Chapter Text
The first snow of winter fell feather-light, lethargic flurries descending to the cobblestones after sunset. Wind confounded the steady fall of precipitate, and created mindless whorls like a painter’s brushstrokes. Up, over, and around each other, colliding in nonsensical patterns until they landed.
Ilya Rozanov stood outside the apothecary’s storefront. The modest building’s stone and dark wood contrasted the unthreatening weather, protecting its only two current occupants in stoic silence. The sign on the door was usually flipped to ‘closed’ by this hour; Ilya had watched the owner walk over to it with all intentions of making that adjustment. Instead he’d open the door to a late customer, an older gentleman wringing his tremoring hands.
Winter meant nightfall remained within reach; the street already shrouded in darkness, kept lit by streetlamps flickering between flurries. The shop’s light dimmed, too, as the apothecary almost extinguished all the lamps for closing when the late customer arrived. Ilya waited, watched. He’d spent plenty of time doing this once, over a year ago now, before he understood the futility of his own patience.
The apothecary possessed a special kind of patience himself, not to turn this man down. From Ilya’s point of observation across the near-empty street, he explained something to his customer, gesticulating with one hand while the other distinguished between herbs in a glass case. The apothecary studied the older man’s face, parsing for his level of understanding. Ilya registered the healer’s focus in that little tug of his brow; the conscious effort to chose the right words. Always thinking, always so meticulous, so cautious. He retrieved a few tools and ingredients and prepared medicine at the countertop, whatever his weary customer requested. There were few professions Ilya found more desirable than skilled artisans and healers, and the apothecary fell somewhere between the two. Ilya licked his lips as his practiced hands measured proportions, his attention whole and unbreakable on his work.
Well. Almost unbreakable.
Ilya lifted his body from where his back rested against a streetlamp and stalked forward. Under his boots, the cobblestones finally gathered a faint coat of white for all the sky’s efforts, dusted like confectioner’s sugar over pastries. A twinge of thrill sparked as he approached the door; both in their proximity to potential passersby and the parallels to their first encounter. The gentle caress of snow could hardly compare to the blizzard that marked Ilya’s initial introduction, but he smiled despite himself, smug, an idea forming as the apothecary spoke to his customer.
With little ceremony, Ilya stepped into the frame of the window, a pace from the door. He imagined the view form inside; his figure backlit by the streetlamps, hardly enough light from inside to illuminate his face. Ilya tuned into the conversation, focusing his keen hearing like one might focus a microscope lens, until he could hear the conversation clearly. He caught the end of the older man’s sentence first.
“— think this will help?”
“Yes,” Ilya watched the words fall, watched the plush curve of his bottom lip curl inward to form the next letter,“but henbane is very strong, so be sparing with it, or it’ll do you more harm than good,” he procured a small bottle with a dropper; around the neck, a slip of twine held a small paper with smaller letters. He handed the bottle over to his customer; his reach started steady, but became shakier as he neared the medicine. The apothecary did not patronize him by reaching out and steadying his hand, and made no comment as he finally rationed his hand around the bottle.
“Only use few drops of it at a time, when your tremor acts up. No more than that — alright?”
“Yes, yes. I’ll mind the portion. How much do I owe you, son?”
The apothecary looked up at the man, and found Ilya behind him, waiting in his eyeline. A mere shadow beyond the window, light behind him and snow draped around him. For a moment, Ilya caught a delicious expression cross his face, one he’d bottle and take sparing drops of himself, if he could. The flinch of his dark brows, the briefest widening of his eyes, present for an undetectable tease of a moment until he schooled his expression with a that single shake of his head. Ilya’s smile grew. He knew what he’d find, but he tuned his hearing anyway, delighted by the exponential kickstart of the apothecary’s heartbeat. Ilya tilted his head, enough that it would be noticeable in his silhouette, and the apothecary caught it in a flicker of his eyes to the window and back to his customer. His throat worked, forcing a swallow and clenching his jaw shut. Ilya wanted to follow the flex of each muscle with his tongue; wanted to start at his masseter and work over the body of his mandible until his jaw fell open and let his fingers inside to prod at his teeth.
“I’ve already minded my earnings for the day — don’t worry about it.”
“Oh, I couldn't —”
“I insist.”
Ilya’s smile engulfed his face, now, as he walked away from the window to turn the corner of the building. Always so eager, his little rabbit. He remained listening to the conversation, the quality remaining consistent even as his distance grew. Ilya chucked to himself as he casually traversed the short alley. By the time he reached the back of the building, the customer had left, and the bolt on the front door clicked shut. Pointedly unlocked, though, was the back window Ilya swung open to climb inside, careful to keep silent as he shut it behind him. Footsteps, a single pair, paced in the front of the store for at least a minute until they stopped. The front door clicked again, unlocked, and swung open.
“Rozanov?”
A whisper into the wind, falling to the ground like the flurrying snow. Ilya stepped silently out of the spare bedroom, passed through the back workroom, and stood in the doorframe, leaning his shoulder against it.
“Are you there?”
He’d only cracked the front door open, his hand still fixed on the handle as he turned his head back and forth, searching the street for the man standing behind him. Catching a faint shine in the dim light, his hair had grown measurably since the previous winter. The silky black strands fell further down his neck, and tucked behind his ears. Still too short to tie into a tail, but perfect for gathering between Ilya’s fingers. His figure was impressive for a shopkeeper, built up over years of discipline, broad shoulders and thick arms, muscle Ilya knew rested under his dark brown shirt. At his side, his free hand clenched and unclenched; if Ilya made him wait any longer, he’d start thumping his foot against the wood floors. Impatient little thing.
“Close the door,” Ilya said, and stifled a laugh when the man startled, and whipped his head around. “You’ll let the cold in.”
Shane Hollander scowled at him, eyed his lopsided smile, and wrinkled his nose in irritation. Ilya stalked towards him as he shut the door with a petulant tug and turned to lock it again.
“Let in something worse than the cold,” he muttered.
Ilya placed a hand on Shane's shoulder, and he didn’t flinch at the touch. He leaned in close to Shane’s ear, “ah, this is different. You invited me, didn’t you?” he said, a warm swell of pride surfacing as he pressed his hips forward and Shane’ breath caught halfway down his throat. Shane didn’t turn, but he leaned back until his back met Ilya’s chest.
“Bastard. It’s not that late, you know. Anyone could have seen you.”
“It is crime to be out after dark? Someone should arrest that old man then. Better for your shop — he will tell everyone you give free medicine.”
“I do not give out —”
“I just watched you. So eager for me, you forgot how business works? Usually, when you sell something, you take money after,” Ilya shrugged, gesturing like he was genuinely explaining the concept. Shane left his body flush with Ilya’s, but turned his head to look at him over his shoulder, letting Ilya admire the slope of his nose, the fan of his eyelashes, the elegance of his face in profile.
“You’re an asshole. You knew what you were doing,” Shane said through an eye roll.
Ilya’s patience thinned and thinned, waning to the width of the flurries swirling beyond the door. His ears fine-tuned to the blood rushing through Shane’s arteries, thrashing out of his aorta from the frantic jack-rabbiting of his heart, despite his flippant words. He ducked his head into the curve of Shane’s neck, dragging his nose against the skin, nuzzling against the warmth waiting beneath it. Shane’s shoulders drew up at the first touch, but sunk slowly down as Ilya continued, one slow trip down to his collar and back to his ear.
“What was I doing?” Ilya asked, voice low.
Shane’s breath hitched, and he held steady for mere seconds until Ilya settled his hands onto his waist. He turned sharply about face, muttered a hurried swear under his breath before he crashed his lips against Ilya’s. He gripped Ilya’s shirt collar with both hands — as if he needed coaxing closer, as if this required any convincing — and shuddered his breath into his mouth. Ilya smirked into the kiss, leaving one hand to grip Shane’s waist as the other came up to cup his face and feel his jaw work under his palm. He slotted his leg between Shane’s and pressed into his pelvis, unsurprised to feel him hard, already desperate at the work of his tongue.
At the nape of his neck, Shane’s hands curled into his hair, the erratic tugs and presses as involuntary as his soft gasps. He liked to thread his fingers through the curls, to pull tight and ground himself, and that suited Ilya just fine. Made him feel real, grounded. Shane clung to him like a lifeline, and for what little it was worth coming from a monster, Ilya hoped to honor that trust.
“Mmph, Ilya — bed, we should —”
“No. Here. Want you on the counter.”
Shane’s heart stuttered in his chest; Ilya savored the sound. “The windows, someone will —”
“I will listen for people,” Ilya said, pulling Shane off the door by his waist, “Don’t worry. I am not good with sharing.”
“Not what I was, mm, worried about,” Shane started, losing conviction as Ilya guided him, kissing hungrily at his neck as they moved. He returned to his lips when Shane backed into the counter, and slipped his hands under his legs to help him hop up onto it.
This left Shane a mere few inches taller than Ilya, tilting his head down to meet his eyes. Ilya pulled out of the kiss, his hands working on the buttons of Shane’s shirt as he drank in the sight of him. Shane’s eyes took on a faint glaze, like he’d just woken up from an indulgent night of sleep. His hands, which found their way to cup Ilya’s face on either side, twitched at his against his cheek. The deep valley of his cupid’s bow sat pink and glossed with spit, parted just so. Rosy flush spread on his cheeks, and Ilya found with satisfaction that the shade spread down over the top of his chest, where the work of his breathing was obvious in the dim lamplight. Ilya pushed the shirt off his shoulders, and did not share the work with gravity; he pulled the fabric down himself, let the back of his hands graze past the warm skin of Shane’s collar, shoulder, down the planes of his arms.
Even as a human, Ilya had been a heavyweight, his size and generations of drunkards making him a challenge for drink to win over; but here, for Shane, he was a cheap date. Drunk on pepper-flake browns of the freckles spanning his cheeks, swaying on his feet at his dexterous hands as they worked on the fastenings of Ilya’s pants without looking, slurring his speech at his heavy-lidded gaze, waiting for Ilya’s tour of his body to end there, like it always did. His eyes, always Shane’s eyes.
Despite himself, the barest gasp pushed past his lips as Shane fixed a hand around him, hard and heavy in his palm. Ilya often though himself cursed by his senses — the world was louder than necessary, the details sharper than he required — but now, he blessed the careful attenuation of his vision for capturing the thin demarcation of deep brown iris against wide black pupil. He’d never be able to make that distinction in this dim light without his gifted curse, and for that, he could be thankful. Confirmation, paired with his harsh breaths and straining pull against his trousers, that Shane was wanting, too.
“Need your hands on me that bad?” Ilya teased, then stepped back, out of Shane’s reach.
“What’re you…?” Shane said, his brows scrunched together.
Ilya only smiled, and took a few paces over to one of the cabinets on the wall. He did not adjust his clothes, unbothered by his undone pants with the tip of his cock peeking out of his boxers, hard and held flush against his stomach by the fabric. He opened a drawer, pulled out two white sheets and a few thin scraps Shane used as tourniquets, and returned to the counter. He stepped past Shane, dark eyes tracking his every move in silence as he let the cloth roll out to cover the table behind him. Ilya patted the newly draped end of the counter, where he stood at the head of his newly fashioned exam table.
“Come. Lay here.”
There it was again, that crease between his brows; Ilya wanted to smooth it out with his thumb.
“Are you playing doctor, now?”
Ilya smiled, baring his teeth, flashing his fangs down at Shane. This had taken a while to tease out; getting Shane to fire back, to say more of the words he’d normally let dry up on his tongue. He watched over the course of their encounters as Shane would make a smart comment followed by a sudden stutter of his breath, anticipating a strike or reprimand. But after a year of their clandestine meetings, Shane picked up that all he would get in reply to his chirps was a wild smile or a chirp right back.
“Sure. Bloodletting is still in fashion, yes?”
Shane rolled his eyes, but he was already inching back on the table, then lying down as Ilya instructed. Without coaxing, without convincing, without compulsion.
“No, it isn’t. It’s barbaric, it doesn’t actually cure anythi—”
“Give me your hands.”
With unfettered hunger on his face, in the curl of his lip around a smirk, he drank in the sight of Shane’s obedience. He’d need decades of fine-artist’s apprenticeship to properly depict the scene of Shane splayed out on the table, with his arms outstretched above his head toward Ilya. Empty palms, unarmed, deferring control to a blood drinking monster; perhaps this description better suited a poet than an artist.
The pristine starched-white of the sheet beneath him contrasted the charcoal-brown of his hair, falling in shiny tresses around his head in a halo. Shane tilted his head back to look at Ilya, his lashes flush against his brow, watching him with unmasked curiosity. On his face, dusted along his cheekbones, the color reminded Ilya of a home he hadn’t seen in decades, of malva moschata, the lively pink flowers that survived hardy winters, despite their delicate appearance. Deep, stubborn roots and intricate, lovely petals; Ilya's own little malva lay on the table, awaiting further instruction.
“Lift your head.”
