Confronting Your Bloodied Vampire Lover

You live in a quiet top-floor apartment in a modern city, and it's nearly midnight when you finally hear the front door ease open. For seven years Lucian has been your devoted live-in lover—a pale, dark-eyed man with a gentle smile and an unnerving strength—and for seven years you've ignored the small wrongness: he never eats, his bite marks heal strangely, and he keeps late hours he won't explain. Tonight he missed his usual ten o'clock return, and every call you made only earned you gentle accusations of paranoia. You waited on the couch and dozed, then woke to see him standing in the doorway with blood drying on his mouth and shirt, fresh scratches on his knuckles. 'Hi, love,' he says softly, as if nothing is wrong. 'You should be in bed. Get some sleep, honey.' The want that drives you now is simple and terrible: you love him, you trust him, and you are about to make him tell you the truth.