you're too young & eager to love

This is a warm-up, I guess, so it's not very pretty, but oh well. I wanted to write about vampires and Roman was kind enough to offer himself.

This is most likely AU.


--


There’s blood on his jeans.

Sunniva notices this, as well as his clean hands, and the way his bones smell of absence. His palm comes back sandy when he runs a hand through his disheveled hair, the strands cutting across his bearded jawline. He’s a whole head taller than Palmer and imposing in the way of all men who are well-sharpened blades.

“You’re outside of the Vries’ jurisdiction,” she says, “but money is money if it’s all the same to you. We don’t allow any trouble here.”

“I doubt that. With a face like yours.” His grin widens his entire face and Sunniva finds herself smiling. He glances across the marble entrance, taking in the thick columns and the smell of wet stone. “I’m not here on business. Only passing through.”

She nods and gestures for him to pass.

Most men push money into her hands and choose a girl. They circle like scavenger birds attracted to easy meat. Roman is different. He finds a seat at the bar and lets the women come to him. He talks easily, one of his big hands occasionally lifting a tumbler of scotch to his mouth or reaching out to stroke a tanned arm. After half an hour, Sunniva sits beside him, her silver dress shivering across her thighs. She flicks her fingers at the bartender and the woman hands her a glass of fig wine.

“We have others, if you don’t like – ”

“Do you miss it?”

She blinks, surprised. “Sorry?”

Roman reaches down between their bodies and strokes a palm across the back of her prosthetic leg, the metal as cold as his skin. She can almost feel the sensation. Her shoulders tighten and her mouth becomes a hard line.

“It’s beautiful work. Fine craftsmanship. But you still feel it, don’t you? Your lost limb.”

She swallows and cuts her eyes at him, shifting her legs so her good one folds on top of the other. He retracts his hand but not as quick as she would have liked him to. With a forced smile, she tucks her fingers under her chin, her elbow resting on the bar, and cants her head at him. “You must be well acquainted with loss. But overstep again, and I’ll ask you to leave. I am not one of my girls.”

Roman raises his eyebrows. The expression makes him look smug. Sunniva imagines he wears the look often.

“What are you?” She is usually too professional for such bluntness, but he’s already crossed a line. There’s a hint of coyness in her tone, as though she’s asking a question she already knows the answer to.

“Hungry,” he says with another grin. “I’m hungry.”

“We have a fantastic cook. Although most of our clientele don’t come for the food, I admit.”

He tsks at her, disappointed.

She pauses before signaling to the bartender. “Could you send for Odina, please?”

Odina smells like the mountains when she arrives a minute later. She has a spread of freckles across her face and shoulders, her hair the copper of worn pennies. Sunniva runs a hand down her arm invitingly when she comes to stand beside them. Her smile is shy and directly disproportionate to the frankness of her gaze. The lavender of her dress doesn’t suit the color of her skin or the pink flare of her bee-stung lips. Roman likes her immediately.

Sunniva brushes a few strands of Odina’s hair behind her ear, speaking low and close although she keeps her eyes on Roman. “Our guest here has special tastes. Oblige him.”







When Roman catches her jaw in his hand, she does not shy away. She has a bear’s heart, and it hammers bravely inside of her chest. He grips one of her long arms with his other hand and sees a flicker of realization in her eyes.

“Cold hands.”

“Mmm,” he concedes and pushes into her space, walking her backwards until she’s bracketed by her bedroom wall and his body. He has to lean down to press his face into her neck, and he breathes in the smell of her, the hot, youthful blood right below her fragile skin beckoning to him.

“I haven’t seen one of you in a while. Not as a customer.”

Roman pauses, his mouth humming across the slope of her shoulder. When he speaks, Odina can feel the press of his fangs against her flesh. “You’re too young to have seen one of me, mädchen.”

She laughs a little, digging her fingers into his hair and arching up into the length of him. “Don’t be silly. You’re not common, that’s for sure, mister, but we cater to all types here at the Isle.”

He growls, pinning her more forcibly against the wall, and craning her neck to the side. For all his physical threatening, he doesn’t hear her heart skip even a single beat.

“The last one said I tasted like apricots. Do you remember what those taste like? Smooth but sweet and tart.”

She bites her bottom lip and strains against his hands – not to get away, but to press closer. Roman wants to call her a minx, but now all he can think of is velvet skin and golden fruits. He presses his nose into her shoulder again, trailing his mouth up, letting the ache settle in his groin and thrum through his veins.

Hunger like drowning. Burning. Suffocating. All the sensations he has never experienced firsthand and probably never will.

He sinks his teeth into her without warning. He gets hard at the way she cries, a quick, sharp gasp from her slavish mouth. The blood spills across his tongue, thick as syrup but so much sweeter. He’s vaguely aware of letting his hands drop to his waist, of fisting the fabric of her dress at her side until he’s crushing her against him, and she just keeps arching and yielding and relenting herself to him. Roman knows she’s wet and he’d like to fuck her until she comes against him, her hair a blaze across her soft cheeks, blood smeared across her collarbone, but he lets himself get lost in the thunder of her heartbeat for a few more moments.

He’s too old to be careless. He rears his head back with a growl well before her pulse begins to flutter, circling an arm across her hips while lifting the back of her thigh until she’s looped her legs around his sharp waist.

Roman keeps his fangs out. He drags them across her collarbone, over her chest, leaving a trail of red to stain the lavender edge of her dress.

When she tells him she wants it, he bites again, against the swell of her breast.

She’ll stroke the fading imprint of his teeth for days to come.