Physio became a strange, tender kind of ritual, the two of us alone most afternoons in the room Damian had quietly converted into something between a gym and a clinic, mats and resistance bands and, taped to the wall where I’d see it every session, a printed sheet of exercises from the actual physiotherapist I’d seen exactly once before deciding Damian’s patience made a better substitute.
“Again,” he said, holding my wrist steady while I worked my shoulder through its range, wincing at the places it still refused to go easily.
“Small movements. You don’t have to prove anything to me.”
“I’m not trying to prove anything.”
“You’re gritting your teeth like this is a competition.” He caught my chin, turned my face to his, something soft under the mock severity.
“It isn’t. You heal at your own pace, and I will sit here counting reps with you for as long as that takes, however long that is.” He was, if I’m honest, better at it than any actual physiotherapist could have been, patient in a way that had centuries behind it, attentive to every small flinch before I’d even fully registered the discomfort myself. Some afternoons the exercises gave way to nothing more than him holding my hand between both of his, working the stiffness out of my fingers one knuckle at a time while I told him about my day, and those afternoons, I think, did more for me than any of the actual stretches. Nana Flo’s lessons happened in the evenings, once Noah was down, at a table in the corner of the library Damian hadn’t known he owned until she’d requisitioned it on her second day, and which had apparently been sitting untouched under dust sheets since some previous decade of his very long life.
“Magic isn’t will alone,” she told me, that first proper evening, laying out a collection of small cloth bundles across the table between us, dried herbs I didn’t have names for yet, a scatter of stones in colours I hadn’t seen outside of jewellery shop windows.
“It’s attention. Most people who fail at it aren’t lacking power. They’re lacking patience to actually look at what they’re working with.” She had a book. It mattered, later, in ways neither of us understood yet, and it was bound in leather gone soft and dark with age, its pages a strange, thick vellum that didn’t feel like any paper I’d touched before, and the writing inside moved between at least three languages I could identify and several more I couldn’t, careful diagrams in the margins, notes in different hands layered over centuries.
“It’s been in our family longer than either of us can properly account for,” she said, turning pages with the particular reverence of someone handling something alive.
“Some of it traces back to the old Sibylline traditions, the prophetic texts the Romans themselves half-feared and half-worshipped. Some of it’s older than Rome, folded in from wherever our line passed through on its way to wherever you and I ended up. Etruscan charm-work, here.” She tapped a page dense with small, careful sigils.
“Greek herb-lore, layered in later, from someone who clearly knew what they were doing with willow bark and vervain.”
“And this is what I’m supposed to learn from?”
“This is what you’re supposed to learn to listen to.” She corrected me gently.
“The book doesn’t teach so much as it remembers, and it will only give up what it thinks you’re ready to carry.” She started me small, which felt, at the time, almost insultingly small. A pinch of dried rosemary between my fingers, a single smooth grey stone, and an instruction to simply hold both and notice what I felt, nothing more, for the better part of a week before she’d let me attempt anything at all resembling a working. I understood, eventually, what she meant about attention. The stone was cold, and then, held long enough, wasn’t. The rosemary had a texture I’d never actually noticed before, brittle and soft at once. The flower happened on a Tuesday, three weeks into my lessons, an ordinary potted geranium Nana Flo had set on the table specifically for the purpose, its one remaining bloom well past its best.
“Don’t will it,” she said, watching me settle my hand around the stem the way she’d taught me, eyes closed, breath slow.
“Ask it. There’s a difference, and the difference is the entire lesson.” I don’t know how to properly describe what I did. I felt for the same place inside myself the scream in the cave had come from, the same place that had failed me entirely on the reserve, and found, this time, something smaller and steadier waiting there instead of a total, overwhelming flood. I asked, the way she’d told me to, some wordless, careful request directed at a half-dead flower, and felt warmth move down through my arm and into my fingers, gentle as anything, nothing like the white detonation of that morning with Silas. The geranium bloomed. Not dramatically, not all at once, but properly, petals unfurling soft and slow, colour deepening back into something rich and alive, and I opened my eyes to find Nana Flo watching me with an expression that undid something in my chest, pride so plain it was almost difficult to look at directly.