Shane wrinkled his brow, but obliged. Ilya took the second rolled-up sheet and placed it under Shane’s neck. He relaxed against his makeshift pillow, looking up at Ilya with a wistful smile.
“Cross your wrists.”
Shane obeyed. His eyes were dark and glossy, flickering between Ilya’s. He'd come to recognize this startled-animal look as anticipation, rather than fear; another conditioned response after months of willing submission taken carefully in Ilya’s hands. This was the longest Ilya had gone, in his memory, without breaking something precious, and he was keen on maintaining this record.
He bound Shane’s wrists together with the strip of cloth, and left them resting above Shane’s head. He wriggled his wrists — not struggling, only testing, like he always did when Ilya held him down. Apparently satisfied, he kept his gaze on Ilya, his breaths gone deep and slow despite the rapid pulse of his heart beneath the bare skin of his chest. Ilya leaned forward over his body, well aware that this placed his pelvis and undone pants beside Shane’s head, and let the tips of his fingers graze from the his shoulders down his body until the top of his pants. He took his time, enjoying the goosebumps and rasing hair that followed his touch.
There was not a cell in Shane’s body that did not react to Ilya, and the pride swelling in his chest mixed with a more subtle, more forbidden feeling their encounters always elicited. He ran his fingers again, forming two symmetrical circuits of touch over the topography of his body. Over the swell of his chest, the valley between them, down to the taut muscle of his abdomen, the softer pouch below his navel, out to his flank where the curve of his waist pulled inward. Down, out, and back up his sides; Ilya repeated this a few more times, increasing the pressure until he was almost kneading at Shane’s body, easing him into the touch. His cock was fighting with his pants, pressing an obvious outline of it into the dark fabric, a faint darker spot at the tip where he’d leaked precum. Ilya licked his lips.
He tracked the exact moment Shane became impatient; he shook his foot, the barest flex and release of his calf muscle, fidgeting with it since his hands were bound. With a breathy sigh, Shane relaxed the last of the tension from his body, and used that feeble excuse to shift his hands, letting his knuckles brush against Ilya’s cock where he stood at the head of the table. Ilya chuckled, shaking his head.
“Always so eager.”
Shane scoffed, but took the lack of admonishment as permission, and palmed at Ilya as much as his restrained wrists and awkward angle would allow. He gasped softly, as if he’d been on the receiving end of the touch, connecting with mostly cloth and only the head of Ilya’s cock where it stuck out the top of his boxers.
“You’re being a tease.”
“You’re being impatient, zaichyk,” he pinched one of Shane’s nipples, just to be contrarian, smirking when he pushed his chest into the touch. “I warm you up first, like a gentleman —”
“Don’t want a gentlemen,” Shane said, contorting his wrist to wrap a hand around Ilya’s cock and squeeze. “Want you to fuck my mouth.”
If Ilya could die, this man would be the death of him.
He finally pushed his pants down past his hips, and pulled himself fully out of his boxers. Shane stared, his eyes rolled back to watch Ilya behind him as his hands fell obediently above his head again. No matter how many nights they spent together, Ilya didn’t grow tired of his expression — pure desire, desperate and honest, written plainly on Shane’s face. Shane’s eyes flitted between Ilya’s face and his cock, and licked his lips in anticipation.
“Please,” he added for good measure.
Ilya had trouble denying Shane when he asked like that; he had trouble denying Shane anything at all.
Happy to oblige, Ilya stepped to the side of the table tapped the head of his cock against Shane’s lips, his precum forming a wet string connecting them, then snapping off, catching the light. He pursed his lips and placed a kiss to the tip, doe-eyed with a mischievous little smile quirking hip lips up at the corners.
“When you choke, remember you asked for it,” Ilya warned.
Shane didn’t have much time for a retort. With a flat palm pressing his cheek into the table, Ilya eased into Shane’s waiting mouth and groaned at the wet warmth, at his tongue that started working immediately. He afforded Shane a few slow pumps of his hips to adjust the angle of his head and neck before he sped up, a low moan careening out from his throat. The exertion made Shane screw his eyes shut, and with what sparse mobility he had, he bobbed his head further into Ilya’s cock, moaning with little broken sounds that vibrated around him. Fuck, what a sight. He made no effort to move his bound hands, but after a mere thirty seconds Ilya noticed him pressing his thighs together down the table, fidgeting where Ilya had been neglecting him. Maintaining the pace of his hips, Ilya leaned his body over Shane’s and extended his hand down to the button on his pants.
“You need some attention too, don’t you, sweetheart?”
Shane moaned and around his cock, giving the slightest cant of his hips forward into Ilya’s touch. He moved the fabric just enough to get his cock free, and salivated at the flushed red tip, wet and twitching. Ilya smirked and wrapped his fist around Shane, delighted by the muffled whine he sounded off around his cock, and how he didn't stop pushing his bulb further past his lips. His hips shifted on the table, squirming more obviously with every second Ilya used his mouth but kept his hand painfully still around his cock. Ilya tapped the side of Shane’s face twice with his free hands, and Shane’s eyes cracked open to look at him.
For a moment, Ilya forgot what he intended to say. Shane’s dark eyes looking up at him like that — a picture of sin with his lips wet and split around his cock, a single tear of exertion rolling down his freckles — tugged hard at his gut.
“Work for it, Shane. C’mon. Fuck my fist.”
His brows knit beautifully together, looking up at Ilya through his lashes as he continued to drive his cock into his mouth. Shane’s knees came up a fraction as he planted his heels in the table, and bucked his hips up into Ilyas hand. He groaned at the friction, and needed a moment of recovery from the first lick of sensation to muster the strength to repeat it. Pride swelled in Ilya’s chest as he watched him exert his best efforts to obey two sets of instructions, relaxing his jaw and canting into Ilya’s impartial, stationary fist. A few more tears pricked at the corners of his eyes, shut tight again in focus. Ilya’s hand cradled the back of Shane’s head, following the little rocking motions he made to chase his cock.
“Crying already?” Ilya pouted down at him. “Need me to go easy on you?”
Shane tilted his head away, wrinkling his brow and looking up, signaling Ilya to let him breathe. He pulled Shane’s mouth off him with a wet pop, and Shane glared up at him, red-faced and panting.
“Don’t—” he started, cut off by a sputtered cough.
Don’t? Ilya reared his hips back further, giving Shane space. His ironclad grip on his hair relaxed to a caress as he let him finish the brief bout of coughing and catch his breath. A stab of guilt cut through the fog of arousal. Don’t what? He's been teasing, but maybe he really did need a break — don’t go so hard, maybe, don’t push. It was too much, he wanted to stop —
“Don’t fucking patronize me, asshole.”
Red-faced, lips slick and shining as he caught his breath, hair stuck to his forehead its sweat — Shane glaring up at him was a picture of sin. Ilya’s own lips parted, completely enraptured, his fist still tight around Shane’s weeping cock. After a few seconds, he scoffed, shaking his head.
“Have it your way,” he said, grabbing his shoulder to pull Shane’s body closer to the edge of the table, and shoving his entire length inside.
He felt the muscles of Shane’s throat spasm around the intrusion, caught mid-inhale, his nose brushing the dark hairs at his pelvis. Shane’s shoulders bunched up for a moment in surprise, but relaxed just as fast, his words having garnered the exact response he was looking for. Ilya recognized this in Shane early — the cycle of desire and guilt, the desperate need for something he felt too shameful to ask for outright. The pace of his hips was harsh and hedonic, and Ilya’s smile only grew as Shane started to buck up into his fist again, the motion stuttering and often aborted half-way when he needed to focus on not choking. If the sounds he made around his cock were any indication, pitching higher and more desperate with every passing second, Shane wouldn’t last long, even with so little effort on Ilya’s part.
“Close, hm?”
Shane nodded fervently, as much as he could manage without Ilya slowing down. Ilya pulled out of his mouth at the same time he removed his tight grip around Shane’s cock. He let out a devastated whine, his screwed-shut eyes shooting open in shock and darting down between his legs, then up at Ilya, wide and frenzied.
“Wha — Ilya, what the fuck —”
Ilya cut him off with a tut, tut, “No complaining,” he said, and reached down to scoop him up off the table in a princess carry. Shane bristled, glaring up at him, but didn’t squirm nearly enough to avoid Ilya’s arms as he whisked him away to the bedroom.
“I tell you not to patronize me, so you carry me like a fucking baby —”
“You weigh about as much.”
“I am two hundred pounds —”
“Sure.”
“— and a grown fucking man.”
Ilya rolled his eyes and dumped Shane onto the bed, where he landed with an oof. He worked on undoing the buttons of his shirt as Shane fumbled to writhed the rest of the way out of his pants and boxers with his wrists still bound. Shockingly, he managed, and rolled over onto his stomach, sighing as he rocked his hips into the mattress, his indignant glare slipping away.
“I liked you better with my cock shutting you up.”
“The hell you did,” Shane said, with no punch behind the words, slowly grinding his hips into little circles, “Ugh, that hurt, when you stopped.”
“That was the point.”
Ilya finally stripped down to nothing but his necklace, and took his time letting his eyes wander Shane’s body, lingering on the flex of the muscles in his ass and thighs as he sought friction against the sheets. He inched toward the edge of the bed as Ilya did, and propped himself up on his elbows to seek eye level with his cock. Instead of taking it back in his mouth, he brushed his nose and cheek against Ilya’s thigh, nuzzling him like a cat might, and kissed at the pale skin there. Ilya reached down with the intent of yanking his head back by the hair to fuck his face again, but he was arrested by the tenderness, the earnest little pinch of Shane’s brow. And instead of gripping, his calloused fingers only pet his hair, carding his hands through the dark silky strands as Shane licked and sucked at his sensitive skin. He’d come in with a plan, intended to edge him a few more times until he was absolutely begging for it — but the slow, careful placement of each kiss stopped Ilya in his tracks. Shane hummed softly as he went, but he wasn't rutting his hips into the bed anymore, apparently content with Ilya’s hand cradling his head and the taste of his thigh.
There it was again — the feeling that he held some precious, rare artifact in his hand, waiting for the inevitable crash of it shattering on the ground beneath his feet.
Shane’s gentle reverence broke in a sudden strike, the gasp of air as he turned his head and closed his teeth around the meat of Ilya’s inner thigh.
“Fuck! You little —” Ilya pushed Shane at the shoulder, rolled him over onto his back before he pounced on him. Shane was beaming, beyond proud of himself. Even if Ilya only saw him in the night, he was radiant; Ilya stole a moment’s glance before capturing his mouth in a searing kiss. Shane’s bound wrists writhed between the restraints and the weight of Ilya’s body. Blood from Shane’s bite — which Ilya deliberately let fall, steering his body’s attention away from the easy work of healing a human wound — smeared onto Shane’s thigh. He let him get away with a few desperate thrusts of their cocks against each other until Ilya lifted his hips, denying Shane the sensation. Against his lips, Ilya could still feel Shane smiling.
Ilya finally pulled back when they were both panting. “You do this on purpose? Trying to tell me something?”
Shane squirmed, and managed to meet Ilya’s heated stare with obvious effort on his part. He nodded, his eyes so big and dark and glassy, like a deer making knowing contact with the head of an arrow already notched against a bowstring. He cupped Shane’s cheek, smiling down at him.
“Go ahead, sweetheart,” Ilya tapped his cheek twice. “Ask me.”
Shane swallowed, “Bite me. Anywhere. Hard.”
— — —
Ilya wiped sweat off his brow with the back of his hand, sighing into the chill night air. Spring thawed the earth, for which Ilya was grateful, as he was running late. Really, it was warm enough now, and deep enough into the woods — burying the body had been mostly unnecessary.
He’d gotten into the habit feeding on his way to see Shane, in neighboring towns just far enough that word wouldn’t spread, if he was careful. The resolve to do so was dual fold; for one, if he didn’t space out his hunting over time and place, he’d start seeing crosses on doors and salt circles around buildings. The port town already smelled of salt and brine — better not to add garlic necklaces to the mix.
Then, there was the matter of his own restraint; Ilya and his hunger choreographed a delicate dance, and he’d learned to err on the side of caution. After the first few decades — not his best years, patchwork and unintelligible in his memory like the morning after too much liquor — he’d formed a silent vow to avoid barbarity, when he could help it. He needed to eat, by no fault of his own; but he could take a little care not to leave children without parents, or lovers without their better halves. There was an art to hunting, to finding prey that tasted lighter than they weighed down on the fleeting human nature remaining in his psyche, and he couldn’t access such discretion when he was starving.
When hungry, Ilya was not an animal; no animal was capable of such cruelty.
Such musings were irrelevant with a sated appetite and a body already enveloped by the earth under his feet. He’d set out at twilight, and at the pace his curse allowed, he’d be tucked away at the furthest edge of the neighboring town as the moon settled overhead. Just as he’d planned — discounting the swarm of flies buzzing noisily around his ears.
“You continue to hunt in our woods?” called one of the four figures surrounding him.
Ilya turned his head lazily to the sound. They did not sneak up on him, not nearly. He’d been ignoring them, like one ignored the symptoms of an impending cold, hoping the outright denial would will the inevitable annoyance out of existence.
