Chapter 56
"So what now, Detective? What happens when two immovable objects meet?"
"Now we save our daughter," Strauss said. Her voice was steady, but her hands were still shaking from adrenaline. "After that… we figure out how to survive each other."
The hallway reeked of smoke and iron. Bodies lay where they had fallen, some still twitching, some already cold.
Strauss wiped her blood-slicked blade on her sleeve and stepped over a man groaning on the floor. Vlad didn't bother stepping over anyone—he walked through them, boots crunching bone.
The sound made her stomach turn. Not from disgust. From familiarity.
She remembered when that sound used to bother her.
They watched the compound where Damien was held from a rooftop vantage point. The building squatted in the industrial district like a concrete tumor, ugly and forgettable.
Perfect for hiding a kidnapped half-vampire.
Strauss checked her weapons. Gun loaded. Blade sharp. Stakes secured. Everything a responsible monster hunter needed.
Vlad stretched beside her, his neck cracking with wet pops as vertebrae realigned.
"You take left flank," Strauss said. "I'll—"
"No." His hand caught her wrist. Cold fingers. Strong grip. "We go together. Like old times."
She jerked free, skin tingling where he'd touched. "There were no 'old times.' Just lies and corpses."
"Semantics." He smiled, fangs catching moonlight.
Strauss wanted to argue. Wanted to remind him that their 'partnership' would end sooner or later.
But Damien was down there.
Their daughter.
The one thing they'd somehow created that wasn't completely fucked.
"Fine," she bit out. "But if you go for unnecessary kills, I'll stake you myself. For the second time."
"Promises, promises."
They dropped from the rooftop in perfect sync—Strauss using a grappling line, Vlad just falling and landing like gravity was a suggestion he chose to follow.
The assault should've been harder.
The Anti-vampire cultists poured out of the compound like roaches from a kicked nest, all wearing the same stupid ceremonial robes and wielding the same cheap swords bought in bulk from some dark web supplier.
Strauss and Vlad moved through them like synchronized death.
She ducked. He struck. He feinted. She finished.
Twenty years apart and their bodies still remembered the rhythm. Like a deadly waltz they'd practiced until muscle memory carved it into their bones.
Except Vlad kept going for kill shots.
A cultist swung at Strauss. She dodged. Vlad grabbed the man's head and started twisting—
Strauss hissed, “Incapacitate,” dragging Vlad back so hard he slammed into the wall with a bone-deep crunch that spider-webbed the concrete.
Vlad’s neck bent at an angle that should’ve required a funeral. “Don’t obliterate,” he added, voice edged like a blade dipped in menace.
The cultist staggered backward, choking on his own breath. Strauss shot him in the kneecap. He collapsed, shrieking.
“Where’s the fun in that?” Vlad sighed, casually twisting his head until the jutting vertebra slid back into place with a wet click.
“We’re here for Damien,” Strauss growled. “Not to host your sadistic game show.”
But here's the thing about Vlad—the thing Strauss had tried to forget for twenty years—he didn't just feed on blood.
Blood was an appetizer. Suffering was the main course.
Pain made him stronger. Fear sharpened his senses. Every scream was a shot of adrenaline straight to his ancient, fucked-up heart.
Vlad lived on agony like normal people lived on oxygen.
And Strauss's mercy was an all-you-can-eat buffet.
She killed clean when she had to. Quick. Efficient. A bullet to the head, lights out, no encores. End the threat, minimize suffering, move on.
Vlad was the opposite. He savored pain like vintage wine. Drew it out. Made it last.
And every enemy Strauss disabled instead of killing became his personal feast.
Every broken limb. Every shattered knee. Every cultist she left screaming on the ground because she refused to execute wounded prisoners.
Vlad absorbed it all.
His eyes brightened from red to crimson. His movements grew smoother, faster, more fluid. The air around him thickened with something dark and satisfied—like reality itself was bending to accommodate his growing power.
A cultist Strauss had shot was sobbing behind them, crawling toward an exit with one functioning leg.
Vlad inhaled slowly, deeply, like he was breathing in the finest incense.
"You choose to cripple them rather than end their life," he murmured, voice dropping an octave. "How thoughtful of you. Very romantic. I’m touched."
His pupils dilated. His skin seemed to glow from within.
"This suffering is exquisite." He turned to her with a smile that was pure fucking nightmare fuel. "Thank you for exquisite dinner, my love."
Strauss felt fury spike through her chest.
The kiss wasn't just a savage consumption; it was a vortex. A brief, hellish space where years of control dissolved. When her teeth chewed his lip, Vlad didn't just seize her; he became a vice.