“There she is,” she said, quietly, and I understood, hearing it, that some part of her had been waiting thirty years to say exactly that. I healed slowly after that, the cast finally coming off, the stitches dissolving into thin, pink lines that Nana Flo assured me would fade to nothing within the year, and Damian, through all of it, treated me like something perpetually on the verge of breaking, careful in a way that had started, by the fourth week, to genuinely wear on me. It came to a head on a Thursday night, the two of us alone in our room, Nana Flo already down the hall reading by lamplight and Noah long asleep. I’d caught him watching me undress for bed with that same careful, cataloguing look he’d worn since the reserve, checking each scar like it was a wound he’d personally failed to prevent.
“Stop it,” I said, more sharply than I meant to.
“Stop what?”
“Looking at me like I’m made of glass.” I turned to face him properly, my shirt half off, the four thin lines still healing pink along my forearm on full display.
“I am not going to shatter, Damian. I want you. I have wanted you for weeks, and every single time I’ve reached for you, you’ve found some careful reason to hold back, and I am so tired of feeling like my own body has become something you’re afraid to touch.” “Sarah—”
“I mean it.” My voice cracked on it, and I let it.
“Please. I need you to want me the way you used to, scars and all, instead of treating every mark on me like something you’re grieving.” He was quiet a long moment, something raw moving behind his eyes, and when he finally crossed the room to me, it was slow, deliberate, his hands settling at my waist like he was still asking permission with every inch of the movement.
“I look at you,” he said, low, “and I see every single moment I failed to keep this from happening to you. That’s not about you being fragile, Sarah. That’s about me not knowing how to forgive myself yet.”
“Then let me help you forgive yourself.” I pulled his mouth down to mine.
“Touch me like you mean it. Please.” He gave in slowly, and then, once he understood I meant it, entirely. It matters, given what came after, that there was nothing frantic in it, nothing of the fierce, desperate need that had marked so many of our other nights together. He undressed me like something precious rather than something fragile, an important distinction I felt in every unhurried pass of his hands, worshipping each scar with his mouth rather than avoiding it, until I understood, properly, that he’d needed this every bit as much as I had, needed proof that I still wanted all of him despite everything his world had cost me.
He was slow and thorough and impossibly tender, taking his time with every part of me like the whole night belonged to nothing but this, and when he finally settled inside me, both of us moving together in an unhurried rhythm that built and built without ever losing its gentleness, I felt something in both of us finally exhale properly for the first time in a month. When he finally let go, it was with my name pressed soft into my hair, and I felt him shudder through it in a way that had nothing left of restraint in it at all, just relief, just love, plain and total. I didn’t let him roll away after. I climbed over him instead, still joined, still feeling the aftershocks of him moving gently through me, and braced my hands against his chest, looking down at a face gone open and unguarded in the low lamplight.
“Feed on me,” I said.
“Sarah.” His hands came up to my hips, not pushing me away, not quite.
“We’ve talked about this.”
“I know what we talked about. I’m asking anyway.” I leaned down until my mouth was at his ear.
“I trust you with everything I am. I want you to have this too. Please, Damian. I’m asking you properly, with my whole self, not because I’m scared or because something’s chasing us. Just because I want to give you every part of me there is.” He was quiet, and I felt him fighting it, five hundred years of careful restraint waging one last battle against a request he’d refused a dozen times already, and I held very still, still moving faintly around him, and waited.
“If anything feels wrong,” he said finally, voice wrecked, “you tell me, and I stop immediately.”
“I promise.” He tilted my throat gently to one side, and pressed a last, soft kiss to the pulse point there, and bit down. What happened next was nothing like any bond I’d read about in Nana Flo’s book, nothing like anything either of us had experienced before, either. Because he was still inside me when he fed, still moving, still part of me in every physical sense a body could manage, and the moment his teeth found the vein, I felt myself pulled somewhere else entirely, not just his memories arriving the way they had in the cave, but something deeper, some current running both directions at once, his mind opening to mine as completely as mine was opening to his.
Light bloomed behind my closed eyes, gold and endless, and I understood, distantly, that I could feel his pleasure as my own and mine as his, both of us folding into a single continuous loop with no clear edge left between where he ended and I began. It didn’t feel like drowning, the way the last feeding had. It felt like completion, like two halves of something ancient finally, finally closing the distance between them. Nana Flo’s voice reached me from somewhere very far away, from down the hallway, from a book that had apparently just done something neither of us had asked it to.
“An infinity bond,” I heard her breathe, awestruck, frightened, from a doorway neither of us had heard open.
“Sarah. Do you have any idea how rare that is?” The gold light held a moment longer, wrapping around both of us like something that had been waiting five hundred years to finally close its circle, before it slowly, gently, began to fade.