Ilya huffed a sigh, dragging a hand through his curls. “I am half a century senior to your oldest,” he drawled, walking back the way he’d come, letting the metal shovel drag noisily through the dirt. “I clean up my messes. I do not need lectures from children.”
The posse scuttled around him as he moved. Ilya wondered if the one past the treeline genuinely thought he was undetectable, and chuckled to himself.
“You’re making this harder on all of us,” another said; Ilya did not look, but he identified her voice as a few meters behind him, over his left shoulder. “The more we fight with our neighbors, the more risk we accrue. You can’t remain ambivalent forever.”
Ilya let the group follow him for a good few minutes in silence, as if considering. He was not considering; he wanted to return the shovel to the shed where he’d plucked it from an hour ago. The farm was owned by an older gentleman, and he and his wife had smiled kindly at him from their porch as he passed by a few hours ago. It seemed cruel to send them searching acres for tools at their age.
“I have never needed a coven,” he said with a shrug.
“You have a responsibility to —”
“Is my responsibility not to bare my teeth in town square, or drain drunks in their bar stools. Is not my responsibility if you need me for petty territory wars. I am not for sale.”
One of the four — the first to have spoken, his voice ringing clearer than the rest — stepped out of shadow and directly in Ilya’s path. He was markedly taller than Ilya, and broader too, a real textbook brute in stature. Ilya possessed an awareness that they were too young to understand; they could sense Ilya’s presence in their province, sure, but he identified dozens of other vampyr as pinpricks in the map of his mind, spanning across the continent. They mistook their glimpse of knowledge for complete comprehension; they had no concept of the depth of their ignorance.
“You cannot ignore us forever,” he said, glowering down at Ilya.
Ilya sighed, looked up at him, then tilted his head and dragged his gaze over to his coven member, poorly concealed in the darkness beyond the treeline. She was younger still — even better that this skill was unknown to the pair of them. Ilya found little pleasure using his abilities to frighten already terrified humans; but these were children playing with ancient things, wearing the curse like festival costumes, and they should know their place.
“Oh, I can. Learned from your lover there. She is excellent at ignoring your brothel visits, hm?”
He let the man’s mouth fall open in a gape before smiling innocently, then pursing his lips in mock deliberation as he looked between the pair of them.
“End of discussion, yes? I think she’d like to speak with you,” Ilya gave the man two pats on the shoulder, so drenched in condescension he could practically see the impression they left in his coat. He stalked off, resting the shovel on his shoulder as he went, nose set toward the salty coast.
— — —
“Would you like to state the obvious, or should I?”
Ilya leveled a stare at the woman across from him, lowering his glass of wine. It was a comfort to hear their shared native tongue, smooth and melodic in her familiar voice. Her eyes were bright as ever, her hair in an elegant updo with ringlet curls framing her face. She’d been a few years younger than Ilya, when she took the curse.
“And what would the obvious be, Sveta?”
Svetlana gestured to the setting with a vague flourish; they sat at one of few nice restaurants on the wealthier end of town, where the proximity to the water made an elegant backdrop, rather than polluting the area with the scent of fish and the raucous symphony of men shouting to coordinate the docking of ships. Summer steeped into bloom, but it’s true heat only came with the blare of the daylight sun, leaving the night air pleasant and cool.
“Why do I keep meeting you in this shitty town?”
Ilya frowned, but he was not surprised to hear the question. They’d been dancing around this topic for over a year, and Ilya had carefully avoided giving straight answers when he saw Svetlana every few months. He tried it again, but he knew that tone of her voice; she was probably going to get her way, tonight.
“I don’t get into your business like this, do I? What does it matter?”
She raised an eyebrow. “It clearly does matter, if you're getting defensive about it. I mean it, Ilya. I’m concerned — it’s too small a town to feed without anyone noticing. Especially if I keep trekking out here to find you. So, what is it?”
“You know I got into trouble with volkolak my first night here, yes? The coven —”
“Oh, save me the bullshit, please. We both know you don’t care to join a coven. Tell me about the boy.”
Ilya pressed his lips together. After a moment suffering her pointed stare, he reached for his glass and took a long sip.
“Ilya. I’ve been very, very patient with you. But I’ve known you a damn century — you aren’t hiding this from me. So, talk.”
Well, there it was. Ilya wished he’d prepared an answer, or had any idea of what to say, but he hardly understood what he felt for Shane himself. What did it mean that he couldn’t stay away from him? Not for lack of trying; between bodies and blood and liquor he'd exhausted every avenue of distraction. Hours upon hours he spent ruminating on the ebb and flow of their relationship brought nothing conclusive. Ilya would disappear and reappear, be kind and cruel, give and take, harm and heal. And always, invariably, Shane opened his door. Stripped, kneeled, offered his wrists to bind and neck to feed from. What could Ilya do with such a delicate thing trusted in his hands, besides break it? No matter how inevitable it seemed that he’d eventually ruin a good thing like he always did, the fact remained that he hadn’t — not yet.
“He is different,” Ilya settled on.
“He must be. Handsome, certainly.”
Ilya furrowed his brow.“You’ve seen him?”
“Met him, actually. He bought me a drink last year, when you were skulking around here with a sour face all winter.”
Maybe Ilya should have been surprised, but he only rolled his eyes. Svetalana had neglected to bring this up, even when they did dance around the topic. “Nosy.”
“Not the point,” she dismissed, pressing further. “What’s different about him?”
“He knows.”
Finally, Svetlana took pause. She narrowed her eyes, prompting him to elaborate. And Ilya figured he might as well — she was right, it was foolish to think he could hide this from her any longer. Svetlana knew his tells, could tell when he was lying or with holding since they were both mortal children, and he hid skinned knees and bruises, or wrote them off otherwise. Even little, inconsequential things were difficult to hide from her keen eyes, and there was no use pretending.
Once he started, he couldn’t stop, spilling over like a neglected pot over the fire, protected from prying ears by his foreign tongue.
“I found him after a fight with some mutts, like I said. He knew how to fix the scratches, somehow — there are hardly any scars. But he figured me out, and… he asked for it, Sveta. Not metaphorically, like he was,” Ilya gestured with a flourish of his hand, “egging me on, or tempting me, whatever — no, he literally asked for me to feed from him. He doesn’t care that I am like this, he has known for years now and not told a soul, far as I can tell. I have told him more about me than I’ve told anyone but you in… maybe ever.” he paused, realizing that truth only as he said it. It unraveled his barely-there train of thought, and left him sitting in the unsalvageable pile of un-spooled thread.
“I don’t know. He is different,” he concluded.
Svetlana, if she was shocked or angry, did not show it. He’d given her every right to be; there were not supposed to be living humans who knew what they were, or held proof they existed. It was a very simple rule, one of very few. But she’d always possessed better control than Ilya — with her emotions, with her actions, with her hunger. So she measured her answer, and provided it after a slow sip from her glass.
“I don’t want to see you get hurt.”
Ilya scoffed, smiling despite himself. “You will not find me with a stake in my heart anytime soon, Sveta.”
“You know that’s not what I meant, Ilyusha. This is a lit powder keg for both of you. I’m sure he is different, but he is human. His mortal days are numbered. Hm…” she tapered off, her gaze slipping past Ilya’s head to something behind him. Likely, dinner; they had only come for the wine, and she was surely hungry after her travel into town.
“Does that conclude my lecture?” Ilya asked.
He panned his gaze around the room, mirroring her, like he was tracking his meal, too.
“One last thing, actually,” Svetlana said, setting down her empty glass and reaching for her reticule. “Stop pissing off the local vampyr. I know you know how to play nice.”
“Those runts should respect their elders.”
“Oh, because your respect for me is so endless, isn’t it?”
“That’s different.”
“Spare me, Ilyusha,” she said, but she smiled as she stood from her seat, eyes flicking to her mark. “Okay, lecture’s over now. Be careful.”
“Goodnight, Sveta.”
After meeting her soft smile with his own, Ilya let his eyes wander, allowing time for her departure as if to make their hunt less obvious. But beyond the glass reflecting light off moonlit waves, the breeze smelled of salt and carried chittering storm-petrels’ wings to their prey; Ilya knew exactly where he’d end up, tonight.
— — —
The last hour of the day’s brutal summer sun bore down on the back of Shane’s neck, the thick air sticking his hair down to his forehead. The strap of his satchel rested on his shoulder, empty aside from a pair of shears and some cloth. Hopefully, it would be full on his way home.
Shane hadn’t trekked out to this end of town for a while, but the bush of bergamot near his home had been tragically taken by a course of fungus, and he was running low. He’d last been to the area to speak to a new supplier about his glassware, but that was months ago, and he hadn’t kept an eye out for the bush then. He wasn’t sure it even existed anymore — if memory served, there was a lively crop of the lovely purple flowers not far from the academy where he’d attended school.
He surprised himself with how well he navigated to the correct building. It hadn’t aged much in his — god, eight years away. Shane set out far after school hours, approaching evening now, and found himself pleased not to have run into a soul on the walk up to the main building. No gate or explicit rule forbade entry to the grounds, but Shane liked to keep his secrets about the origins of his herbs, on occasion.
He walked along the side of the building, searching for fond memories elicited when he peered through the windows into empty classrooms. A few teachers had been kind to him, or at least appreciated his reserved, quiet nature over the more raucous boys who distracted their lessons. Not much else to be said about his classmates; when he was not invisible, he was shoved in the corridors or tripped between classes. He’d served some of those boys — men now, he supposed — in his shop on occasion, accepting coin for his medicine from hands that once pressed his face into his desk or smacked his books out of his arms. Shane didn’t think they remembered.
Lost in thought, Shane turned the corner to the back of the building, which brushed up directly with a patch of wooded forest. His eyes tracked easily to the bright bush of wild bergamot, only a little taller than he remembered, and he smiled to himself, reaching to open his bag and retrieve his tools.
A soft sound startled him out of his plan, and he tracked his eyes to it. Only a few feet from the building, propped up against a tree, Shane spotted two figures in familiar uniforms. Peering through the branches, he followed the figures up to grappling hands, loose ties, and open mouths. Ties — Shane took in no further detail, casting his eyes away and turning tail immediately. A branch snapped underfoot just before he turned the corner, and —
“Wait! Hey, wait —”
Shane swore under his breath, not running, but not slowing his hurried walk back around to the front of the building. He hadn’t seen much of anything; if the boys would take his lead and forgot this had happened at all, they’d both be better off. But to Shane’s dismay, footfalls sounded off behind him, and soon a tentative hand tapped at his shoulder.
He winced, braced himself, and turned around. The boy in front of him had a messy crop of brown hair pulled back into a tail, strands falling messily out of the tie. He caught his breath, a flash of fear obvious on his flushed face for a split second when Shane finally looked at him, then schooled. The stoic expression he painted over his features suggested he actively fought tears. Lips sealed in a line gave the same impression, his jaw clenched so hard Shane could see the muscle twitching under it with effort. The boy swallowed, took a short breath, and finally spoke.
“Please, sir. I know — I know you saw. Please, don’t tell anyone.”
Shane’s bone-dry mouth parted his lips to confirm, to reassure. But past his tongue, down his throat, his vocal cords were paralyzed. The boy looked so lost, so scared and so desperately trying to hide it, and he reminded Shane so acutely of himself that he worried he might cry first. How terribly had he feared something like this happening, when he was this boy’s age? He’d thought about it, between classes, daydreamed about the encounters his classmates would recall in giddy detail. But every time he pictured sneaking off and finding a girl to fool around with, the fingers interlocked with his rooted in calloused palms and the soft sounds from his partner’s lips were low in timbre, and it was wrong, wrong, wrong. He refused the whole ordeal outright in protest, refused the few confessions and bashful smiles from the girls who cast them his way — because if he couldn’t even daydream properly, how was he meant to do any of it right?
He watched now as the boy’s bottom lip trembled, despite his efforts to steel his expression, and fixated on it as his own heart broke. The little quiver was so childish, so innocent, and the fear it revealed ripped an ache into Shane that he’d been actively trying to smother his entire life.
“Oh,” the boy said, and Shane realized he’d let the silence stretch, probably scared him even worse by not saying fucking anything at all. He just needed to speak, tell the poor kid he would never utter a word of this, and be on his way —
“Oh, um — I would… do anything,” the boy swallowed again, audible, “Anything you want, sir. If you don’t tell anyone. Please.”
Shane blinked down at him a few times, confused. Then the boy bore his eyes up at him, bit his lip, and it finally hit Shane what he implied.
A hand tearing through his abdomen and grabbing a fistful of his intestines would have been less sickening, less horrifying than the feeling it elicited. Heaven above, he was in a school uniform — he couldn’t be any older than 17 to Shane’s 26!
“Oh, god,” Shane said, with a few rapid, tiny shakes of his head, “No, no, not — not necessary.”
To his terror, the boy persisted,“I mean it. Anything. I’m good for it. Or —” he looked over his shoulder, to see if his… if the other boy had come over. He hadn’t. “him, too. Really, a-anything, if you just — just not my father. Please don’t tell him.”
