not them and that was how survival worked here. The collectors didn't slow for the rain or my stumbling and I had to run to keep up while the chains cut into my wrists.
The entrance to the Crimson Court was carved into the old cathedral where people used to pray before they realized gods didn't answer when vampires were involved. Stone steps descended into darkness and the air grew colder with each step until I could see my breath misting. The collectors' boots echoed like drumbeats and somewhere far below I heard music too beautiful to be made by anything that remembered being human.
The tunnels twisted until I lost all sense of direction and knew I could never find my way back. Torches burned with flames the wrong color red and cast shadows that moved wrong. Other vampires passed us and their eyes tracked me with casual hunger like I was livestock and the worst part was how normal this seemed to them.
The tunnel opened into a throne room that stole my breath because it was horrifying and magnificent in equal measure. Black stone polished until it reflected like dark water, columns rising into shadows, and at the center a throne carved from obsidian that absorbed all light. The vampire sitting there made every survival instinct I possessed scream run even though my legs had locked.
He was beautiful the way winter was beautiful when it killed you, all sharp elegant lines and cold perfection. When he stood the entire room shifted like gravity had decided he was the only thing that mattered. Silver eyes that caught torchlight and burned, black hair falling past his shoulders, features that might have belonged to an angel if angels were carved from ice and cruelty. He descended the steps with movements too smooth to be natural and I couldn't look away.
The collectors vanished and suddenly I stood alone. He circled me slowly and I felt his attention cataloging everything from my rain-soaked hair to my freckled nose to the way I was shaking. When he stopped in front of me he stood close enough that I could smell winter nights and old power and something darker that made my head swim.
His hand reached for my throat and I tried not to flinch but failed. His fingers were marble-cold when they tilted my chin up forcing me to meet those inhuman silver eyes and I waited for fangs and pain and quick death. But instead he went absolutely still and his eyes widened and I felt his hand start trembling against my skin.
Then the world caught fire.
Something invisible wrapped around my chest and squeezed and suddenly I couldn't breathe couldn't think couldn't do anything except feel this foreign presence pouring into me like molten metal.
Heat flooded my veins and I gasped and his pupils swallowed the silver until his eyes were black and between one heartbeat and the next I felt everything he felt eight hundred years of loneliness crashing into me like a wave, hunger so deep it had its own gravity, and underneath it all a desperate aching need that had nothing to do with blood.
My knees gave out and he caught me before I hit the floor and through the haze I saw his face transform from cold control into something raw and almost frightened.
The bond because I knew somehow that's what this was pulsed between us like a living thing tying us together in ways I didn't understand and didn't want and couldn't escape.
His arms tightened around me and I felt his breath against my ear and his voice shook when he spoke and I couldn't make out the words through the roaring in my head. The last thing I registered before darkness pulled me under was the feeling of his heart beating in time with mine and the terrible knowledge settling into my bones.
I hadn't been brought here to die.
I'd been brought here to belong to him in ways that made death look like mercy.