A Dowry of Blood (A Dowry of Blood #1)(20)

You did look at me then, dark eyes erratic with lust and irritation and some other, less pronounceable emotion. Admiration, perhaps. You showed it to me so rarely I hardly knew how to recognize it.

“Constanta,” you said, savoring the syllables like they were a filthy note passed under the pews to you in church. “My jewel, my wife.”

“Getting better,” I said, shucking off my heavy outer dress and draping it over the back of a chair. I loosened the buttons at the nape of my neck and left the length of laces down my spine for your agile fingers to unfasten. My hands were trembling now, my heart beating fast and hot in my throat.

You tilted Magdalena’s chin towards me, showing off her pink cheeks, her silken fall of black hair. The desire that had been slowly uncoiling in my stomach reached my chest, tightening painfully.

“Look at how lovely our new bride is,” you said, nipping her earlobe. “Come and kiss your sister. Show her there isn’t any animosity between you.”

Magdalena, ever-willing, held her arm out to me. Those lovely fingers curled, beckoning me closer.

“Please,” she said, voice sweet as a berry so ripe it was ready to burst.

I was furious with you. You had manufactured my consent every step of the way, a mere formality. This had always been your design for the both of us, we were always going to end up here, in this bed.

But I was also delirious with want, and half-convinced that you had been right all along. It was so much easier to believe that you always had my best interests at heart.

I swallowed dryly and crossed the room to the bed, running my hand over the curve of your back as I bent down to kiss her.

Her mouth was warm and willing, and when she made one of those soft sounds against my lips, I shuddered. She tugged me down gently onto the bed, forming the shape of that word again before the buck of your hips snatched her breath away. Please.

“You,” I said, kissing her with more urgency as I allowed you to make short work of my laces. “Are a torment.”





Desire makes idiots of all of us. But you already knew that part, didn’t you?





Magdalena sighed into my kiss and I knew I would kill for her, die for her, do it all over again and then some. I had never wanted a woman like this, not even Hanne, not to the brink of such total desolation. It reminded me of the way I loved you, and that shook me to my core. One body could not hold such fervor, such feeling, I thought. It might rip me in two.

Your lips sought mine while she was still wrapped around you. I ran my hand down the smooth plane of her stomach, then lower still.

“Can I please?” I asked breathlessly.

Magdalena nodded, and then made a delicious little sound when I circled her with my fingers. She writhed and mewled under our expert ministrations, calling out my name and yours in turn.

Then, at the moment of her climax, you sank your teeth into her neck.

She convulsed and cried out, but she held you fast. As though she were welcoming the pain and the change, not rejecting it. I reeled, my mind addled by pleasure and the scent of hot blood wafting towards me. This was happening too fast, I wasn’t ready for this, I wasn’t ready to share my life forever with another one of your wives, I wasn’t…

You kissed me firmly with blood-slick lips, and then I was gone. You guided my head towards the pulsing wound at her throat, and I sucked the sweet red liquor from her skin while she murmured my name, her hands tangled in my hair. I had never known such perfect tenderness, such absolute ecstasy.

It terrified me.

We shared the wine of her in sips, alternating between drinking from her and kissing her, kissing each other. I could scarcely tell the difference between your two mouths in the dark, that’s how close the three of us were.

Magdalena obediently opened her mouth for you when you opened the vein in your wrist, and drank from you with a determined ferocity I didn’t expect to see from someone who was not yet one of us. There was a flash of her steel again, as compelling as it was frightening. She would not be made the world’s victim, that much was obvious.

My blood wasn’t as potent as yours, and I didn’t know if it had matured enough to offer the powers we enjoyed, but I opened a vein for her all the same.

We passed the night drinking from each other and making love, taking full advantage of the heightened sensitivities that flooded Magdalena’s system. None of the servants bothered us, and none of the dinner guests came looking for us.

They were well-trained, after all. And as Magdalena wound her fingers around my wrists and covered my chest in hot kisses, called me sister with that mischievous smile on her face, I couldn’t help but wonder if I was being trained, too.





We took our leave the following night, our carriages loaded down with Magdalena’s finery. She left the manor in the care of one of her highest-ranking servants, promising that she would return sooner rather than later. I wonder if she knew that sooner had a way of becoming much, much later when you lived as long as we did. But she was young, optimistic. Maybe she didn’t believe that taking up with you meant the total obliteration of her previous life.

She would learn, in time.

She was vain and petulant and my rival besides, I reminded myself as we headed out into the ocher light of dusk together. I was determined to see her worst qualities and keep her at arm’s length even as we travelled pressed together in the coach. But she was also brilliant, and beautiful, and so sure of who she was and what she wanted out of the world. She held my gloved hand in hers whenever the carriage went over a bump. She fed me little bites of treacle from her traveling bag and she dozed against me with her mess of curls tickling my cheeks. She invented word games to keep us diverted, and woke me every evening with a little kiss in the corner of my mouth.