Chapter 41 Rayne Drunk For The First Time
Rayne's POV
I held a bottle of Bloodwine, staring at the fireplace. Not the kind humans drank.
This was the concentrated strain brewed from fermented vampire blood and aged in spelled oak for decades.
It was the only substance in existence that could strip a Highblood's control the way cheap liquor stripped a human's.
It took three bottles before the first one registered. I was on my sixth and still thinking too clearly for my liking.
The seventh was in my hand. I hadn't bothered with a glass after the third.
The glasses were on the wall now. Or what remained of them, dark stains against the stone where they'd hit, shards still scattered across the floor because I hadn't cared enough to move them.
The memories were back. All of them. That was the problem.
I remembered everything now, the cliff, the Dreadbones erupting from the dark below it, her beside me in that moment.
The engagement announcement. The way she'd looked at me across every room we'd ever been in together. The body swap.
The tribunal. The forest..I even died because of her. All of it returned in the space of a breath courtesy of three hundred year old runes carved into a fountain basin and I would have preferred not knowing.
I raised the bottle. Drank. Her face appeared anyway.
The bottle left my hand before I decided to throw it. It hit the fireplace and exploded, glass and Bloodwine catching the flames, a brief bright flare that lit the study orange for one second before settling back.
I watched it burn. "She stabbed me." I thought maybe I was wrong. I'd gone back to deliver my apology, when I saw her face buried in another man's chest.
I reached for the next bottle as the door opened. I didn't turn around. I didn't need to. I knew her step.
"Get out," I said. Seraphine came in anyway.
I heard her stop behind me. Heard the specific quality of her silence the one that meant she was assessing before speaking.
"Rayne." Her voice was careful. "You should sleep."
"I said get out." She crossed the room. Her hand came to my shoulder — steady, familiar, the touch of someone who had known me long enough to think she could reach me anywhere.
I moved faster than she could track.My hand closed around her wrist.
I turned and the thing that came out of my chest wasn't a word so much as a sound that happened to contain one.
"Brea." The name left my mouth before I understood it was coming.
Just — present, surfacing through the Bloodwine and the exhaustion and the specific misery of a man who had spent the last several hours trying to hate someone and kept failing at it.
Seraphine went very still. I released her wrist. Stepped back. Looked at the last bottle in my other hand, half empty with the label peeling at the corner.
"I want to be alone," I said. Quieter now. She didn't move.
"Seraphine."
"I heard you," she said. "The answer is no."
I looked at her for a long moment. She stood her ground the way she always stood her ground.
Her dark hair loose around her shoulders, the line of her jaw set, her eyes carrying that particular expression she reserved for when she had decided something and wasn't going to be argued out of it.
I turned away. I walked toward the fireplace. Stood in front of it.
The last bottle went into the flames the same way the others had.
"I'm going to make her beg," I said quietly to the fire. "I no longer want to show her any sort of mercy"
I turned as Seraphine was right there.. Her eyes level with my chin were very close and her face tilted up, and for one suspended moment, I stared into her eyes.
Her eyes met mine. She didn't look away. Nothing moved in me that was meant for her.
I stepped past her. My shoulder brushed hers as I went. I crossed to the bed and sat on the edge of it, elbows on my knees, head down, the room tilting slightly with the Bloodwine still working through my system.
Sleep came faster than I expected.
Seraphine's POV
I waited until his breathing changed. It didn't take long. The Bloodwine had done most of the work already, Rayne's control had its limits.
By the time I crossed to the bed he was already deep in slumber.
I stood beside him for a moment. Just looked.
Even unconscious the tension didn't fully leave him. His jaw still held that familiar set.
I sat on the edge of the bed. Then carefully, without rushing it, I lay down beside him.
My dark hair spread across the pillow beside his. The curve of my shoulder catching the dim light of the dying fire, the warmth of him reaching me even without contact.
I pressed my cheek to his chest and felt his heartbeat underneath — slow, steady, completely indifferent to my presence the way it had always been.
My hand rested flat against him. I could feel his soft chest. Three hundred years of bleeding for him, fighting beside him, standing in every room he walked into and being the one thing he trusted completely.
And he had never once looked at me the way he looked at her.
A human girl he had known for a fraction of the time.
"You're missing so much," I said quietly. To the sleeping version of him that couldn't argue back. To the room. To the dying fire. "By choosing her."
His heartbeat didn't change.I closed my eyes and said nothing else.