Blood Knot by Tracy Cooper-Posey

tends to stay up all hours of the night. Vampire hours, you know? Nice to meet you.”
    She slipped between the first class suites to theirs, knowing that Nial would not be far behind.

Chapter Seven

    WINTER KICKED OFF her shoes and climbed onto the bed that had been assembled while she was gone. The lighting had been lowered and pillows plumped and placed for them both. Soft music played on the entertainment screen, masking the constant thrumming of the aircraft.
    It was cozy and would definitely be private once the doors were shut.
    “ Vampire hours, hmmm?” Nial murmured. “Very cute.”
    She looked up from studying the entertainment controls, startled. “You sneaked up on me deliberately,” she accused. He stood on the other side of the double suite, a hand on either side of the curved walls.
    “ Of course,” he said. “I wanted to see what you were doing. I admit I’m somewhat disappointed. I thought you might be lying across the beds, waiting for me.”
    She laughed. “You’re an optimist.”
    “ I have fantasies,” he corrected gravely.
    Winter felt her cheeks heat. He seemed to be able to do that to her far too easily. “You enjoyed that,” she admonished him.
    “ Which? Making you blush, or the by-play at the bar?”
    “ Both,” she said simply. “A professional would have been too focused to enjoy himself.”
    Nial’s smile faded. “I’ve never considered myself a professional,” he replied. “I did it from necessity and made myself good at it because I wanted to survive. Life is ugly enough at the baseline without adding to the seriousness. You should be adding joy wherever you can, Winter. Not the other way around. Didn’t Serbia teach you that?”
    She sat up on her knees. “Define joy for me,” she demanded.
    Nial’s eyes narrowed. “Do you want a dictionary definition or a personal interpretation?”
    She hissed her impatience at him. “How old were you when you became a vampire, Nial?”
    Nial glanced along the corridor, dropped off his shoes, then eased himself onto his side of the bed and shut the door on his side of the suite. It enclosed them in their own little world. Then he surprised her by crossing his legs and threading his fingers together. He didn’t reach for her or languidly recline. He was treating the question seriously.
    “ I was twenty-eight, as near as I can calculate,” he told her. “Age was not a critical matter in my day,” he added. “And calendars and years were not precise.”
    “ But you were taken from your family and put into slavery when you were ten, you said.”
    He drew a breath. She saw his shoulders lift. “Yes,” he said simply.
    “ While you were a slave, did you have friends amongst the other slaves?”
    His eyes narrowed again. “Slavery didn’t work like that. I was sold to a household after my capture and put to work there. But I had a friend in the house, one of owner’s sons, and there were other slaves in other households nearby.”
    Winter nodded. “You had a place, then.”
    Nial’s expression became a fully-fledged frown. “For the way things worked back then, yes. I had a place. I didn’t particularly care for it, once I understood where I stood in the scheme of things. But I had my place.”
    “ I didn’t,” Winter replied. “Not once. Not ever. You at least had twenty-eight years of being human and being accepted, Nial. I’ve never had that, not even from my family.” She filled her lungs and held them for a moment against the swell of self-pity, before letting herself go on.
    Nial’s expression was neither pitying or gentle. It was simply interested and that helped. “They rejected your talent as soon as they learned of it,” he surmised.
    She nodded again. “They wouldn’t touch me. Ever. They would rarely speak to me. It was only my father’s idea of Christian charity that made him keep me in the house and feed and clothe me. He began to drink and beat my mother when I was four. He thought it was her