His fingers dug past flesh and muscle, hooking under her hip bone. The pain was a white-hot needle—a momentary, necessary substitute for sanity. Strauss threw herself into the agony.
Her arms, locked around his neck, became a death-grip, pulling his large body down, molding their weight together.
Vlad's control imploded.
A sound—part animalistic cry, part despairing prayer—was ripped from his throat, shaking her to the core.
Chapter 57
His free hand slammed against her spine, crushing her waist into his. Every nerve ending screamed with the contact.
Strauss's hands ripped his shirt open. The buttons became tiny, irrelevant shrapnel. The expensive cloth tore like paper.
Her palms burned as they connected with his bare, furnace-hot chest. She raked her fingers over the ridges of muscle and scar tissue.
She needed to feel the truth of him beneath the facade.
Her fingers clawed into his thick neck, twisting their mouths together for a final, drowning kiss.
The blood was now a salty, thick mask over their faces, a shared ceremonial mark.
When she broke the kiss, gasping, the air was a choking, toxic cloud.
"I've hated you," she hissed, her voice a shattered pane of glass. "I hate that I missed you. My damned one. My only poison."
His smile was a slow, crimson crescent. His eyes were no longer molten; they were dead, vacant space, filled only with reflection of her chaos.
"My bride, my wife, you are the love of my life," he breathed, the sound a low, velvet threat. "Submit to me. Confess it. Tell me you adore the darkness I drag into your world. Whisper that you belong to only me, your Master, your God."
Her chest was heaving, her lungs screaming for air that didn't feel tainted by the metallic tang of his blood and her own frenzy.
She was ready to say it—ready to throw the last shred of her sanity into the fire just to keep him close for one more second.
Then the sound tore through the night.
Shriek.
Not a cry, but a raw, piercing shriek.
Damien.
The sound was a physical blow that ripped her out of the blood-drenched haze.
Strauss's entire body seized. Her vision snapped from the blurred, scarlet focus of Vlad's face to the razor-sharp clarity of the surrounding darkness. The blood on her mouth instantly felt cold.
"Move," she snarled, the voice not entirely her own, and shoved him with the full, instinctual force of a mother whose child is in danger.
They tore apart with a violent, sickening sound—the wet sound of fabric and skin separating.
Both of them stumbled for balance, adrenaline instantly spiking from lust to terror.
They ran.
The floor shook under Vlad's steps. Strauss's boots pounded beside him, her blade catching flickers of overhead lights as they sprinted down the corridor.
The hallway ahead filled with more guards, all drawn by the noise of their daughter's scream.
Neither of them slowed down.
Because Damien was behind that door.
And anyone standing between them and their daughter was already dead—they just didn't know it yet.
Strauss hit the first guard with a flying knee that caved in his sternum. Vlad grabbed the second by the throat and threw him into a wall hard enough that the concrete cracked.
They tore through the remaining guards like paper.
Strauss's movements were precise—trained, efficient, every strike calculated for maximum damage with minimum energy.
Vlad's were pure chaos—grabbing, breaking, throwing bodies like they weighed nothing.
They broke past the metal barricade and kicked open the reinforced door.
The inner chamber was thick with smoke. Emergency lamps flickered weakly.
Bodies were scattered across the floor—some unconscious, some groaning, some completely still.
And in the center of it all stood Damien.
Her small boots were planted firmly. Her hands were still raised in a defensive stance.
Someone else's blood streaked her cheek in a diagonal line, but her eyes were bright and steady and completely unbothered.
She looked like she'd just finished an annoying workout.
"Mom. Dad," she said, raising one eyebrow. "You got back together just to save me? That's sweet."
The word 'sweet' dripped with so much sarcasm it could've corroded metal.
Strauss froze.
Relief hit her so hard her knees almost buckled. Her chest went tight. Her throat closed up.
For a second, she couldn't breathe. Couldn't think. Could only stare at her daughter—alive, safe, standing in a room full of unconscious kidnappers like she'd been waiting for room service.
Vlad followed Strauss's gaze.
His expression shifted—sharpened like a blade, then softened in a way he rarely allowed. He took in everything with those too-old, too-knowing eyes.
The broken restraints on the floor. The knocked-out guards. The scorch marks on the walls where someone had clearly used some kind of explosive.
Understanding hit him.
"She tricked us," Vlad murmured, voice caught between admiration and exasperation. "She staged her own kidnapping."
Strauss clenched her jaw so hard her teeth ached.
Damien's smirk grew wider. "Took you long enough to figure it out."
“For my defense, I’m busy seducing your long-lost mom.” Vlad stepped closer, studying his daughter like she was a particularly interesting specimen. Or a bomb that might go off.
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