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theethighpriestess · 22 hours ago

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Chapter 3- The Thirst Beneath the Song

A/N: First off, thank y'all so so sooooo much for all the love y'all have been showing my little story. I have a few more chapters left in me before we close the book on Eden, but her story is far from over.

Characters: Elias "Stack" Moore, Eden Taylor (OC), Oriana Mireaux (OC)

Warning(s): 18+, Adult language, Blood & vampirism, Supernatural Elements, Vampire Kink, Explicit Sex

Summary: Eden’s broke. Her rent’s late, her car sounds like it’s choking, and her dreams of making it as a singer in New Orleans are getting harder to hold onto. So when she sees a sketchy little ad offering big cash to be a “discreet donor,” she answers it. She tells herself it’s just money. Just blood. Just once. But the contract’s signed, the room is breathing, and Eden? She might’ve just stepped into something deeper than debt.

Word Count: 6K

Eden woke up with the taste of him still in her mouth.

Not blood, since she hadn’t been the one feeding, but something heavier. Copper-soft and electric. It sat on her tongue like a memory, low and honeyed, like the ending of a song you didn’t know had already ended. The fan buzzed overhead, stirring the thick July air but doing nothing to move it. The sheets clung to her skin like a second body. She kicked them off and sat up slowly, her throat dry.

The clock blinked 3:47 AM.

Her limbs felt loose. Her thoughts didn’t. They curled tight behind her ribs, coiled and pulsing, like something inside her was waiting for instructions.

She hadn’t heard from Stack since that night.

Not a message. Not a call. Just the envelope of cash, the press of his mouth, and the silence that followed like steam after a summer storm. She told herself it was fine. Just business. A high-end transaction. Money for moments. But her body remembered too much. The weight of him between her thighs. The way his fangs dragged slow, deliberate. Like he could taste more than just her blood. Like he could taste her secrets.

She hadn’t written anything in over a week. Not a full verse. Not a line.

Every time she picked up her pen, it started hopeful, then sank into something else. Something slow and aching. Lyrics that tasted like want and satin. Rhymes that pulsed like bruises in candlelight. She couldn't finish a single song without slipping back into that red-lit room and the feel of his breath against her skin.

She tried humming instead, keeping her hands busy with dishes or her hair or folding laundry she hadn’t worn in weeks. But even her melodies came out low and syrupy, dragging like river silt. By sunrise, she gave up on pretending she could sleep.

The sun had just started to bake the sidewalk when she threw on sandals and grabbed her keys, no real destination in mind. Her curls were still damp from the shower, piled on top of her head, and she’d thrown on one of her dad’s old Tulane Law tees that hung low on her thighs. No makeup. No earrings. Just a set of keys, five crumpled dollars, and something gnawing at her chest that wasn’t quite fear and wasn’t quite hunger.

Her silver Camry purred to life, cool air blowing steady from the vents. She’d only had the car for a few weeks, but it still felt like a quiet kind of miracle. No dashboard tantrums. No grinding starter. The dealership had thrown in a peach-scented air freshener and a full tank of gas, and she’d nearly cried in front of the finance guy.

She made it as far as Chartres and Iberville before she turned the wheel on instinct and pulled to the curb.

The Sugar Séance sat nestled between a shuttered florist and a barbershop with a crooked barber pole and faded saints decals on the door. Its storefront was painted in soft lavender and buttercream hues, like a slice of cake someone had dreamed into being. Glass jars dangled from the porch beams, filled with pastel candy rocks, dried herbs, and tiny paper spells that fluttered when the wind caught them. Wind chimes made of antique spoons, skeleton keys, and chipped teacups clinked gently overhead. The windows were fogged with lace curtains and dusted sugar, and the hand-painted sign above the door shimmered in the morning light—gold lettering curling like incense smoke across a board carved to resemble a bitten praline.

