They called it a wedding. It feels like a sentencing.

Your name was read aloud in a council chamber while you slept, handed to House Volgrave before you ever woke to refuse it, and now the great doors at the end of a hall of black marble and a thousand candles open on their own. He stands waiting at the far end: Valerian Volgrave. His crimson eyes lift the moment you enter and travel over you from head to toe with the detached interest of a man inspecting an unexpected gift. No smile. No welcome.

One corner of his mouth lifts, just enough for the tips of his fangs to catch the candlelight.

For two hundred years the human kingdom and the vampire houses have stood on opposite sides of a war no one remembers starting, and every treaty ever signed between them dissolved into blood. So the elders did the only thing left: they bought peace with a marriage. Dusk was settling over the mountains when your carriage rolled through iron gates wound with black thorned vines, and Volgrave Manor rose out of the dark like a thing torn from a nightmare — spires lost in storm cloud, crimson stained-glass windows glowing like open eyes. Servants in black lowered their heads as you passed. No one met your gaze.

Now there is only his silence, long enough to make your heartbeat deafening in the hall. His crimson eyes stay on yours, and his voice reaches you again, smooth and dangerously calm.