Chapter 5

Nyx moved through the world like a grandmaster at the chessboard. The rest of us were merely pieces, pushed from square to square according to some design only he could see.

What game was he playing?

Back in the bedchamber, he ordered me to bathe. When I emerged in fresh clothes, toweling the damp from my hair, I found him settled by the window, lost in the pages of an ancient tome.

The moment he noticed me, he shut the book and beckoned me closer with a single curl of his fingers.

I faltered for a breath, then crossed the room to him.

"Do I frighten you?" he asked.

I kept my eyes fixed on the floor and held my tongue.

"Sit." He gestured to the carpet at his feet.

I sank obediently, like a well-schooled hound.

He reached out and tilted my chin upward, studying my face with an intensity that made my skin prickle. "The Primordial Blood is taking hold rather nicely, it seems."

A fever simmered beneath my skin, the lingering echo of whatever transformation the Well of Withered Bones had set in motion.

I could feel something deep within me had shifted. My senses now cut through the world with a sharpness I had never known.

"What are you truly after?" The question burned its way out of me before I could swallow it back.

"Shh." His fingertip pressed against my lips, silencing me. "Some questions are wiser left unspoken."

His touch was ice-cold, yet it sent a jolt through me like a spark of lightning, leaving a shiver in its wake.

"Commit this to memory. Do as you are told, and you will keep breathing." He withdrew his hand and lifted the ancient book once more. "Stay among the living, and perhaps you may prove useful yet."

Useful. So that was all I was to him. I was a tool to be wielded.

From that day forward, Nyx no longer regarded me as a mere amusement.

He granted me access to his study, where millennia of Bloodkin lore and secrets lay entombed in dusty volumes.

He pressed a reference chart for their script and language into my hands and instructed me to teach myself.

I threw myself into the task like parched earth drinking in rain. Every scrap of knowledge I could seize felt like a lifeline.

Some instinct whispered that my sole chance of survival lay in understanding this world, the Bloodkin, and the enigmatic creature who ruled over them all.

The system aided me tirelessly, scanning and deciphering the ancient texts at unnatural speed, assembling a private library of translations within my mind.

One term surfaced again and again across those crumbling pages: the Bloodbound Rite.

According to the records, the vampire progenitor would select a human who carried the Primordial Blood to stand as their mate.

Through the Bloodbound Rite, they would reshape their chosen partner into the most formidable of their kind, and through that bond, shatter the very limits of their own power.

But every mention of the Primordial Blood dissolved into riddles, calling it a rare blessing from the gods, a gift bestowed upon one soul in a million.

A vague suspicion began to take root in my thoughts, refusing to be shaken loose.

Evelyn, meanwhile, had not abandoned her vendetta. She no longer dared to strike at me openly, so she wove her venom into the shadows instead.

The books I was studying would vanish and reappear, swapped for volumes laced with subtle errors. My meals arrived seasoned with herbs toxic to human blood.

Once, I leaned against the balustrade of the castle terrace to read, and the railing crumbled beneath my weight without warning.

Had my reflexes not been honed by the changes coursing through my body, I would have plunged from a height of over three hundred feet onto the stones below.

I wheeled around and caught the flicker of a crimson gown disappearing down the far corridor.

I said nothing of it to Nyx. What would be the point? He would not trouble himself over such trifles. I was on my own.

I began using what I had gleaned from the ancient texts to identify the poisons slipped into my food and to sidestep the snares Evelyn laid in my path.

I went further. In secret, I taught myself rudimentary warding spells, magic that by all rights only the vampires should have been able to command.

Nyx observed it all in silence. He never questioned me. He never intervened.

Between us stretched a strange and brittle equilibrium, a truce built on unspoken terms.

Late one night, in the deepest recesses of the study, my fingers brushed against a diary bound with a heavy lock.

Its cover was fashioned from human skin. Branded into the pale leather in ancient Bloodkin runes was a name: [Nyx Blackwood.]