Inside, the air was thick with scent: warm pralines, candied citrus peel, bourbon vanilla, and something older and greener beneath it all. Not unpleasant, just unexpected. Like walking into a candy store that had a working altar in the back and whispered when you weren’t looking.

The bell over the door jingled low as Eden stepped inside. The floorboards creaked beneath Eden’s feet, and for a moment, she thought she was alone.

Then Oriana Mireaux, the bubbly shop owner, appeared from behind a curtain of beaded strings, barefoot and unbothered, as if the room had conjured her on cue. She moved like incense smoke; slow and sure, every step threaded with something otherworldly. Her silk slip dress clung to her body like moonlight to water, dyed the color of periwinkle smoke and trimmed in antique lace. Long dark locs tumbled over her shoulders, wrapped in velvet ribbons and rosemary sprigs, tiny golden charms glinting like secrets where the light caught them.

She smelled faintly of rosewater and scorched citrus peel, with a note of ash clinging like a memory. A black cord circled her neck, the small iron key at its center resting just beneath her collarbone. Her gold-rimmed glasses flashed as she tilted her head, eyes narrowing through enchanted lenses rumored to show only the truth.

“Well, look who finally wandered in,” Oriana said, her voice a velvet drawl. “Miss Eden Taylor.”

Eden offered a half-smile, suddenly aware of how loud her own breath sounded in the foggy hush of the room. “Was I expected?”

The shop shimmered behind her, all sugar smoke and drifting whispers, but Oriana’s gaze held steady. Not quite amused. Not quite surprised. Just certain.

“Always,” she murmured, like the answer had been written long ago.

“You been humming in your sleep,” she said softly, stepping around the counter. “Dreamin’ in red. Thinking I wouldn’t hear it.”

They weren’t close, not really. Acquaintances, more than friends. Same circles. Same city. The kind of woman you see at shows, at bookstores, on sidewalks with a paper bag full of herbs and intentions. But Oriana had always looked at her like she saw more than the surface.

“I didn’t come here for anything serious,” Eden said, wandering toward a shelf lined with jars of rock candy and candied ginger.

“Mhm,” Oriana hummed. “That why you drove straight here with your hair still wet and your heart all tangled up?”

Eden blinked. “You’re really doing the full clairvoyant thing today, huh?”

Oriana grinned. “I don’t do anything half-assed. Besides, I know a hunger dream when I smell one.”

Eden picked up a tin of cinnamon drops. “You’re not gonna ask what happened?”

“I already know what didn’t,” Oriana replied, walking past her to a low cabinet near the register. She crouched, pulled open the drawer, and came back with a small stack of books tied together with twine.

“You came looking for answers,” she said simply. “Here’s a few to start.”

Eden looked at the bundle. “What kind of answers?”

“The kind you don’t get by Googling,” Oriana said. “First one’s a grimoire from a healer in St. Lucia. Talks about beings that feed off life force, not just blood. Second one’s vampire folklore collected from Creole families down in Plaquemines Parish. Half of it’s myth, the rest is memory. You’ll know which is which. And the last one…” Her lips curled. “Let’s call it a manual for women learning how to hold their power without flinching.”

Eden stared at the twine. “And you keep this kind of stuff tucked between bubble gum and jawbreakers?”

“Sugar makes the medicine easier to swallow, or whatever Mary Poppins said,” Oriana said with a wink. She added a sachet of candied hibiscus to the stack and nudged it forward. “For the heart. On the house.”

Eden reached into her pocket. “Let me pay you—”

Oriana shook her head. “Just tell me what you learn when you come back to see me.”

The morning light glinted off her dragon tattoo as she turned away, the scales inked in ocean tones that caught like moonlight. Eden stood for a long moment, the books pressed to her chest, the weight of them anchoring her in a way nothing else had lately.

Outside, the city simmered, golden and loud. She got back into her Camry, shut the door, and sat with the engine running, watching the steam rise off the pavement. One of the books shifted in her lap, the corner catching a glint of sun.

