Chapter 10: Pillow talk
The silence that followed was thick, but not uncomfortable. It was filled with the low crackle of the fireplace and the distant, muffled hum of the city ninety stories below. Liana lay curled against Matthias, her ear pressed to the place where a heartbeat should have been. There was only a profound, resonant stillness. His skin was cool marble under her cheek, his hand a steady, rhythmic weight stroking her bare arm.
Her whole body felt like a plucked string, vibrating with a strange, new frequency. The euphoria was fading, replaced by a deep, liquid languor and a mind that was finally starting to churn again.
“Hey,” she said, her voice rough.
“Hmm?” His fingers didn’t stop their gentle motion.
She tilted her head back to look up at him. The firelight carved the sharp angles of his face into something both beautiful and severe. “All of that… was it just an experiment? To see what my… sparkly party trick… would do?”
He stopped stroking her arm. His red eyes, now a muted garnet in the firelight, looked down at her. The expression in them was complex—amused, contemplative, something else she couldn’t name. He shifted, rolling onto his side to face her, propping his head on one hand. The silk sheet pooled around his waist.
“An experiment implies a hypothesis,” he said, his voice a low rumble. “I had none. Only curiosity.” He reached out with his free hand and tucked a sweat-damp strand of hair behind her ear. The gesture was disarmingly tender. “But to answer the spirit of your question: no.”
He paused, his gaze tracing the line of her brow, the curve of her mouth. “From the moment you walked into that council chamber, smelling of antiseptic and mortal fear, I found you captivating. A human, neck-deep in our world, yet utterly unaware of the storm inside her. I saw your strength that night—the way you stood by that wounded wolf, all defiance and clumsy compassion. It was… refreshing.”
A small, self-deprecating smile touched her lips. “Clumsy is the right word.”
“Then,” he continued, ignoring her interjection, “I found myself surprised by your charm. Your skepticism in the face of everything we are. The way you make a council of ancient beings feel like a particularly tedious hospital board meeting.” He smiled then, a real one that softened the severe lines of his face. “And tonight… I was enraptured.” His eyes dropped, taking in the sweep of her body under the sheet, then returned to hers. “Completely.”
He leaned in, brushing his lips against hers, a whisper of a kiss. “I hope I wasn’t too bold.”
Liana snorted, a totally undignified sound that broke the intense atmosphere. “You’re a several-hundred-year-old vampire lord who just drank my blood while I… you know. ‘Bold’ might be an understatement.”
He laughed, a genuine, surprised sound that seemed to startle even him. “Fair.”
She settled back into the crook of his arm, the tension seeping out of her. It wasn’t a declaration of love. It was something else—an acknowledgment of fascination, of desire, of utility. It felt more honest than pretty lies.
She traced an idle pattern on his chest, her fingertips following the imagined lines of old muscle. The twin points on her inner thigh throbbed softly, a pleasant, persistent reminder.
“So,” she began, her voice still carrying that post-euphoria rasp. “Have you figured out what I am yet? With all your… tests?”
Matthias’s hand stilled on her back. He was quiet for a moment, his gaze fixed on the vaulted ceiling. “The laboratory analysis of your blood sample is still ongoing,” he said, his tone shifting into something more clinical. “The components are complex. I wouldn’t want to speculate prematurely.”
Liana propped herself up on an elbow, looking down at him. A playful smile touched her lips. “Lab tests, sure. But you just conducted a pretty thorough field test, Matthias. You tasted me in, let’s say, multiple contexts.” Her hand drifted down under the silk sheet, her fingers lightly brushing the two small, healing punctures on her thigh. “Surely the great vampire lord has a hunch. After all that… experimentation.”
He turned his head slowly on the pillow. His eyes found hers, and the glow within them intensified, casting tiny crimson reflections on her face. He gave her a wry, almost apologetic smile. “A hunch is a dangerous thing. It leads to assumptions.”
“Indulge me.”
He watched her for a long beat, the fire popping in the hearth. “Have you ever heard the term ‘Nephilim’?” he finally asked.
The word meant nothing to her. It sounded old, biblical, and heavy. “No,” she said, her playful mood softening into wary curiosity. “Should I have?”
“Not unless you frequent very specific, paranoid corners of our historical archives.” He shifted, sitting up against the headboard and drawing her with him, the sheet pooling around their waists. The city’s lights painted his pale skin in shades of blue and gray. “The supernatural world loves its categories. Werewolves, vampires, fae. Aasimar, like your friend Sera.”
“The touched-by-an-angel brigade.”
“Precisely,” he nodded. “Aasimar are descendants of mortal lines that were merely brushed by divine power, blessed or cursed with a sliver of that light. It dilutes over generations. It’s a… resonance.”