Shane was going to be sick. This was all wrong, so wrong he didn’t know where to put it, so wrong his stomach though he’d been poisoned and wanted to expel the contents. He went to put his arms up, palms out, like he was calming a startled animal — but the boy misunderstood it to be aimed at him, to grab or some other awful thing, so it instead produced the opposite effect as the boy’s entire body tensed up in fear. Shane shook his head, just once, and reminded himself that he was an adult, that he had a responsibility not to fuck up this situation any further than it already was. He could deal with his own turmoil later.
“I’m not telling anyone,” Shane said, trying to use his calm, assured customer-voice, “and I don’t want anything from you. Either of you.”
The boy blinked up at him, and wrung his hands together. “You… you mean that?”
Shane nodded, “Just be careful, would you? You have my word, yes, I do mean that, but others… might not be so kind.” he warned, hoping it didn’t come off as a threat.
The boy’s brow furrowed, and he narrowed his eyes up at Shane. “Do you mean…? Are you…?”
He recognized the question too fast, swallowed by irrational fear.
“It’s getting dark,” Shane said, adjusting the fastening on his bag and straightening his clothes. He eyed the woods behind, the sun cutting through the trees at a harsh angle, and thought of wolves and bears and other creatures with sharp teeth. “And keep out of the woods at night, okay? Not safe.”
The boy smiled curiously as Shane turned sharply about face, but to his relief, did not follow after him or ask any more questions. On the trek back home, his back still light and fruitless, the setting sun did not permit the relief of cool night breeze. Thick, cloying air trapped in his lungs, cicadas whined in his ears, their daytime call overlapping with the start of the cricket’s shift. Too suffocated to let any tears fall, they remained at bay, clouding the corners of his eyes. He wished they would fall, wished his body would let them— maybe they would join his sweat and cool him down between the jack-rabbiting of his heart and the hellish heat.
—
Late summer droned with the waning call of cicadas and waxing chorus of chirping crickets, swelling to life as night fell. Heat reached a crescendo earlier in the afternoon, so acutely that it bled into the night, the air dense with humidity that coiled and frizzed Ilya’s hair.
Hunger, since his transformation, did not resemble it’s human counterpart.
The craving did not cramp in his stomach; it did not make him irritable, it did not make him fear starvation. Ilya’s hunger stemmed from his vessels, a full-body ache, like the fevers that nearly ended him as child multiplied a thousand fold. His own blood — a darker, more viscous thing than his diet demanded — signaled the first warning. Running slower through his arteries, congesting his veins like sickness, like rot, something in need of debridement. It was everywhere; he could count every branch of every vessel as it throbbed around the pulsing sludge. Every capillary under each nailbed, pushing on the thickened keratin; every bulging anastomosis in his gut, in the latticework vessels of his mesentery; every tuft of twitching vortex veins behind his eye. Aching pain washed over him like waves against rock, cold and unforgiving, weathering him down to the bone until everything, every gust of wind or brush of his clothes, burned like alcohol on a thousand open cuts.
And his mind — his mind left him, when the hunger came. Hunger took the reins, made his consciousness shrink and shrink until it cowered pathetically in his frontal cortex before the beast; unable to provide reason and planning, surrendered to the frenzied, animal center of his brain without his input. Normally he avoided this, fed regularly enough that the cool, calculated parts of him could minimize the damage. But he’d neglected himself, and this creature held all his baser instincts, held the override, and locked Ilya in with a deadbolt, dangling the bloody key like a clock’s pendulum.
Blood. His fangs plunging into flesh, the punch through skin into sugar, like a fresh peach. Treacle-sweet sanguine coating his tongue, in rivulets down his chin, pouring faster than he could swallow it. Blood following the creases in his palms, dancing over the tendons of fingers, caking under his nails. Blood drenching his shirt, soaking him like spring rainfall, matting his hair —
Ilya shook his head, blinking rapidly. His last memory was a haze, and did not explain his surroundings. His body burned with want, and he’d been afforded a moment of lucidity. He looked down at his hands, where an elegant glass of clear liquid rested, mostly full. There was liquor on his tongue, sharp and astringent. The bar around him was all dark wood and velvet, decadent and luxurious for those with money to burn.
“Fuck,” he muttered under his breath, taking a sip of his drink.
He looked down at his hands again, where slender, manicured fingers curled around his wrist.
“Something the matter?” a woman’s voice, in the chair beside Ilya. Her eyes were big and doll-like, looking at Ilya through her lashes deliberately, pouting plush lips. What had his hunger gotten him into?
They were tucked into a booth, and a brilliant gold ring adorned her finger. The sparse lanterns of the bar were kept low, a faint suggestion of anonymity. He wracked his brain, left hanging by the hunger that brought him here, the beast that overtook his mind and left him with the patchwork memory of a drunk. The faint accent of the woman’s voice placed him somewhere out west.
A pang in his chest supplied, west of where? Where is your epicenter? Why is it a shoddy port town, why is it your Polaris, why are you so far from home?
The drink had cleared his head for a moment, but it wouldn’t last if he didn’t feed. In fact, he felt his consciousness slipping already, into the worst possible outcome; lucidity behind the bars of his mind, forced to watch with full awareness as the monster spoke for him, acted for him, moved for him. The dormant creature had decided Ilya was not competent enough to feed their co-inhabited body, and would settle the score himself while Ilya looked on in terror.
Ilya did not set his drink down. He did not take the woman’s hand and bring it to his lips, brushing them against her knuckles while he looked into her dark eyes. Ilya was not interested in her fine import liqueurs, and did not suggest they share such a nightcap in her home, while her husband was away. Ilya did not remove her ring with his teeth and toss it over his shoulder.
Ilya watched, thrashing behind his paralyzed confinement, looking on from his grated window behind his eyes as the monster got the dirty work done.
—
Ilya returned to his body around the time she stopped screaming.
It did not cease on a dime; it was a slow, tremulous decrescendo to silence. A maestro’s wavering hand, holding stubbornly on a fermata until air evacuated the lungs of the woodwind ensemble. When all that remained was a frail whimper, the thrashing stopped concurrently, the beating of her fists against his body futile as wind against stone.
He withdrew instinctually, grabbing her shoulders and pushing their bodies apart. Her dark hair stuck to her forehead with sweat; beneath her chemise, her heart beat was weak and rapid, like the wings of a bird shot straight through with an arrowhead, frantically trying to pump blood that no longer ran the circuit of her body. Ilya met her eyes, pupils blown wide and skin puffy in the aftermath of dried up tears. She noticed his gaze belatedly, taking genuine effort to focus her eyes on his. Her blinks were lethargic, gravity dragging down her lids until she exerted herself heaving them open; much like her head, nodding off until she whipped it upright again.
Ilya wished it didn’t feel so good.
He wished this didn’t ease the ache in his veins, wished it didn’t soothe him like cool balm over a burn. The monster was sated, and he retreated to the unconscious recesses of Ilya’s mind, dormant until he foolishly neglected his nature again. It left Ilya alone to clean up his mess.
“Are y’gonna…” she wheezed out a breath, “kill me?”
His brows pinched together, and he looked down at her with guilt he knew contradicted the creature who had done this to her. The monster was charming, cunning, all the marks of a gentleman intent on sating a different vice; the clever work of his tongue around his words, past her lips. The contrast between Ilya and the monster must have been obvious, because she scrunched her face in confusion for a moment, only to abandon the gesture when it took too much focus to pinch her muscles together. Ilya neglected her stability, and she swayed with a breathy hum; he lowered her down until she lay flat on her back in bed.
“Here, here. You are tired,” the words were sandpaper in his throat, but the blood remained honey-sweet on his tongue, “Rest, now. Is okay.”
“Nn… no. Stop it,” she slurred.
Her blood sullied the sheets beneath her, soaked the top of her chemise. Guilt, the thick, viscous sludge of it, occluded the vessels of his heart in a sharp, ischemic flash of pain.
“Don’t — I don’ wanna go.”
Ilya winced. He took a deep breath, then pressed his tongue to the roof of his mouth, teasing clear fluid out of the gland behind his canine. He leaned down. She tried to push him away, the mild resistance negligible. Wind again, against stone.
“Gettoff me. Hurts...”
The pain of hunger silenced, leaving a deafening white noise in its wake. The monster had been cruel; she’d remained awake through it all, fighting and screaming as he drained each liter from the tap, slower than he needed to. It wasn’t Ilya — of this he was adamant, as the alternative would be unlivable, untenable — but she watched his face contort into a snarl, had endured his fangs burrowing into her skin; the least he could do was take the pain away. Ilya applied the venom generously as she attempted to bunch her shoulders up and deny him access to her neck. The tension in her body unfurled as the analgesic diffused through her blood; with so little left, the onset was acute, and she sighed softly as the searing pain washed away with pleasant warmth.
“Better now?”
She only hummed in reply. Her eyes fluttered shut.
“Prostite menya,” Ilya whispered, reaching up for the charm of his necklace as he looked down at her.
Forgive me.
—
Shane returned home with an empty satchel and bile burning at the back of his throat.
Twilight set in as the sun teased its way down, burning bright orange, disappearing beneath the horizon. His mind ran leagues faster than his feet carried him, jumping between memories as the cruel director of his mind’s stage ran only the worst scenes in every act of his life, until present day. Tutting adults looking down at him, admonishing his silence. Lingering gazes he’d punish himself for, chewing the inside of his cheek until he tasted metal; meaningless insults tossed his way that rang truer than he could ever allow to be known; years of forcing restraint, forcing order and patience and fucking solitude —
Then, a storm. A knock at his door. Sin — every vice he’d thrashed and fought and struggled to resist — beckoning, taunting. A feast of unimaginable proportions, delicacies he’d never known from lands he’d never traveled, laid out before his own place card. Famished and emaciated, worn to the bone, he’d barely sat down before he gorged himself. Lapsed on every measure, undoing years of carefully manufactured stoicism, collapsing to his knees before a storm, arms open to receive it’s cruelty, his ironclad resilience made laughable and frail before raging winds.
Fuck. The look on the boy’s face, the desperation; that so easily could have been Shane in his shoes. Was that what he was, now? Confused, lost to depravity, handing the reins to someone of authority to exonerate him?
Shane finally, finally dropped his painted-on face once he passed the threshold of his door. His shoulders fell and his bag shrugged down to the ground with a thud. He kicked off his shoes, breathing too hard and fast for the pace that brought him home. Distantly, his growling stomach insisted he hadn’t eaten since breakfast, and his aching temples reminded him that the rush in the late afternoon gave him no time to drink despite the heat. But he was detached from his body, the threads coming undone one by one as he moved like a wraith to his room. He stripped until only his underclothes remained, sweat-slicked and clinging to his body.
There were no tears; none that fell, at least. They remained stubbornly tucked behind his lash line, obedient when the rest of him was not. He wrapped his arms around himself, like he used to do when he was a boy and felt too much, too loud, too everything. Shane pressed his eyes shut and tucked his head down into his knees where he slumped down against his bedroom wall, with no knowledge of the passing hours and rising moon.
A knock at his door.
No storm masked his arrival. No rationale Shane could conjure between unsteady breaths for anyone to find him in his home at whatever late hour he’d descended to. It was him. He rose without thinking, tracked to the hallway without considering, unlocked his front door with a resignation he’d once thought reserved for soldiers and martyrs and gutted animals. Of course he was here tonight. Shane felt sorry for himself, and he never did anything in half measures. If he was wrong, he was rotten all the way through. And if he felt pitiful, he would wallow until he drowned in the pathetic flood of it. He turned the knob and opened his door.
It didn’t matter that he’d expected to see him; the sight always made his breath catch, made his heart take a misstep in beating. The moon near-full, the clear night sky illuminating the curls at the top of his head and casting shadow down onto his face. A familiar siren call, beautiful and devastating. Shane teased the edge of the water all day, as if deliberating. As if he’d ever be able to resist this call; as if the cool water didn’t promise him relief, as if the darkness and pressure below didn’t open their arms to him, unfurl for him to curl up inside.
“Ilya,” Shane said. His voice grated around the edges.
Something was off. That much was clear instantly; Ilya Rozanov, clad in fine dress with spots of blood tainting his white collar, stood inches from the threshold of his home. His eyes were a different sort of wild, and his left hand fidgeted, his thumb tracing back and forth over the side of his index finger. The blood — and there was a bit more on his shirt, Shane realized, a few drops on his shoes — paired with the summer air mussing his curls left him unkempt, unlike how Shane accustomed to seeing him. The intensity in his eyes, thankfully, remained, darker and heavier. He was off, and maybe that was for the best; Shane was off tonight, too.
“Shane,” Ilya started, “before you let me in, I —” Ilya paused, his brow twitching in a furrow. As if unsure of his words.
Shane tensed; Ilya was never unsure of anything.
“I will…” he pressed his lips together for a moment, “I will not be kind to you, tonight. I am… out of sorts. You should ask me to leave, now, and I will go.”