Blood remembers what the mind forgets.

She traced the words with her finger, then put the car in drive.

She had a lot of remembering to do.

–

Eden read everything over the next two days. She read like someone starving. Like the words might stitch the holes she didn’t know she had. She didn’t eat much. Didn’t sleep. Her songbooks lay untouched on the floor beside the bed, lyrics abandoned in favor of pages filled with things older than memory. The books smelled like old paper and fennel, and sometimes, when she turned a page too quickly, something floral and unfamiliar drifted out. Rose, maybe. Or dried blood.

The first book read like a letter from a world she almost recognized. It spoke in symbols and metaphors, riddled with footnotes, but something about it made sense in the marrow. There were no fangs. No coffins. No capes. Just hunger and power, described in strange, beautiful prose. It spoke of ancient rites hidden in songs and salt lines. Of those who fed not only to live, but to listen. To taste the truth in someone’s breath and mirror it back with intention.

The second book was messier. Marginalia scrawled in red ink by someone who clearly didn’t trust the stories. There were interviews. Fragments of oral tradition from families along the Gulf Coast. Tales passed down from grandmothers who had seen too much and said too little. Stories of midnight visitors who never knocked, only whispered. Of lovers who fed beneath cypress trees and left their marks behind in freckles shaped like constellations. Of women who woke up glowing and wrecked, their mouths bruised with silence, their lives never quite their own again.

One account stopped her cold. A Creole midwife in 1913 claimed she’d seen a man waiting just beyond a woman’s doorstep, still as a shadow, until she beckoned him inside. She said he didn’t touch her, not in the way people meant, but knelt at her feet, placed his hands on her thighs, and took something she didn’t know she’d offered. The woman wept without knowing why. For seven nights after, her dreams ran thick with blood and candlelight. On the eighth, she vanished. No sign of struggle. Just open windows and sheets still warm.

Eden shut the book and stared at the ceiling.

She tried to shake the image, but it clung. Not the story, but the sensation. The heat of remembered breath against her skin. The curve of hands. The weight of silence. She dropped her head back against the pillow and closed her eyes, and the vision opened like a door.

Stack.

In the dream, she was sitting on the chaise again, red light painting the room in velvet shadows. He knelt in front of her, still and grave, the way he always was before feeding. No hurry. No hunger in his face. Just that watchful, measured calm. His fingers grazed her thighs as he leaned in, and she remembered the moment not by sound, but by pulse. How hers jumped. How his slowed. How everything between them thickened.

She could feel the way his mouth pressed into her skin. Not with greed, but with reverence. The kind of slowness that demanded surrender. She remembered the pull, not just from her body, but from somewhere deeper. Like he wasn’t just drinking, but drawing something out. Something molten and tender and unsayable.

She gasped and sat up.

The book had slipped from her lap to the floor, its spine cracked, pages spilling like open wounds. She rubbed her eyes and tried to steady her breath.

The final book was different. Smaller, bound in thick navy cloth with no title on the cover. The kind of thing you wouldn’t pick up on instinct. Inside, it read like a guide. A warning. A promise.

There were diagrams. Symbols in ash-colored ink. Notes written by a woman named Esmé Duval, who claimed her great-aunt had once been “bonded” to a feeder for nearly a decade. The term wasn’t explained so much as whispered around. But one sentence stood out, underlined already in faint pencil, as if it had mattered to someone before her:

The bond is a thinning of the veil. A place where breath and blood and memory meet. It is temporary. It is dangerous. It is addictive.

Eden stared at the words. Her pulse slowed. She reached for her own pencil and traced over the line, darkening the letters like they might come alive if she gave them enough weight.

She leaned back against the couch and tried to process it all. The heat outside pressed against the window, thick and humming, but her skin had gone cold. Not in fear. In recognition.