His fingers laced with hers atop the sheet. “Nephilim are different.” His voice dropped, taking on the cadence of a history lesson spoken in a tomb. “They are not touched. They are hybrid. The direct, forbidden offspring of a mortal and a true divine being—an angel, or something of comparable potency. It’s not resonance. It’s inheritance. The power is woven into the very fabric of their being, dormant, waiting.”
Liana’s breath caught. The golden warmth under her skin, which had settled into a quiet ember, gave a faint pulse.
“They are incredibly rare,” Matthias continued, his red eyes holding hers, seeing the dawning understanding and fear. “Such unions were forbidden for a reason. The power is immense, often unstable.” He brought her hand up, turning it over as if examining the lines on her palm. “It reacts to extreme emotion. To trauma. To passion. It defends. It glows. The few Nephilim who are born often cannot harness their power and inevitably destroy themselves.”
The words hung in the air, heavier than the silk sheets. Liana stared at their joined hands, her own looking suddenly foreign. Inheritance. Not resonance. The golden light wasn’t a borrowed spark. It was a buried sun, and she was its cracked container.
A full-body tremor ran through her, starting deep in her core and vibrating out to her fingertips. It was fear, cold and clean. “Destroy themselves,” she echoed, her voice barely a whisper.
“Historically,” Matthias clarified, his tone softening. “But history is written by survivors, Liana. And by those who fear what they cannot control.”
Her mind spun, careening from the intimate warmth of minutes ago to this chilling, cosmic diagnosis. She thought of the council chamber, Sera’s stern protection, the werewolf’s growled warnings. Her gaze snapped up to his. “What will happen when the Council discovers? Sera… she said they categorize everything. They’d see me as a what, not a who. A security risk.”
Matthias’s thumb swept across her knuckles. “That is not a ‘when,’ but an ‘if,’” he said, his voice low and deliberate. “My remaining tests must confirm the theory. The blood work is… unprecedented.”
He shifted, lifting his other hand to cradle her face. His touch was cool, anchoring. “But should they confirm it,” he continued, his red eyes holding hers with an intensity that felt like a physical force, “I will leave it to you to decide who to share that knowledge with.” His thumb stroked her cheekbone. “Something so fundamental, so personal, should be your choice alone. No one else’s.”
He leaned closer, his breath a ghost against her lips. “I will keep your secret, Liana. Even from the Council, if need be.”
The promise wrapped around her. It offered safety that she'd not felt since plunging into this new world.
The weight of his promise settled over her, a shield against the terrifying scope of what he’d just described. She let out a shaky breath, her forehead resting against his collarbone, and for a minute, they just existed in the quiet.
His eyes drifted past her, over to an ornate brass clock mounted on the far wall. “It’s nearly four,” he murmured, his hand still in her hair. “You should get going soon if you’re to get any proper rest tonight.” A faint, almost imperceptible tension entered his body. “Sera’s inevitable training tomorrow will not be gentle, I imagine.”
The mention of Sera, of the mundane reality of tomorrow, was a splash of cold water. But it didn’t douse the low, simmering heat still in her veins. It stoked it. The fear, the revelation, his confession—it all twisted together into a sharp, reclaiming desire.
She lifted her head, a slow, playful smile spreading across her lips. “You’re probably right,” she said, her voice husky. Her hand slid down his chest, over the cool plane of his stomach beneath the sheet. “But clearly, I need to help you with one final experiment first.”
She moved before he could respond, pushing him gently onto his back and straddling his hips. The silk sheet slipped away. She watched his face, those crimson eyes darkening with renewed interest, as she reached between them. Her fingers wrapped around him, feeling him soften from their earlier passion. She began to stroke, a slow, deliberate rhythm, grinding herself against the base of him.
Her own arousal, never fully banked, flared hot and immediate. A faint, golden warmth prickled just under the skin of her thighs and belly. She felt him respond, thickening and hardening in her hand with a swiftness that made her breath catch. “There it is,” she whispered, more to herself than to him.
As soon as he was fully hard, she guided him to her entrance and slid down, taking him inside in one smooth, deep motion. A sharp, gratifying gasp tore from her throat. She braced her hands on his chest, her head falling back as she began to move, establishing a slow, rolling rhythm.
Her moans started low, soft things lost in the vast room, but they grew. Each rise and fall, each drag of him inside her, stoked the embers of that inherited power. A soft luminance, like sunlight through honey, began to emanate from her skin. It pulsed from her core, radiating out along her limbs, chasing away the deep shadows clinging to the bed.
The light danced across his pale chest, over the stark angles of his face as he watched her, his hands gripping her hips. She rode him with a focused intensity, chasing not just pleasure but proof—proof of her own control, proof that this terrifying power inside her could also be this, could be brilliant and beautiful and hers. Her skin glowed brighter with each passing second, painting the room in shifting, warm gold as her cries echoed against the glass.