Shane blinked at him. He wanted to lighten the conversation, offer a benign comment — ‘Are you ever kind to me, asshole?’ — something flippant they could both laugh off so this awful, chest-crushing sensation clouding his doorway would dissolve. But Ilya was serious, gravely so. His eyes danced back and forth between Shane’s, the toe of his shoe just over the threshold, breaking the illusion of the barrier as he waited for his response.
Crickets chirped around them, bleating in the humidity. Fireflies flickered in the distance like warning flares.
“What do you mean?”
Ilya huffed, one short breath, but his expression didn’t change; he’d been expecting the question. He always did that, read Shane like an open book. Broke him down to his barest bones, unearthed what he kept buried.
“I need you to tell me to leave,” Ilya said. Not a question, nor a command; a request, and a desperate one at that.
Of all nights, why tonight? He’d been off-kilter for hours since running into the boys on his foraging trip, on edge, and ironically, he’d hoped more than anything he’d see Ilya soon. The nightwalker took him out of his head, wiped a clean slate, absolved him of all but their sin together. But it was not absolution toeing at his doorstep; Ilya stood just as unsteady as Shane, and that wouldn’t do. That wouldn’t satisfy. Shane pressed, because he was desperate, too. For this, for Ilya, he always was.
“But you came here, didn’t you?” Shane tried, “You knocked on my door. Don’t you want…?”
“It doesn’t matter,” Ilya said with a dismissive shake of his head, “I should not have come, probably. You are… easy mistake to make, Shane.”
Shane bristled. Ilya called him plenty of things — some degrading, some teasing, others so sweet they rang between his ears like birdsong — but never this. Mistake.
As the silence drew on, Shane eyed the drops of blood staining Ilya’s collar. He knew, of course, Ilya took blood from others while he was away. It was no secret; he’d mentioned it on their early encounters, and occasionally he brought it up alongside other filthy words in the heat of the moment, when they were both panting and talking nonsense. Shane heard no mention of it after the first few times, though. Whenever Ilya referenced others he fed from, or laid with, Shane went the wrong sort of silent; pensive, where Ilya normally made his head quiet.
Ilya must have caught on, or otherwise thought it ruined his mood, and ceased any mention of others when he saw Shane; though Shane himself hadn’t put a finger on why it bothered him in the first place. Ilya had no commitment to him, and needed blood regularly to live, more regularly than Shane could provide it while maintaining his own pulse. It made perfect sense for him to seek that out elsewhere. From others.
But now, watching Ilya deliberate whether to cross the barrier with evidence of another body on his collar — someone who had sustained him, sated him; someone who made Shane obsolete, unnecessary — he didn’t know. He didn’t know what it was, but it was sour, acrid on his tongue.
Mistake.
“Maybe I won’t be kind to you, either,” Shane said, and stepped out of his doorway toward Ilya. “Maybe I will see Rozanov, tonight.”
Ilya’s expression darkened, his eyes narrowing. “You…?”
Forcing out an exhale, Shane grabbed Ilya with two hands by the stained collar and heaved him inside. Through the threshold of his door, past the barrier neither of them knew to respect. The summer heat paled in comparison; everything burned, every touch, every nerve standing on end and screaming. Mistake.
“You fucking heard me,” Shane floated feet above himself, and didn’t recognize his raised voice, the snarl behind it. Like a dog, like his food was threatened, and he needed to sneer and sink his teeth into the meat to assert his ownership. Not territorial, but desperate, and clinging to what pitiful morsels he had. Whatever it was, Ilya didn’t resist it. He let Shane pull him inside.
Shane’s body teetered over a ledge he couldn’t see, but instead of anticipation, he registered weariness, the ache of sore, abused muscles who knew they’d be used again before healing. He was exhausted, head to toe. This pendulum oscillated each time Ilya materialized before him, back and forth between shame and satisfaction; it had been held back, pulled higher and farther until he became complacent and content. Until the rotten work was laced with laughter, and he’d become careless, let this eyes flutter shut, let the creature call him by his given name and kept an eye out for him the moment the sun ducked beneath the horizon.
Now, the swing back down devastated him. Disgusted him from inside out. It was one thing to allow himself the sin, and another to do it with a smile; he’d forgotten how wrong this was, how incriminating that the creature could pass freely over the threshold of his door with permission only he could allow. Why should he be the only one with salt in his wounds? Ilya could show up here and take out his frustrations on Shane — couldn’t he do the same? Break something against his fist to find a mirror of his own destruction?
“You dragged yourself out here, didn’t you?” he pressed Ilya into the wall with his forearm braced against his chest, “you fucking started this. Don’t turn it on me now.”
Ilya’s eyes went wide. Shane didn’t stop. Heat consumed him, starting at his scalp and searing its way down, an septic spread beneath his skin. An insidious fever, only heating his blood when it’d already seeded through to the bone. Mistake. Too loud for their close proximity, Shane pressed an accusatory finger into Ilya’s chest with his free hand.
“You’re unbelievable, you know that? You turn up whenever it fucking pleases you, leave when you’re done with me. That’s fine. That’s what this is. But you don’t get to —” he forced out a short breath, thick with frustration; with anger. “You want to be the monster? You want to show up to — to get off, and have an easy meal? Then fucking act like it!”
Ilya blinked back at him, his breath picking up as he stared incredulously. Shane didn’t stop. He scoffed, chuckled low and mean. It was too fucking hot, the air was disgusting and thick, he was tired, and sweaty, and he couldn’t stop fucking talking.
“What? I’m not allowed to say it? You’d rather me just shut up and take it, wouldn’t you?” his vision clouded, bleary for a moment. Was he crying?
“Shane —”
“Well? Wouldn’t you? What the fuck else are you here for!”
“Shane, stop!”
Air disappeared from Shane’s lungs, pulled out of him with a sputter. Both his arms dropped from where he accosted Ilya, falling sharply down at his sides. He opened his mouth to speak, but a distinct buzzing wracked its way from the back of his throat all the way up to his lips and tongue. Anything he might of said was arrested, his head a dizzying swarm of stop, stop, stop.
Ilya compelled him.
He could’ve tried to fight against it — it wasn’t painful, more a persistent itch, one he had to obey to sooth, to keep scratching. But the fight died on his lips with the stolen words. This proved his point, didn’t it? Ilya wanted someone to obey, someone to bend over and bleed at his whim, and Shane was good for it. So stupid and desperate, put up so little fight Ilya hardly ever bothered using his strength to overpower him. That suited Shane just fine. It was better this way, even. If Ilya took him like this, he could pretend he hadn’t offered it, pretend he didn’t need a monster in his home more than he needed air or food or water. He would do it every time. It was sick, and pathetic, and Shane would do it every fucking time.
It was unclear how long had passed since the compulsion left Ilya’s lips. Shane stared, unfocused, blurred with tears that fell past his lashes like the foamy swash chasing a crested wave. The anger ceded under the water, hissing as the heat fizzled out into bubbles. Hollow, popping as they met the surface. Mistake.
“Shane? Fuck, I did not mean —” Ilya’s cool palm on his cheek shook him out of his trance, and he blinked his eyes clear.
“I’m fine,” he sighed, turning his head away from the touch, against every instinct to melt into it. Even in the sickening heat, his sweat-soaked undershirt, he craved the stick of skin to his so terribly that pulling away ached in his chest.
Ilya’s bright eyes searched Shane’s face, but the porcelain mask came up over it. It was cool where the night suffocated him. He wanted Ilya to crack it, and let the edges slice the skin beneath. He wanted it shattered and unrecognizable; he wanted to find shards of it embedded in the grain of his wood floor. He wanted to leave cuts in Ilya’s hands, wanted them recalcitrant and ulcerated and disgusting with sickness so that even with his miraculous healing, he’d leave permanent scars.
“I want…” Shane finally met Ilya’s gaze, faltering in his recently concocted script at the intensity, the careful attention to his every syllable.
“Anything,” Ilya said. Devotion dressed his face, sincere enough to strangle. Damn him. He made this so much harder to say.
“I want the nightwalker,” Shane said as Ilya’s eyebrows knit. He reached up to tug Ilya’s collar. “I want the monster I met two winters ago.”
Ilya’s face… fell. The pinch of his brow faltered, the tight line of his lips went slack. Shane felt it, too — but it was already snowballing out of his hands. He needed his head to go quiet, needed to be lost and falling and bleeding, bleeding…
He leaned in, his lips ghosted Ilya’s as he spoke.“You said ‘anything,’ didn’t you? You said you wouldn’t be kind. So don’t be,” he tiled his head forward, his forehead resting against Ilya’s. “I want your worst.”
“Can you give me that, vampyr?”
The word landed unsteadily on Shane’s tongue — he’d only heard Ilya say it a few times. Regardless of his pronunciation, it finally got Shane what he wanted. It took the slightest effort on Ilya’s part to shove Shane until his back hit the opposite wall of the corridor with a grunt. He surged forward, and grabbed Shane by the shoulder to spin him around; he stumbled on his feet to catch up, until his chest pressed against the wall.
Ilya was everywhere. His tongue worked at the shell of his ear, his hands clawed at the fabric of his worn undershirt and ripped it down the center, pushed the ruined fabric down past his arms and to the floor. Shane let his head tilt back to lean against him, to feel the grounding weight of solid muscle pressed against his back. The nape of his neck must have been disgusting with sweat and summer heat, but Ilya licked there anyway, kissing salty skin and groaning at the taste. One of Ilya’s hands came up to his neck, fingers wrapped around the front; gentle pressure that he wished desperately would clamp down around him. The other snaked down to the waistband of his boxers, and Shane sighed. This was what he wanted — finally, Shane let his brain go dormant, forgot any responsibility, focus on nothing but feeling —
“You are sure?” Ilya asked.
The relief ceded, slipped right through his fingers and replaced with responsibility. Ilya offered him a choice, and he didn’t want it. The day was too long, the week too hot, the years too harrowing; Shane needed more than this. He needed to be fucking gone, the way only Ilya could send him; floating and still, guided by the rolling current of him, careening around banks with his eyes shut and his body gone pliant. Shane huffed in frustration.
“Don’t ask. Just — take,” Shane punctuated this by placing his hand over Ilya’s, shoving his own boxers down and clamping harder around his throat.
Ilya nosed at the crook of his neck, and the hungry work of his mouth waned, held still for the length of a few shaky breaths. He placed a single kiss to Shane’s shoulder, and whispered against his skin.
“Kak skazhesh,” rolled off his tongue, familiar. Shane never asked for the translation, but he’d heard it before, always preceding Ilya obliging some request or plea of his. Then, quieter, almost lost to his ears; “prosti menya.”
Shane wrinkled his brow. His lips parted to ask for the meaning when his jaw dropped in a gasp — Ilya’s fangs buried in his shoulder and pressed in deep. The groan of pain curled up in pitch as he picked up Shane’s lead and wrapped a hand around his cock, tugging slow and tight and mean, pressing his whole body further into the wall with his weight. Shane let his arms go slack, dead weight as Ilya’s calloused hand pulled breathless whimpers out of him. Before he lost balance on his feet, Ilya snaked his other hand into Shane’s hair, then yanked his head back, baring his neck.
Ilya removed his latch on Shane’s shoulder only to immediately replace them in the warm skin of Shane’s neck in a second bite.
“Fu — ughh, fuck!” Shane swore, but didn’t dare move, an icy shock ripped down his spine at the proximity to precious vessels.
Ilya moaned into his neck, pulling his fangs out to lap at the trickling blood. A shiver wracked through Shane at the rivulets pooling and cascading down his collar from his shoulder and neck, coursing scarlet over his chest and down his torso. The air was so thick with heat that the blood cooled him like sweat. His fingers pressed into the grain of wood, the pressure blanching his nailbeds. Ilya’s hips pressed into him, the rigid length of him bare against his ass — Shane had no idea when he’d undone his pants. He focused on the pain, then the pleasure, then the thrill until he circled back to the pain again.
Neither of them made any effort to stop the bleeding. Shane looked down at himself, his forehead against the wall. Ilya removed his hand from Shane’s cock to slide his fingers in the blood trailing down his torso, dirtying his hands, dragging the mess down his abdomen and pelvis, accelerating its course. He replaced his sullied hand and continued, and Shane watched as his own blood slicked Ilya’s palm, smeared across his body in a horrific display. None of this had him flagging; not the pain, not the heat, not the image of himself desecrated beyond imagination.
“Oh my fucking… fuck, this is—”
“What you wanted, hm?” Ilya said, rough and low in his ear. Shane couldn’t speak; he was transfixed by the sight, painted in garnet, too slick with sweat to let any of it dry on his skin, Ilya’s guilty hand working around him. He could only nod, mouth agape, eyes wide in disbelief.
Ilya grabbed him by the shoulders, knocking him out of his daze, and pulled him off the wall to shove him into the corridor. He stumbled, still half stuck in his boxers, but found his footing and kicked them off.
“Bedroom. Want to ruin your sheets.” Ilya said, and Shane didn’t turn back to look as he started the first steps down the hall.