The bond. That was what it had to be. She hadn’t imagined the way her body lit up beneath his touch, or the way the world blurred into velvet and honey when he fed. It wasn’t just chemistry. It wasn’t even lust. It was a threshold. A place she hadn’t known she was capable of crossing until he opened it for her.

She touched the side of her neck, absently rubbing a spot that still felt warm, though nothing had been there in weeks. The next few pages detailed signs of a bond forming. Lucid dreams. Heightened senses. The inability to write, sing, or create without summoning the other person in your mind. A kind of echo, the book called it. A soulprint.

Eden flipped to the next chapter, but the words swam. She shut the book and pressed her fingers to her temple, breathing slow. She had wanted clarity. Instead, she’d found a name for something she hadn’t been ready to claim. A name for the burn in her chest and the way her melodies kept turning into confessions. And if this was only temporary, if it really was meant to fade like the book said, then why did it feel like she was just beginning to be pulled under?

Her phone buzzed.

A text from the DJ who had promised to spin her single on the radio again.

Can’t play your track this week. Sponsor pulled. Maybe next month.

She stared at the screen. Her reflection ghosted in the glass. Curls pulled back. Face bare. Eyes sharp and unsure.

She tossed the phone onto her bed, the words from the book still carved into her thoughts.

Temporary.

Dangerous.

Addictive.

So was music. So was dreaming. So was trying to touch something sacred with your mouth open and your hands trembling.

But she didn’t stop singing.

And she wasn’t ready to stop dreaming about Stack.

So she dressed.

Not in anything extravagant. Just a fitted white tank top, soft from too many washes, and a long black skirt that kissed her ankles when she walked. Her curls were pulled back in two space buns, loose bangs falling in her face casually. She dabbed rosewater at her pulse points and slid gold bangles up one arm until they clinked softly when she moved.

She wasn’t planning to see him. She just needed to drive.

Needed the hum of the city in her ears, the blur of houses and shotgun porches flickering past her window like beads on a second line. Maybe she’d loop around City Park. Maybe she’d find a corner to sing on just to hear her own voice move through the air again. Something to break the silence that had started feeling personal.

The Camry was cool and ready, the stereo humming something slow and unbothered. She didn’t touch the volume. She just drove. By the time she made it past Canal and turned onto Baronne, the air had begun to shift. Not the weather, but something quieter. Underneath. A low pull, almost magnetic, settling beneath her ribs like a string being tugged.

She told herself she was just heading toward the river. Just driving.

She passed a corner store that sold pink coconut pies and menthols in singles. An old woman sweeping her stoop looked up at her like she knew something Eden didn’t. She turned off the next street.

And that’s when she saw her.

A woman. Slim. Pale in that fragile kind of way that always looked a little haunted in this heat. Her hair was the color of night oil, long and brushed to shine, not a strand out of place. She wore a silk dress the color of champagne, high heels in one hand, a phone in the other, smile small and tired.

Eden slowed instinctively.

Not because she recognized the woman. But because she recognized the ache behind her posture. The way she walked like something inside her had been poured out and carefully refilled. Not sluggish. Not broken. Just... stretched.

Like Eden had felt.

That’s what did it. Not her looks. Not the gleam of her jewelry. But the air around her. That afterglow. That softness edged in something sacred and bone-deep. The woman crossed the street. Eden kept driving, eyes flicking to the rearview.

The woman moved with purpose, but not urgency. She turned left at the light. And something in Eden’s chest clicked hard, like a trap being set.

She circled the block and caught up, easing her foot off the gas just enough to watch without drawing attention. The woman stopped in front of a nondescript warehouse tucked deep in the Warehouse District. The surrounding buildings were lifeless, windows dark and walls crumbling with time. To the untrained eye, Stack’s place looked just as abandoned, just another forgotten relic of the city. But above the steel door, a single red light pulsed, dim and deliberate, like a secret only some could see.

Stack’s warehouse.

