Chapter 5: The Handmaid
Bianca woke to pale grey light and the soft sound of breathing that was not her own.
Her eyes snapped open. The figure stood at the foot of the bed, hands folded before her, a slender vampire woman in severe black silk with copper hair swept into a tight coil. She had the stillness of a predator pretending to be furniture.
Bianca did not move. Her hand, beneath the sheets, closed around the small silver blade she kept in the hollow of her pillow. The iron in old things sang through her fingertips.
"Good morning, Lady Rojas." The woman dipped her head. "I am Orla. I have been assigned as your handmaid."
Bianca stared at her for a long breath. The word assigned landed like a slap. She sat up slowly, the sheet pooling around her waist, her dreads loose and wild from the night before. She had not slept. The bond had hummed beneath her skin all night, a low current she could not switch off.
"Why?" she asked.
Orla's expression did not flicker. "As the new lady of the house, it is fitting that you have a handmaid at your side at all times. The master instructed it."
The master instructed it. Bianca let the phrase settle in her chest, cold and heavy as river stone. She rose from the bed without ceremony, and Orla's eyes widened a fraction at the sight of her, the long scarred tail curling behind her in the grey light, the angles of her body as sharp as her temper.
"I do not need assistance," Bianca said, pulling a robe from the chair where she had thrown it the night before. She tied it at her waist. "You may wait outside."
Orla hesitated. "My lady, it is customary that I remain close enough to respond—"
"Outside." Bianca's voice did not rise. It did not need to.
Orla bowed and retreated through the door, closing it with a whisper of brass.
Bianca stood alone in the unfamiliar suite, surrounded by opulence that felt like a trap: the silk hangings, the gilded mirror, the vase of white lilies someone had placed on the writing desk. She had slept in worse places. She had slept in alleys and warehouses and the back rooms of clubs where the stink of fear never left the walls. But she had never slept somewhere that felt like watching eyes in every dark corner.
She dressed quickly, in simple dark trousers and a heavy wool sweater, her dreads still loose and unruly. She pulled them back with a leather cord, her grandmother's locket cold against her collarbone, and she went hunting for her husband.
The estate sprawled like a labyrinth of wealth and shadow. Servants lowered their eyes as she passed. Paintings of dead vampires watched her from the walls. She followed the scent of parchment and old blood to a heavy oak door at the end of a long corridor, and she did not knock.
Tomas Rojas sat behind his great mahogany desk, a book open in his long fingers. He did not look up. The velvet coat was gone, replaced by a dark grey shirt with rolled sleeves that showed the pale corded muscle of his forearms. His signet ring caught the lamplight.
The fire crackled. He turned a page.
Bianca stood in the doorway, legs braced, tail lashing behind her. The bond pulled at her ribs like an insistent heartbeat, and she hated him for it.
"I do not need a babysitter," she said.
Tomas turned another page. "She is not a babysitter. She is a handmaid. I trust she explained this to you, yes? Or is your head full of fairy dust?"
The condescension was a deliberate cut, she knew, a small hook to see how she would flinch. She did not.
"I understand perfectly well." Bianca stepped into the room, boots silent on the thick carpet. "I just do not care, nor do I need such frivolous things. I have dressed myself since I was eight years old. I have fed myself, armed myself, and kept myself alive in ways your precious handmaid could not imagine. I will not have some painted doll trailing me like a bellhop."
Now Tomas looked up. His eyes were dark, bottomless, the predatory depth of a thing that had watched empires rise and rot. He closed the book with a soft thud.
"You are the lady of this house now," he said. "There are expectations."
"I am the leader of a syndicate that spans four continents," Bianca replied. "Expectations are what I set, not what I follow."
Tomas rose from his chair, slow and deliberate, a predator unfolding. He came around the desk, and the air thickened with his presence. The bond twisted in her chest, a muscle cramp of want and fury.
He stopped a few feet from her. "You have made your point," he said. "But you will find that my household runs on my authority."
"Then we have a problem." She held his gaze. "Because my household runs on mine. And until that ring stops being a strategy and starts being a cage, you will not dictate how I breathe."
A muscle moved in his jaw. His voice dropped, low and flat. "You do not have to stay here."
The words hung between them, sharp as a blade drawn across a throat.
Bianca felt something crack open inside her, a hot bright thing that was not pain and was not grief. She did not know what it was. She did not want to know.
"I won't," she said.
"Good," he said.
"Good," she said.
She turned on her heel, her tail slicing through the air, and she walked out of his study. She did not slam the door. The door closed with a click that felt louder than any shout, and the bond tugged at her chest like a line hooked to her heart.
She felt his gaze on her back, heavy and unreadable, all the way down the corridor. It followed her past the servants and the paintings and the silent watching walls, until she turned the corner and the thread of it snapped at last.
She kept walking. She did not look back.
But her hand, beneath the sleeve of her sweater, pressed against the silver locket, and she felt her own pulse racing, rabbit-fast under the skin, as if she had survived an execution by inches.
The silence of the study closed around him like water. For a long moment Tomas did not move, his hands hanging at his sides, his gaze fixed on the door she had just passed through. The wood was old, dark, scarred by centuries of use, and it told him nothing. He listened to the rhythm of her footsteps fading down the corridor, the soft whisper of her tail against the walls, the slowing of her pulse as she put distance between them. The bond pulled at him with every step she took, a taut wire strung between his sternum and the space where she existed, and it did not ease until she turned the corner and vanished from his awareness.