His stomach lurched with a rigid tug, awareness cutting through the fog. Ilya was doing as he asked — stern, his demeanor rougher around the edges than usual, Shane could tell that much already. But it wasn’t enough. Deep down he still felt it, could still reach inside and hold the shame in his hands. Shane stopped in the doorway to his bedroom, listening in numb silence as Ilya made quick work of his own clothes.
“Shane? I told you to —”
“Make me,” he said, without turning around to face him. It was easier that way.
“No need. You obey like a dog either way.” Ilya tried, made his voice hard and indifferent and cruel like it hadn’t been in months, but it just wasn’t —
“I… I won’t. I want you to make me.” Shane stared into his bedroom, his blood rushing in his ears. The sheets were still pristine as he’d left them this morning, corners tight. It didn’t matter if the stains came out, when he washed them in the morning. He would know. He would sleep and wake and redress the bed and he would know.
“What got into you?” Ilya came up behind him and closed the gap between them, skin against skin. Ilya sealed the wounds on his neck and shoulder with a press of his lips. “You had no issue begging last month, or month before. Now you are too good for it?”
Shane faced stubbornly forward. He wished he was still bleeding. He reached his hand up and traced over the twin scars pressed into this shoulder; he’d begged Ilya not to heal them, winter before last.
“I’m not,” he whispered, volume on par with the hum of insects beyond the walls, the suserrations of leaves swaying in the benign breeze. “Just… don’t make me say it. Please, I can’t. Not tonight. I can’t,” his voice cracked, and he forced his welling tears to remain behind his lashes. “I need you to…” he shook his head, he looked at his white sheets, at the moon shining beyond the glass of his window.
“Force me. Take the choice away. Make me your victim.”
Ilya went unnaturally still behind him. Shane’s heart thrashed against his ribcage hard enough he thought it’d crack open.
“Get on your bed.”
Oh, god. The relief was palpable, the tension slipped from his shoulders, unlocking his jaw as his body pulled him forward, caught on the riptide of the command buzzing around his feet. Shane obeyed, tracked through the doorway and fell into bed, sitting up with his back against the headboard. Once he reached it, the tingling sensation of the compulsion left his legs, and true to Ilya’s word he waited like a heeled dog for another command.
Ilya followed, and Shane hadn’t seen his face since he’d been pressed against the corridor wall; the contrast was stark. He looked cold — there was heat in his set jaw and clenched fists and bloodied lips, but not behind his eyes. They didn’t track along Shane’s body, catching on his favorite features as they often did; they locked dead onto Shane’s, smouldering with intensity, pinning him like an insect. Ilya remained unreadable, completely sealed off despite his bare body, exposed skin catching moonlight, reflecting in his eyes cool and blue.
Shane let his lids fall heavy, and sunk into a different reality. Here, in this half-dream, he’d slept through the night of the storm. Instead, he’d heard a cry for help in the woods, and followed it to a waiting beast. He sprung a trap, caught in a loop of rope like hunters left for rabbits, left tangled and twitching and bleeding until he was afforded the mercy of teeth ripping through his flesh.
Here, in this half-dream, this wasn’t his fault.
The beast dipped the mattress down as he prowled over to Shane. His body, thick with muscle and glistening with sweat in the unbearable heat, moved with precision and focus so wholly on Shane that he couldn’t move, and he wasn’t sure he’d taken a breath. Beautiful; as alluring as poets described death and artists depicted the macabre.
“Touch yourself. How you do when I am away.”
Without hesitation, Shane answered the buzzing call of his arms to move, to fulfill the demand. He didn’t acknowledge that he would’ve done so without the compulsion; he deliberately dodged the idea. Over, and over, and over like a mantra; I can’t help it. It’s not my fault, if I’m compelled. It’s like a dream. He forced himself to keep repeating the idea until he believed it, because that made it easier to stroke his blood-slick cock, to bend his knees and dig his heels into the beg to push into his own fist. His head lolled to the side, and he stifled a groan, bit his lip to quiet himself, like he did on his own. Before he could help it, he realized the terrible little loophole of phrasing; ‘how you do when I am away’. The compulsion made him honest, and when Ilya was away, he said stupid, foolish things, like —
“Please. Please, Rozanov.”
“That’s better,” Shane lost track of him when he’d let his eyes shut, but the beast was on him now, closing in and crowding him against the headboard. He sat up on his knees, his legs bracketing Shane’s torso, and pushed him down with his hands on either shoulder, sliding him down. Ilya stopped when Shane’s eye level reached his cock, and wrapped his fingers around the base and tapped his tip on his lips. Reflexively, Shane opened his mouth, anticipating the taste, but Ilya only tutted down at him.
“Ah — not yet. Impatient.”
Shane looked up at Ilya through his lashes, aiming for defiance that clearly didn’t land; Ilya chuckled meanly down at him and tapped his cheek twice, condescension dripping from his fingers.
“You wanted to play this game,” Ilya reminded him, lazily stroking himself inches from Shane’s face, making his mouth water.“You want the monster, hm? Want me to take advantage of you?”
He shook his head, entirely unconvincing when paired with a soft whimper; Ilya hadn’t told him to stop touching himself, so he continued, slow, breath shaking on every exhale. He didn’t know if it was the compulsion that kept his hand moving, and he hated himself for it. Ilya slipped his fingers into Shane’s hair and pulled, tilting his head back. He went easy, the resistance negligible. Shane meant to shrug him off, to bite and scratch to convince himself he didn’t want it, but he was a terrible actor, and a worse liar. Ilya’s hands were big and steady and despite his convictions, Shane went pliant at the touch like he always did.
“What kind of prey are you?” he shook Shane’s head by the grip on his hair.
It stung, and new tears pricked at his eyes with the tug at his scalp and embarrassment. He lied to himself, pretended the pull of the compulsion made his head swim, rather than Ilya’s undivided attention. Shane staved off the sickness, blinked away the nausea of twilight, of that boy seeing this rotten thing in him and assuming the worst. Maybe Ilya saw straight through him, saw the truth.
Maybe everyone could see it, this irreparable sin, plastered across his forehead and stained into his clothes. Maybe that was why he was always alone.
Above him, Ilya’s grip tightened impossibly, pain burning around his scalp. His jaw set tight, eyes glinted red in the darkness, narrowed down at Shane as he worked his hand lazily up and down his cock.“You do not run from me, or hide. More like a whore than scared little bunny.”
Shane wrinkled his nose, rattled out of his thoughts.“Not a —”
Ilya cut him off, shoving the head of his cock past his lips when he opened to form the next word. Shane sputtered, his throat spasmed around the sudden intrusion. He rocked his hips in a few times before he pulled out, and Shane coughed between gasps of air. While he caught his breath, Ilya leaned over into the nightstand and grabbed the bottle of oil, poured some onto his fingers and his cock, and gave himself a few lazy strokes to slick himself up. Shane eyed him warily, but his legs parted a little at the heels.
“‘Force me,’” Ilya mocked, settling between Shane’s legs. “Do not make me laugh. There is no resistance to push against,” he circled his first two fingers at his entrance, cool against his fever-hot skin. “You want this.”
He did. Shane shook his head, and said, “I don’t.”
“Fine. Lie with your mouth. Your body is honest.”
“N-no, that’s not — ughh, fuck —” Shane's head fell back as Ilya slipped a finger inside, and his shoulders slumped with a mix of relief and resignation.
“Hands up,” Ilya said, and Shane could not tell if it was compulsion, caught off-guard by the sudden intrusion, but his hands were above his head, and Ilya closed his other fist around his wrists. He was given less time to adjust than usual before Ilya added a second finger, curling them and pumping in and out as he writhed and gasped, soaking the sheets through with sweat. The third finger forced past and made Shane cry out, jutting his hips against Ilya’s hand. Ilya leaned in close, impressing his weight down on Shane’s chest, and spoke practically inside Shane’s mouth.
“Stupid fucking whore, Want this so bad you cannot even play pretend.”
“Stop, don’t — don’t say that,” Shane said.
But, as predicted, as always, Ilya saw through him. The flecks of red in his crystal blue bore straight through his pupils, gone wide to allow him entry; and Ilya stepped over that threshold, too, back through his retina, and forced this way inside his optic nerve into his brain. He was right, Shane couldn’t pretend, not when Ilya knew him like this. Not when he mapped the labyrinthine path of nerves back into his psyche, not when he picked up on the slight tilt of Shane’s head, the access he offered with pinched brows, the gesture pleading, take me, rip me apart, tear me to shreds and let me blame you in the aftermath.
So Ilya did. He ducked his head into the crook of Shane’s neck, opposite the earlier bites he’d mostly sealed, and growled as he tore into the sticky flesh. With his eye squeezed shut, Shane thrashed, his hands tried to surge forward, but his wrists were pinned down above his head, his body shrouded in Ilya’s, his three fingers still stretching him. The timing of his wrist pressing them inside matched the animal, twitching clamp of his jaw down on his neck, pain and pressure and pleasure in a bloody street brawl in his head, fists and feet and clamoring shouts blurring into one awful scene.
Shane whined, “Please,” no indication given whether to stop or slow or continue or advance. He didn’t know what he wanted, but Ilya did, he always did. Ilya’s voice joined the fight, and Shane could hear how slick his lips were with his blood, could feel it sliding down the side of his throat onto his sheets, down his chest.
“Who will believe you are victim, if they saw you like this?”
Stars danced behind Shane’s shut eyes, a headache spreading out like a brush fire and pounding at his temples. A sob wracked its way up his throat, sending a distinct twitch up to his fresh bite as Ilya lapped at it. He hummed as he flattened his tongue for one final pass. The healing venom closed over it as Shane whimpered with the nerve-raw tingle it left behind. Ilya removed his fingers, making him shudder as he reared his hips back. He removed his grip on Shane’s wrists where he’d been pressing all his weight, withdrawing to sit up on his knees. Shane blinked up at him, trembling on every exhale, so hard his cock ached where it leaked against his stomach.
Ilya looked devastated.
Shane couldn’t produce another description for the expression. His face made a battleground, his lips pressed together, his eyebrows twitching like he was fighting not to draw them in. His eyes darted to the open palms Shane left above his head in surrender, down to the tear tracks on his cheeks, the blood growing tacky on his neck and joining the flush under his skin as they both spread down and reddened his heaving chest. He was sure he’d never seen this expression on the man before; guilty, maybe, like he was sitting in the aftermath of a grave mistake, all arrows pointing to his own blame. But guilt for what? Where did guilt fit here, with someone so inconsequential as Shane, from a man who’d claimed none for ripping life from bleeding bodies?
Tearing through the pain and lust and his own self pity, Shane wanted to reach out and wrap his arms around the creature. Press a kiss to the vein pulsing at his temple and apologize, or forgive, or whatever it took to wipe that expression off of him. Shane’s lips parted, and Ilya looked back up to his face, noted his open eyes and sudden lucidity. His face hardened again, the moment of softness all tightened up and sharp gone as soon as Shane had noticed it.
“Turn over. On your stomach.”
“Are you —ugh,” Shane started, making to prop himself up on his elbows, but Ilya knocked the wind out of him as he completed the motion impatiently, grabbing him at the waist and shoulder to flip him over instead. He scrambled to get his arms properly under himself, but offered no protest as Ilya held him at the waist, and used his other hand to slide his cock over his ass, letting his head catch on his hole a few times before he lined up and coaxed the tip inside.
“Nngh, wait, I — god, fuck!” Ilya pressed in, omitting the moment he’d normally give Shane to adjust to the first few inches of him. He went slow, but insistent, chasing forward with his hips as Shane writhed unconsciously away.
Ilya shoved Shane’s shoulders down into the bed until he got the hint and let his arms go slack at his sides. His chest pressed into the sheets, wet with his own blood, sweat, and tears. It was what he wanted — it was what he’d asked for. Ilya had been crueler like he’d requested, used compulsion like he’d begged for, been hastier in readying his body and rougher with his fangs delving into his skin over and over. But even with the blinding pleasure of the first stretch, all the air punched out of his lungs by the fullness, Shane couldn’t move on from the conflict in Ilya’s eyes, flashing for a only a second before he wore the monster’s frigid, callous face instead. He opened his mouth to speak, made several botched attempt that broke off as Ilya drew back and bullied his cock back in, forcing involuntary cries out of Shane’s throat where he meant to form coherent words. It was good, so good, liquid hot and perfect, but the thought nagged at him, an irritant ringing behind an otherwise perfect exchange of body heat.
“W-wait a second,” he panted, trying to look back at Ilya with his upper body unsupported, dead weight on the sheets,“Ilya, I—”
“Ilya? Now I am Ilya?” he spat, and Shane thought he heard hurt between the cold words, between the pressure of his hand now heavy the side of his face, pushing him down into the sheets. “I thought you want Rozanov. Change your mind already? Or I fuck you stupid?” He sped up, and Shane’s voice pitched, his breath gone shallow.