Eden’s stomach pulled tight. She turned down the next alley and parked behind a van with peeling paint. Cut the engine. Waited. The woman pressed something into the hand of the man at the door, maybe an envelope, maybe a card, and smiled like she’d done it before. Not warmly. Not flirty. Just… familiar. Like this wasn’t a favor. Like this was a rhythm.

Eden watched her disappear behind the door.

She sat still for a long time. Long enough for the windshield to fog faintly from her breath. Her hand stayed frozen on the gearshift. Her mouth felt dry. She told herself it made sense. Stack was powerful. Wealthy. Undead, yes, but polished. Controlled. It made sense that he had others. That she wasn’t the only one.

It made sense.

But sense didn’t settle anything. It just rang hollow in her chest, like a bell with no echo. She hadn’t expected this kind of feeling.

It wasn’t jealousy. She refused to name it that. It wasn’t love. She wasn’t that naïve. But it was something that curled tight in her gut and whispered things she didn’t want to say out loud. Something old. Something human. A want to be singular. A want to be remembered.

A want to matter.

She let her forehead rest against the steering wheel. Closed her eyes. Breathed deep.

He hadn’t lied to her.

He’d never said it was exclusive. Never promised intimacy beyond the sharp end of a transaction. And maybe the money had been clean. Crisp. The experience curated. Gentle even, in its own strange way.

But it had changed her.

And now, watching someone else walk that same path, unbothered, glowing, undone—it scraped against her like a blade in silk.

She sat up and started the engine again. Didn’t drive off this time.

Instead, she pulled out her compact mirror and stared at herself under the flickering streetlight. Skin slightly damp. Eyes rimmed in shadow. Lips parted like she’d been caught mid-confession.

She didn’t recognize herself. Not fully.

There was a woman inside her now who craved more than answers. Who wanted to understand not just the what, but the why. Why her melodies trembled when she thought of him. Why her lyrics always led back to his mouth. Why she had started humming in minor keys even when she felt victorious.

Maybe she needed to ask him.

Not about the other woman. Not about rules.

But about this.

This pull. This weight. This ache she hadn’t known how to carry.

She checked the rearview again.

The door hadn’t opened. No one came or left. Just the pulse of red light above the threshold, like a heartbeat in concrete. Her fingers hovered over her phone. She didn’t text.

Instead, she drove home slow, letting the city wind around her. Spanish moss dipped low from the trees. A second line ghosted down St. Charles, distant brass echoing like it belonged to another lifetime.

By the time she reached her apartment, the sky had gone purple-black. The books were still where she’d left them on the coffee table, but she didn’t touch them. Instead, she let her body carry her to the kitchen, where she stared at her reflection in the microwave door.

Still hers.

Still Eden.

But the name felt softer now. Like it had been spoken too many times in too many dreams.

She turned off the lights and lay on her bed with her knees drawn up and her hand pressed lightly to the center of her chest.

The ache wasn’t going away.

But neither was she.

–

His text came late.

Later than usual. Later than polite. Midnight was already breathing down her neck when her phone lit up across the room.

Eden rolled over in bed, her arm draped over the nearest pillow, her hair still damp from the shower. The screen glowed cool in the dark.

Tomorrow. Midnight. I want to show you something.

No greeting or pleasantries. Just that message. Short. Final. Like he knew she’d come.

She stared at it for a full minute, thumb hovering. Her first impulse was to ask for details. Her second was to pretend she hadn’t seen it. But all she did was lock her phone again and hold it to her chest, heart already kicking up a rhythm like her body knew something her brain hadn’t caught up to yet.

She didn’t sleep. Not really.

The next day passed in a quiet blur. She cleaned the kitchen twice. Tried to write. Tried to eat. Settled for tea and the last of the pralines Oriana had slipped in the bag with the books. When she looked at herself in the mirror, she saw someone less frayed than before. But not quite steady either. Like a record with one deep groove too many.

By the time the clock hit 11:30, she was already dressed.

Not stage-dressed. Not pretty.

Just real.