Then it was only a hollow ache. A phantom limb.
Tomas closed his eyes.
He had expected this marriage to be a contract. A merger of blood and territory, sealed with a ceremony and a handshake, each party free to pursue their own interests in the cold arithmetic of power. That was what he had agreed to, what he had endured the gala and the bachelor party and the interminable hours of vows for. The blood rite was tradition, a formality necessary to satisfy the older houses, and he had performed it the way he had performed a hundred other rituals: with detachment, with precision, with the bored competence of a man who had watched lesser creatures believe in gods.
He had not expected the bond to take. He had not expected it to feel like this.
The variable had been Bianca herself. Her blood was not human, not vampire, not any single thing he could name. There was witch in her, and fairy, and something older that he could not place, something that had made the rite seize and burn and sink its hooks in far deeper than it should have. When she had drunk from him, he had felt the world tilt. When he had taken her in that private chamber, he had lost himself in ways he had not lost himself in centuries, and the memory of it now sat in his chest like a stone thrown into still water, radiating ripples he could not smooth.
He could not think clearly around her. That was the truth of it. Every word she spoke, every flash of her purple eyes, every curve of her mouth when she wanted to cut him, it all pressed on something primal that he had long believed dead. She made him want to reach for her and throttle her in equal measure, and the two impulses were so entangled that he could not tell where one ended and the other began.
She was feeling it too. He knew that. He had felt the pulse of her fury through the bond, the crackle of her temper, and underneath it the same confused heat that plagued him. The way her hand had moved to her locket as she walked away, the way her pulse had quickened despite her anger. She was as trapped by this as he was.
Living apart was the sensible answer. He had said as much last night on the terrace, and she had agreed. Distance until the bond settled, until the sharp edges wore smooth, until they could stand in the same room without this infernal pull singing through his veins. It hurt. He would not pretend otherwise. The ache of her absence was a physical thing, a pressure behind his sternum, a hunger he could not feed. But he had spent three hundred years mastering his appetites, and he would master this one too.
He opened his eyes. The study was exactly as it had been before she entered: the fire crackling, the books silent on their shelves, the great desk waiting with its papers and its histories. He took a breath that he did not need and walked back to his chair, settling into the worn leather with a fluidity that betrayed nothing.
The phone on his desk buzzed.
He looked at it. The screen glowed with a name he had been expecting since last night, if not this soon. Aldous Vane. His second, his oldest friend, the man who had proposed killing his new wife fourteen hours ago and had left the bachelor party convinced he had secured Tomas's blessing.
Tomas let it ring once. Twice. He picked up on the third, voice flat and unhurried.
"Aldous."
"My don." Aldous's voice came through the speaker, smooth as oil, carrying the faint undercurrent of eagerness that Tomas had learned to read centuries ago. "I trust the wedding night was... satisfactory."
The question was a probe, a hook lowered into still water. Tomas let it hang. "It was satisfactory."
"Good. Good." A pause. "I wanted to touch base, my don. The arrangements we discussed. I have been thinking on them, refining the details, and I believe I have a plan that will be both elegant and untraceable."
Tomas leaned back in his chair, watching the fire. In the glass of the window, his own reflection stared back at him, pale and unreadable. "I told you to wait."
"You did. And I have waited. But the matter is one of timing, my don. The longer we delay, the more embedded she becomes in your household, in your affairs. The harder she becomes to remove without leaving a stain."
"The wedding was yesterday."
"Exactly. Which is why we move quickly. The household is still in upheaval. The servants are still learning a new mistress. A hunting accident, perhaps, in the northern grounds. A fall from a cliff, a misfortune with a horse. They are common enough among newly brought brides who do not know the terrain."
Tomas said nothing. He could feel the shape of Bianca in the back of his mind, the low burn of the bond, the echo of her footsteps still fading from his hearing. The thought of her falling, of her neck breaking on the rocks below the northern cliffs, should have been a relief. It would solve everything. The merger would collapse, her syndicate would splinter without her, and he would absorb their assets at his leisure. The voodoo rumors would be tested and found empty, and he would be free of this infernal pull.
But the ache in his chest did not ease at the thought.
"Aldous," he said. "I will tell you when. Not before."
The silence that followed was heavy with Aldous's displeasure. "My don, I understand caution. But she is a threat. You have allowed her into your home, your bed. How long before she has a knife at your throat?"
Tomas smiled, though there was no warmth in it. "She is welcome to try."
"I do not share your confidence."
"Noted." Tomas hung up before Aldous could respond.
The study fell silent again. The phone sat on the desk, a black slab of modern technology in a room of ancient things. Tomas stared at it for a long moment, then let his eyes drift to the window. Beyond the glass, the northern grounds rolled out in grey and green, the cliffs rising in the distance, the sea a dark line on the horizon.
The bond hummed beneath his skin, a constant low frequency, and he felt the echo of her anger still burning somewhere in the house, three corridors and a stairwell away. She was pacing. He could feel it, the restless rhythm of her steps, the way her tail lashed as she thought.
He could call her back. He could tell Aldous no. He could let the marriage be what it was meant to be: an alliance of mutual convenience, two predators sharing a den without sharing a kill.
But he did not, and the stillness of the study stretched thin and taut around him, waiting for the next move.