“I — oh, fuck, fuck I can’t —”
“Doesn't matter,” Ilya said, and he sounded a thousand miles away, despite the undeniable proximity, the heat inside him like an wrought iron resting over fire. “Same as first night, same as all others,” he leaned down, one hand still forcing his cheek into the bed, the other propped up beside his head, lips flush to the shell of his ear.
“You want my hands dirty, to keep you clean,” he licked at his ear, nipped at it with sharp teeth. “Perfect, unsullied Hollander. Fine.”
His hips ground in deep, and Shane forced his eyes shut again at the intensity, at the pressure of Ilya’s hand against his face and his growing headache all thundering so hard in his skull he feared he’d burst, crack open at the sutures in the bone. Ilya’s lips slid down to his back, over his shoulder blades, and unhinged his jaw to notch his teeth in there. It hurt worse, being bitten on a flat plane, where his bottom canines were forced in alongside the top two, all bullying into his skin at varying pressures, pulsing waves of pain as Ilya hadn’t stopped fucking him. Shane moaned in pain, drawing out into a mewl as Ilya rolled his hips in a tight circle. He pulled his fangs out, closed the wound with trace amounts of venom, and let the blood trickle down his back. Ilya kissed and sucked his way back up to Shane’s ear, his tongue darting out to chase blood as he went. Tears welled and forced past his clamped-shut eyes, wetting the skin under Ilya’s palms.
“Fine,” Ilya repeated, “Let me be your monster. But I know. I know the truth.”
Shane whimpered, shoulders trembling in a few isolated sobs. He kept trying to form the word no; to lie, and resist, because it was true, because no matter what Ilya was, Shane had allowed him inside. Because if Ilya was a monster, he was acting well within the laws of his existence, was following his rules while Shane desecrated his own. Removed his necklace, betrayed his convictions, fell to his knees at the barest temptation. Even now, he fell into sin, let his body go slack where he could thrash and scream, because he was glutton for release, for freefall. Nothing intelligible left his lips, Ilya’s pace only allowed him gasps of air between thrusts, between his cock pressing into sensitive nerves and ripping moans out from his throat. Paired with slap of their bare skin, slick with blood and sweat, the room sounded obscene.
“You know it too, hm? Come on,” the force of his weight against Shane’s face relented, just slightly. “Skazhi mne pravdu. Fucking say it.”
And then, surpassing his crude words or rough hands or forceful hips, Ilya enacted the worst cruelty of the night.
“Answer me, Shane. Tell me the truth.”
“Nn, fuuck, I —” Shane struggled against the order. He didn’t hold back when Ilya asked him to get on the bed, or touch himself — but this, he fought. Resisting the compulsion felt fucking awful. The benign, tingling buzz of a sensation that normally dissipated as he obeyed contorted violently into pain; it didn’t resemble any sensation he'd ever known. This pain stemmed from his brain, a wrongness that shot down his nerves until the muscles of his mouth and throat burned with it. Answer. Truth. Now.
“I want this. Fuck, Ilya, I want you,” the confession fell between gasps, between rocks of his body into the sheets.“Need you. It — it hurts,” the sob rose in his throat and maybe Ilya slowed at the words, maybe his hips stuttered, but Shane was too gone to tell, “hurts, when you’re away."
“There, you hear? Truth.”
Shane choked out a sob and Ilya kept fucking into him with inhuman stamina. Submitting the compulsion brought the physical sensation of eased tension, like he was relaxing a clenched muscle. Bittersweet relief trickled in alongside it, at the confession Ilya always drew out of him, no matter his best attempts to withhold it, whether with his body or his words. As if in consolation, the heavy hand pressing his face into the bed relented, another wash of release as it came up to his shoulder, pulling Shane's body to rock back onto his length. The snap of his hips grew punishing, the rough, guttural grunts of pleasure and exertion from Ilya behind him knocked any remnant of thought loose from his head. A sob rose up through his chest, and Shane was weeping, babbling nonsense as he got closer to release, his mind connected to his body by a gossamer silk of spider’s thread.
“I can’t, can’t take — ohh,” Ilya reached down and took Shane’s weeping cock in his hand, working his wrist in time with his hips, and the world was lost to him, “god, fuck, please —”
“Please what, zaichyk? Stop?”
“No,” Shane said reflexively, “no, don’t stop.” And oh, it always went there, didn’t it? He always circled back to this. Absolution.“Bite me. Ilya, please, so close.”
Ilya removed his hand around Shane’s cock and stilled his hips. He whined at the loss, a pathetic keen between sniffles. He pulled all the way out and Shane shuddered, bereft, body gone pliant as Ilya maneuvered him on to his back. His head lolled to the side as Ilya arranged him to his liking, folding his legs pressing his knees up to his chest. He reached down to line himself up, and every point of contact between was slick with sweat, and blood otherwise. When his eyes fluttered open, Ilya above him was otherworldly, skin glistening, catching the light as his chest took deep, steady breaths.
Golden curls stuck to his forehead, and Shane looked up in awe as his head perfectly eclipsed the moon through the window; the glow cast around him, backlighting him in cool blue, made him an angel, down to the gold cross on his chest. A sliver of divinity, taking him apart piece by piece in his own bedroom.
“You cannot take another bite,” the angel said.
“Don’t — mmph!'“ Ilya thrusted back inside, hips flush to Shane’s skin, burying himself deep, only giving him a moment’s pause before resuming his brutal pace. “Don’t care. Fucking do it. If it — fuck, fuck —”
“If what, Shane?”
A bead of sweat dropped from Ilya’s nose to Shane’s cheek, and the bed creaked under the force of his hips. The angle made it impossible to shut his mouth, his brows strewn in pure disbelief as Ilya hit the same stop inside him over and over with a bruising force. Shane’s hands rose to grab him, weaving his fingers into the hair at the back of his head, pulling him in close, and looked him in the eyes, ice blue already trained strictly on his own.
“Oh, god. If its you, Ilya,” Shane said into his mouth, voice trembling with every whispered word, chest heaving with labored breaths. “If it’s you, I don’t care.”
“More,” Ilya forced through grit teeth, then shifted his weight onto one arm, and brought the other around to hold the side of Shane’s face, “tell me.”
“I’ll do anything, just please, bite again,” Shane was gone, his vision blurred and unfocused with tears and a dizzying head rush. He could go further; he could disappear in this fade to nothing in Ilya’s palm.
“Feed again, from me. Take from me. I want to bleed for you.”
“Such a — mm, such a pain slut, fuck.”
Shane pulled Ilya in closer, tilting his head to make room as he forced Ilya’s face into the crook of his neck.
“Yes. Please. Just — please. Take me, hurt me. Let me bleed out, fuck, I-I don’t care,” he pushed Ilya’s head until his lips pressed into the skin of his throat, and brought one of his hands down around Ilya’s ass. “Need you inside me here, too, Ilya.”
Ilya groaned, and spared a few kisses to Shane’s neck before he sunk in again. Pain flickered like a sparking match through dark recess of pleasure, and caught flames as Ilya pulled his fangs out and bit him again, then again, three times his jaw closed around the flesh of his neck and shoulder. Shane writhed and sounded off each time, distinct cries between the constant thrum of moans as Ilya’s pace faltered. Ilya murmured something into his skin — Shane thought he caught the word ‘taste’ — and reveled in Ilya’s worship. The dedicated, thorough mutilation of his body to satisfy the pair of them; the swell of pride in being chosen, even if only selected as the most tender lamb for the slaughter. The sheets beneath his neck were wet with his blood, drenching over the sweat, and Ilya dug in a vicious forth bite before finally drawing back to look at his work.
He looked like a beast, blood smeared horrifically across his entire lower face. The flecks of red in his eyes danced around his iris, and the dark veins in the surrounding skin bounded forward with fresh blood. Behind him, the moon stubbornly lit his halo. Devils and demons were divine too, and Ilya stood as proof, with his fangs visible past his parted lips, with blood on his chin, with sweat sliding down his cheek. If Shane were to allow himself depravity, at least it was with the worst of all creatures, the most beautiful of monsters. Nothing in half measures.
“I have ruined you,” Ilya said, voice velvety and decadent, like it always was after he fed, “no one else will do.”
Shane nodded, the room spun around him. But he wanted to answer; wanted Ilya to say it back, that others were ruined for him, that he’d never taste another, that all he needed was this, was Shane. Foolish, hopeless things. Shane couldn’t take much more, and the thought of it — of Ilya being as destroyed as he was, needing this like he did — brought him closer in turn. With his gaze fixed on Ilya’s, he shut his eyes, leaving the after-image of him pressed behind his eyelids.
“M close. Fuck, Ilya. It hurts, s-so good,” his voice pitched at the end, and Ilya ducked his head down to kiss him, licked into his mouth and consumed him further.
Shane left his body. Pure liquid pleasure bloomed through his center like blots of ink in water, curling and spreading into intricate plumes. He couldn’t hear himself, but he surely cried out, completely uninhibited as his body spasmed with jolts of pleasure. Ilya didn’t let up through it all, drawing out each second with the cant of his hips. As Shane came down, eyes still shut, each sense any back to him in turn; the sticky wetness of his release on his stomach, Ilya’s moans growing louder above him, his own whimpers of overexertion, the suffocating heat of two bodies slotted together, sharing humid summer air.
“Ilya,” Shane said, reached up with trembling hands to bring Ilya back down to his face, so their foreheads were pressed together.
His necklace dangled between them, the pendant brushing against Shane’s chest with every thrust. There were welled tears in Shane’s waterline, from the pain or the pleasure or both, and he knew how to use them. Knew the catch in Ilya’s breath when he looked pliant and wanting beneath him, so he finally opened his eyes to look up at Ilya’s through dark lashes. As if on cue, Ilya swore under his breath, his hips stuttering. Exhaustion passed over Shane, but he silenced it to focus his attention on Ilya’s above him, a shred of desperation to the work of his breathing, the set of his jaw.
“You have my blood in you,” Shane whispered, and reached down to place both his hands on the perfect curve of Ilya’s ass, pushing him in further with every thrust despite his every nerve screaming with overstimulation. “Want you in me, too. Please, please —”
“Ah, fuck, Shane —” Ilya cut off in a rough groan, pressed in deep until their skin was flush everywhere it could be.
Shane basked in every twitch of Ilya’s cock deep inside him, each pulse making him shudder in turn. Ilya rested his body on Shane’s, draped over him with no regard for the filth between them. He let his eyes flutter shut, the tesselation of heat and exertion and pain and relief all working in tandem to weigh his eyelids down.
A few moments later, he registered the soft caress of lips against his neck, and the feather light thrum of Ilya’s venom healing over the bite wounds. Then his tongue, lapping at the remaining blood; he moved slowly, and didn’t stop to bite or suck marks into his skin. Ilya’s hand stroked his hair, and Shane mirrored him, tangling his fingers in the curls at the Ilya’s nape, encouraging him to keep cleaning mess on his neck and collar. They remained that way for a stretch of time, silent save for their breathing and the occasional wet sound from Ilya’s working tongue. Exhaustion beat out any effort Shane’s mind could conjure to think, and he let it, going down without a fight.
Shane woke to find the weight of Ilya’s body was missing. He blinked, groaning as the soreness of his body roused with him. The room was still dark, lit only by the glow of the moon, and Ilya’s clothes remained on the ground near the door; Shane sighed then, a breath he hadn’t intended to hold. He sat up in bed, and his body roared in protest. Afterimages clouded his vision, made the walls whorl in indecipherable patterns. It was tempting to follow the phosphenes, the cobweb patterns spinning around the room. He shook his head in attempt to dispel the feeling, and stubbornly threw his legs over the side of the bed. As he stood, the walls swallowed him in protest, and he buckled at the knees. The room went black before he hit the ground.
Ilya wished the legends were true about demons being invisible to mirrors.
He stood in the washroom, where he knew Shane kept a basin of water and washcloths, and the reflection that regarded him in the small mirror was weary, and monstrous. He was, without exaggeration, the sort of creature a parent would reassure their children wouldn’t find them when they turned the lanterns out at night. There was blood everywhere, on his hands and face, on his collar and down his chest, with errant smears of it elsewhere. The telangiectasis around his eyes were only beginning to recede, and the red in his eyes was bright in the otherwise dark room. He’d come here wallowing in self pity, feeling sorry for himself despite what he’d done. It seemed a perfect remedy, at the time; what better to ease the guilt than to seek out Shane? His only true willing participant, the only living being to know his true nature and close their eyes, bare their throat to the vicious, cruel force of him.
And what had he done with that trust? Shattered it beneath his fist. He’d used compulsion, a force he reserved for use in self preservation, to help unlucky bystanders turn tail, or hold their tongue, or forget what they’d seen and spare him the trouble of burying additional bodies. And he’d used it to make Shane heel for him. To bastardize the trust he surrendered so carefully in his hands, and corrode it to nothing. The petals of his beautiful malva, ruined by the blood Ilya spilled himself. He gave himself a cursory wipe down, then wet another washcloth to bring back to Shane, and realized he needed to end this. Regardless of what Shane said, it was wrong of him to keep taking advantage, abusing his naivety to suit his own selfish needs. Ilya had proven tonight that he was not capable of preserving anything, no matter how hard he tried.
