Aaron's birthday falls on a Saturday, and vampires apparently celebrate turning twenty-two the same way they do everything else—excessively. The party is in the Fangs' private lounge beneath the stadium, a place I didn't know existed until Rhys pulled me through a door disguised as a maintenance closet.
I'd planned to skip it. A room full of vampires who tolerate me at best didn't sound like a relaxing evening. But Rhys showed up at my dorm at nine, leaning against the doorframe in a black shirt with the top two buttons undone.
"You're coming." Not a question.
"I wasn't invited."
"You're my girlfriend." His mouth curved. "You're permanently invited."
He hasn't mentioned the scar. I haven't pushed. But something shifted between us in that cottage—a door cracked open that neither of us knows how to close. His hand finds mine under tables now. His eyes follow me across rooms with something heavier than want.
The lounge is all dark leather and low light, bass pulsing through the walls. Vampires drink things I don't want to identify, and the air smells like expensive smoke and old blood. Rhys sits in a corner booth with Aaron and two other teammates, a glass of something amber in his hand.
By the time I find him again an hour later, the glass has been refilled four times.
"You're drunk." I slide into the booth beside him. His teammates have scattered, leaving him alone with the bottle and the shadows.
"I'm not drunk." He lifts the glass, misses his mouth by an inch, and sets it down with exaggerated care. "I'm... loosened."
"You're hammered." I pull the glass away from him. "Since when do you drink like this?"
"Since tonight." He leans his head back against the booth, eyes half-closed. The mask is gone—not cracked, not slipping, just absent. Like he forgot to put it on. "Since you touched that scar and didn't run."
My chest tightens. "Why would I run?"
"Everyone runs." His voice has gone soft, slurred at the edges. "Everyone who finds out what I am either runs or tries to kill me. Those are the only two options. You're the first person who kissed it instead."
"Rhys—"
"My mother had an affair." The words fall out of him like stones dropping into still water. "With a werewolf. She was married to my father—pureblooded vampire royalty, the perfect match, centuries of breeding distilled into one pristine union. And she fell in love with a wolf."
He reaches for the glass I moved away. I let him take it.
"She got pregnant. With me." He drinks, swallows hard. "My father didn't know at first. I looked vampire enough—the dark hair, the gray eyes, the cold skin. But when I was seven, I shifted."
His hand tightens on the glass until I hear it crack.
"Middle of the night. I woke up screaming because my bones were breaking and I didn't understand why. My father heard. Came to my room." A pause. His throat works. "He saw what I was and he picked me up by the throat."
"Rhys."
"He was going to kill me. Right there. Seven years old, half-shifted, choking in my father's hand." His eyes are open now, fixed on the ceiling, and the amber bleeds through the gray in slow pulses. "My mother threw herself between us. Begged. Screamed. Made a deal."
"What deal?"
"I live if I suppress the wolf. Forever. No shifting, no amber eyes, no trace of what I am. If anyone finds out—anyone—we both die. Her and me." His voice drops to something barely audible. "She's been a prisoner in that house for twenty-one years because of what she did. Because of what I am."
The glass cracks fully in his grip. Amber liquid runs between his fingers and he doesn't notice.
"I've never told anyone." He turns his head and looks at me, and the rawness in his face makes my ribs ache. "Not once. Not in twenty-one years. You're the first person who knows everything."
I take the broken glass from his hand, setting it aside. Blood beads on his palm where a shard caught skin—already healing, the cut closing before the blood can dry.
"You're not an abomination." I hold his wounded hand between both of mine. "You're not a monster. You're not whatever your father made you believe you are."
"You don't know that."
"I know that a monster doesn't talk a terrified girl through her first shift. A monster doesn't wrap her in his jacket when she's naked and shaking. A monster doesn't—"
He kisses me. Not like before—not desperate, not frantic. His hands find my face and his mouth presses against mine with a tenderness that cracks something open in my chest. He tastes like whiskey and grief and the kind of trust that terrifies people who've never been allowed to have it.
"Come with me." His forehead rests against mine. "Please. I can't be alone tonight."
We make it to his room—a single in the vampire dorms, larger than mine, colder. He locks the door and stands in the center of the room, swaying slightly, looking at me with eyes that keep flickering between gray and amber.
I go to him. Pull his shirt over his head. Press my palm flat against the scar on his back, and his whole body shudders.
"I see you," I whisper against his chest. "All of you. The vampire and the wolf and the boy who survived. I see it all and I'm still here."
His hands come up slowly—fingers tracing my jaw, my throat, the top button of my shirt. He unfastens each one like he's unwrapping something fragile, his knuckles brushing bare skin as the fabric parts. The shirt falls from my shoulders and he stares—not with hunger this time, but with something closer to awe. His thumb traces my collarbone, the dip between my breasts, the line of my ribs.
"You're shaking," I murmur.
"I know." His voice cracks on both syllables. "I've never—no one's ever—"
He doesn't finish. Doesn't need to. No one has ever seen him and stayed.
He lowers me onto the bed, and this time everything is different. Slow. His hands mapping my body with the reverence of someone memorizing something they're afraid to lose. His mouth follows where his fingers lead—the inside of my wrist, the curve of my waist, the soft skin behind my knee—like he's cataloging every part of me against future loss.
His eyes stay locked on mine—gray and amber swirling together, both halves of him present, neither hiding. When he moves inside me, it feels like confession. Every slow thrust a word he can't say out loud. His forehead presses against mine, breath ragged, and the tremor in his arms spreads through his whole body.
"Don't hide." I hold his face between my hands, thumbs tracing the hollows beneath his eyes. "Not from me. Not tonight."
The amber holds steady, burning through the gray, and for the first time he doesn't fight it. Doesn't clench his jaw and force it back. Just lets me see him—fully, completely, every hidden part laid bare. My legs wrap tighter around him, pulling him deeper, and the sound he makes is so broken and grateful it sends heat flooding behind my eyes.
His rhythm stays slow. Devastating. Each movement deliberate, his hand sliding beneath my back to arch me closer, his mouth open against mine sharing breath instead of stealing it. The pleasure builds in long, rolling waves instead of sharp crests—and when it finally breaks, it takes us both at once. His face buried in my neck, my fingers twisted in his hair, neither of us making a sound except each other's names.
After, he sleeps. Actually sleeps—deep and heavy, his arm locked around my waist, his face pressed against my shoulder. I lie awake for hours, listening to his breathing, feeling the scar beneath my fingertips.
His mother. A prisoner for twenty-one years. His father. A man who choked his seven-year-old son and called it mercy.
I pull him closer. He murmurs my name without waking.