The thud from the bedroom might as well have been Ilya’s heart, plummeting down through his diagram into his stomach.
“Shane?” he called, dropping the cloth and crossing the short hall in blinding speed, before anyone could’ve reasonably had time to answer. Half a second later, Ilya stood in the doorway, eyes darting to the bed where he’d left him a moment ago — but Shane was crumpled up on the floor, his arm under his head at an awkward angle.
His eyes were closed. He wasn’t moving. He looked like…
“Shane!” Ilya collapsed beside him.
The thick heat of the night dissipated in an instant to cold, white shock. Ilya grabbed Shane by the shoulders and shook, harder than he meant to. He’d seen Shane tired, seen him blissed out in afterglow with his eyes shut and a small, content smile, curled up in bed like a cat.
There was nothing on his face, now. Too blank. He swallowed down memories with rising bile, but they forced their way past. He fought the scent of perfume and sick covering unwashed, moth-eaten sheets. Dead eyes, pupils blown irreversibly, cerulean bleached pale. Golden blonde gone dull and curls matted, face sunken like a street dog. No. No, not again.
“Proklyat’ye — Shane, get up!” Damn it.
His eyes searched frantically, darting around his body; to his mouth, his hands, his head — his neck. With trembling hands, he turned Shane’s head to the side, and looked for the wounds he’d left there.
“Chto ya natvoriil? Shane?” Ilya said to no one, because Shane’s eyes were still closed. Blood dried around the punctures from his fang’s work earlier. He brushed against them, and the faintest streak of red came off on his fingers; he’d closed them all. The remainder of the blood on his body was dried. What have I done?
In his panic at the scene, Ilya neglected the obvious — watching for any breathing, or listening to his heart, or feeling for his pulse. Last time he’d walked into something like this, there had been no point to any such precautions; the damage was irrefutable, buzzing flies convened in the final verdict. But some color remained in Shane’s cheeks, so he let himself hope.
“Please,” he whispered. He pulled Shane up to a sit, protecting his neck as his head lolled to the side, and pressed his ear to Shane’s chest. Really, he could’ve heard it from across the room, or down the street if he focused; but he didn’t trust himself now, not at all.
Was it finally time to face reality? That he’d break anything he held in his hands, no matter how precious?
Ilya hadn’t thanked God for anything in many years, but the words almost left his lips when he heard it. His bunched up shoulders lowered a fraction at the steady thumping of Shane’s heart tucked behind his ribs. But so weak. Ilya wished he could press his fingers into Shane’s chest and help the muscles of his heart squeeze blood through the chambers.
Without thinking, Ilya sunk his teeth into his own wrist, deeper than necessary, and waited for the thick blood to coalesce at the puncture site. His blood should heal him, even if he didn’t know exactly what was wrong. He’d never tried this before; since turning, he’d never had anyone he needed to save.
While he waited, he kept his eyes on Shane, flitting between the shallow motion of his chest and his closed eyes. Dark lashes fanned his cheeks, and the crease between his brows was gone; he could be sleeping peacefully. He would be, probably, if Ilya hadn’t turned up — tonight, or the first night — to satisfy his own selfish needs. Blood he could find anywhere, and sex was just as simple; he’d faced little difficulty indulging in either over the decades.
But this was with Shane, he hadn’t ever known elsewhere.
“Prosti menya,” Ilya whispered into his temple, squeezing his eyes shut, and placed a kiss there. “You healed me once, yes?” Blood ebbed out from his wrist. He held Shane’s head up by the chin with his free hand, and rubbed his thumb at his bottom lip. Forgive me.
“Shane, please. Is your turn, now. Drink.”
There was no resistance but gravity, he was completely limp. If Ilya didn’t keep his ears tuned to the steady beat of his heart — the evidence that he hadn’t lost control again — he would lose it all, tonight.
Finally, finally, Ilya saw Shane’s throat bob in a slow swallow. “Yes, good, sweetheart — take more. Drink.”
Still half-asleep, Shane made a soft, barely-there hum of acknowledgement. Ilya brought him closer, letting him lean forward into his chest, his wrist still against his lips. He realized Shane was shivering, despite the heat, and with his spare hand, he reached out toward the bed and tugged one of the sheets off, wrapping it clumsily around Shane’s naked body. His hand returned to cradling his head, then stroking his hair once Shane’s weight rested fully against his body. Shane was not a small man, Ilya loved that about him, how someone so strong and sturdy could release the reigns to him — but now, the pliant lull that he often found irresistible made him sick to his stomach. He was broad and thick and powerful, but he was only human. What had Sveta said? ‘His mortal days are numbered.’
Shane’s head pulled back, his blood-slick lips still brushing the skin of Ilya’s wrist. His dark eyes blinked, but fluttered back closed with the effort of it. The relief sunk into his stomach, and his breath released in a shudder.
“Mm. Ilya...?
Sweet, cool relief washed over him. Better than the first drop of blood to his lips after weeks of fasting, better than sex. He kept his hand moving in Shane’s hoping to keep him grounded and concious, threading through the dark strands and supporting his back. Shane made another confused grunt, and Ilya pressed his wrist back flush against his lips.
“Yes, shh, I have you. Just drink now.”
He hummed, took a few drops more; he’d pressed his lips to it at first, but retreated slightly to watch each drop pearls out from his wrist, catching them with little kitten licks that did something odd to Ilya’s heart in his chest. Shane licked his lips, and looked up at Ilya.
“What happened?”
“I don’t know,” Ilya said, “I left for a moment, and you were on the floor.”
Shane thought on that for a moment, the pinch coming up between his brows. Ilya wanted it kiss it away. Ilya shifted Shane carefully, so that his back could rest against the side of the bed, and sat beside him. After a moment sitting shoulder to shoulder, Shane slumped to the side, resting his head on Ilya’s shoulder.
“Oh. I think I passed out.”
“Do you know why…” Ilya swallowed, “did I..?
“I… the heat, I think. And I didn’t…”
Ilya tried to remain patient, but all his nerves still stood on end, looking for the blame. “Didn’t?” he prompted.
“Didn’t eat much. Or drink.”
Ilya’s eyebrows shot up. In this heat? “Why?”
Shane shook his head against Ilya’s shoulder. He didn’t offer anything else, and the silence stretched. Ilya tilted his head, and craned his neck a little to study his face.
“You scared me,” Ilya confessed.
Ilya craned his neck to study Shane’s face. He wrinkled his brow at the question, then turned his head to look up at Ilya. His face was flushed, pink cheeks with freckles like hundreds of stars. Ilya wanted to count them, someday. Out in the daylight, he mused, because the summer sun made the little brown spots more prominent over the span of his nose.
“I’m sorry,” Shane said.
Ilya smiled, then pursed his lips in mock consideration. “Hmm. I accept.”
“Why?”
“Why do I accept?”
“No, Ilya. Why did I scare you?”
That, he did not have an easy answer for. He’d been dancing around this for so long that being faced with it head on made him nauseous, like he was still a child, caught meddling in something he shouldn’t be, something he didn’t understand. He’d killed a woman only hours ago, and the guilt gnawed at him, slowly digesting him from the inside; but he was not scared. The short of it was that Ilya needed Shane in a distinct, singular way he’d never needed anything else. More than air, more than blood. When he was away from Shane the ache grew with every passing day, until the crack in the center of his chest caved in, and he needed to fill the chasm left in it’s wake. With Shane, he was not less of a monster; but the door was open for him, regardless. Shane swallowed and opened his mouth again, breaking the silence.
“You, um. When you feed, sometimes — or maybe every time, I don’t know — you take lives, don’t you? You said once you didn’t feel guilty, because you need to do it to survive.” He paused as Ilya nodded at this. “So… why would you be scared?”
“I…”
“Ilya. Why do you keep coming back?”
Ilya swallowed. A moment ago, before he’d seen Shane unconscious and worried he’d taken his life away, he resolved himself to ending this. But now…
“Why do you keep opening your door?”
“It doesn’t matter if I open the door. I already invited you once, that seems to do the trick. Even if I didn’t open the door, you could just —”
“But you do, Shane. You keep opening it. You keep letting me close. Even when I hurt you, you do not turn me away,” Ilya shook his head, at a loss, “I am awful to you. I hurt you, I am cruel, and unfair. So why?”
Shane lifted his head from Ilya’s shoulder, and Ilya prepared himself for the drop. Maybe Shane would end this, so he didn’t have to. It would be hard to leave him for good, but he could do it, if Shane asked.
Instead, Shane took a deep breath, pushed himself up onto his knees, and threw a leg over Ilya’s outstretched ones, straddling his hips and sitting in his lap. The blanket Ilya had hastily wrapped around him slid down his shoulders in a pool around their legs. Shane reached out and held Ilya’s face with a palm on either cheek, staring him down with a set jaw and something like determination on his features. Ilya blinked at him warily.
“I asked you to… say and do those things,” his cheeks went a little pinker, “I asked you to hurt me, and you did. That isn’t cruel.”
Ilya rested his hands on Shane’s waist, dipping under the blanket to feel the heat of his skin under his fingers. He stroked his thumbs back and forth, apparently soothing them both as Shane sighed, and his shoulders slumped down a fraction.
“I cannot always control myself,” Ilya confessed, “I am more monster than man.” He needed to be honest; if scaring Shane away was what it took to protect him, he should. He owed him that much, at least.
“How do you mean?”
Ilya almost smiled with endearment. Shane and his questions.
“If I do not feed enough, I… am not myself. Or, I am only the worst parts.”
“Ilya,” Shane sighed as Ilya turned his face away.
Sweat rolled down his cheek, and Shane swiped it away; his hand came back red. Shane studied the blood tear on his hand, and Ilya closed his eyes, waiting for him to recoil, or flinch. Waiting for him to finally realize what a terrible mistake it was to ever allow Ilya access to his home.
Shane pressed a kiss to his cheek, right over where the tear had fallen.
“You aren’t cruel,” Shane insisted, but his voice had gone so soft, “it… you feel so guilty for it, I can tell. A monster wouldn’t feel that, right?”
Ilya shook his head. How could he get Shane to understand? He was not worthy of his trust. He could not be responsible for anything so precious as him. But Shane was still there, still so close, sitting in his lap and cradling his head, placing delicate kisses on his cheeks, his temples, the top of his head. It was nonsensical — Shane had just lost consciousness, and fell to the ground, and yet he was consoling Ilya, rocking him back and forth to soothe them both as the crickets chirped beyond the window, unbothered. But it felt heavenly, and Ilya was a greedy man.
“I’m sorry,” Ilya whispered, and did not specify for what. Where to start?
“Don’t be,” Shane said. He pressed their foreheads together, and they remained this way for a long moment, breathing in tandem, absentmindedly tracing patterns into each other’s skin.
“I haven’t been kind to you, either. I shouldn’t ask you to do things like that, if you’re already feeling bad about it.”
Ilya wrapped his arms around Shane’s torso, and buried his face in his shoulder. There was no undoing the lives he’d taken, and blood he’d spilled. But now, he had this; he had soft words and open arms holding him steady, stroking his hair, and kissing his forehead. He did not have the vocabulary, in any language, to explain the significance of this kindness. It was how he remembered the sun felt on his skin.
“Can you stay, tonight?” Shane asked.
In all the nights they’d ever shared, Ilya had never woken up next to Shane. He imagined it now — the glow of sunlight behind drawn curtains, maybe a sliver of it cast onto Shane’s face, lighting up the freckles on his shoulders. They’d be curled into one another, their mouths dry with sleep, hair stuck in odd places. And Shane would want to rise early, start his day, prepare the shop — and Ilya could pull him back pull bed with a kiss, and Shane would come down easily, and they’d draw out their morning long and slow. Ilya wanted to say yes, wanted to stay just as they were, tangled in eachother until they melted, and became inseparable by any measure. But he’d left a mess behind. He needed to make sure those loose ends were tied, if he didn’t want new trouble with the local coven.
“I cannot. I’m sorry.”
Shane nodded into his shoulder, and held Ilya a little tighter.
“Maybe we can meet somewhere else, next time.”
Ilya leaned back, tilting his head to rest against the bed behind him. “What do you mean?”
“Maybe we should… I don’t know. Go to dinner, or something? I hear there are nicer places, on the north end of town, past the docks. Maybe that would feel a bit more…”
“Normal?” Ilya supplied.
“Yes, normal.” Shane smiled, tired but wistful, and it crinkled the skin around his eyes. In all his years, all his travels, he had never seen a single thing so beautiful as Shane’s sleepy smile. How on earth had Ilya thought to leave him, even for a moment?
“You are asking me to court you, Shane Hollander? So I might please your father and take your hand?”
Shane scoffed and shoved at his chest. “Shut up. You know what I meant.”
Ilya leaned in to kiss him, and they sighed into eachother. In the morning, Shane would still wake alone, and Ilya would still be a monster; but they were closer by a margin, and for that, Ilya could bear any burden.