A black tank dress with thin straps. Clean face, clear gloss on her lips. A single gold ring on her finger. Her curls pulled back into a high puff that crowned her head soft and proud. She looked like the girl she was before him, or close enough.

The drive was quiet. The address he’d sent took her out of the Quarter and into a neighborhood that sloped low, where the houses sat quiet behind wrought iron fences and jasmine spilled over from every second gate. She slowed in front of a narrow cream-colored home tucked between two tall oaks. No number on the door. Just a single porch light glowing warm above it.

She parked at the curb and took a breath before stepping out.

The heat hugged her instantly. July heavy. Still and watching.

The front door opened before she knocked.

Stack stood in the frame, barefoot and unsmiling, wearing a black shirt and loose cotton pants. His sleeves were pushed up. No watch tonight. Just the gleam of his chain and the soft violet burn in his eyes.

He didn’t speak. Just stepped back and let her in.

The house was quiet.

Not the sterile kind of quiet. But lived-in. Dimly lit and warm, with dark wood floors and worn rugs. The walls were lined with framed photographs. Sepia portraits, places she couldn’t name, people in old clothes with eyes that followed her as she walked past. She swore there was even a photo of Stack, except his expression was much more serious and his tweed suit sported blue trim and detailing. A piano sat under the front window, its lid closed but freshly dusted. Somewhere deeper in the house, she heard the whisper of a record player, old jazz playing like it had been waiting for her to notice.

“You live here?” she asked, voice softer than she meant it to be.

Stack gave a small nod. “Most of the time.”

She turned to look at him fully. His posture was easy, but something about him was wound tighter tonight. Not tense. Just alert. Like this moment had been rehearsed in his mind too many times.

“Come,” he said and turned without waiting.

He led her through a narrow hallway that smelled faintly of cedar and smoke, the walls lined with gilded sconces dimly lit by candlelight. The floorboards creaked softly beneath their steps, their footfalls swallowed by the hush of something deeper. At the end of the corridor, he opened a tall door and guided her into a back room that felt more like a study or a sanctuary.

Tall windows reached nearly to the ceiling, their panes streaked with rain and city light, but the velvet curtains had been drawn wide open to the night. Outside, the moon hung low and swollen, casting silver onto the wooden floors. A low fire crackled in the hearth, the scent of burning oak mingling with something faintly sweet, like tobacco and aged vanilla.

Books filled the built-in shelves from floor to ceiling, their spines worn, many of them leather-bound, some tagged with ribbons or crumbling slips of parchment. A few were stacked haphazardly on the floor and side tables, as if they’d been read recently and often. There was no overhead light, only antique lamps with amber bulbs and thick beeswax candles in mismatched holders. Their flickering glow danced across the room, turning gold against the stone mantle and deep burgundy rug. Everything shimmered in the firelight, as if the room itself was exhaling warmth. It was quiet in the way sacred places were quiet. Like the kind of silence that asked something of you.

He gestured to the armchair. She sat. He remained standing.

“I saw you,” he said after a moment. “Across the street. A few nights ago.”

Eden’s mouth went dry.

“I didn’t mean to—”

“You weren’t the first,” he said, gently. “To come back with questions. You won’t be the last.”

“But you texted me.”

“Yes.”

“Why now?”

His eyes caught the firelight. “Because you’re still here.”

The silence stretched between them, not cold but close. His voice was low when he spoke again.

“I don’t feed from many people, Eden. I never have. What you saw... it was just a rhythm I kept. Clean. Efficient. But you...”

He trailed off, looking down at his hands.

“You made something stir in me I thought was gone. Not just the blood. Not just the body. You brought something back.”

Eden didn’t move.

He stepped closer.

“Tell me what you feel when I’m near.”

She shook her head. “You don’t want that answer.”

“I do.”

She hesitated.

“I feel seen. Not the way people look at me on stage or when I post something pretty. But like... like you see the parts I didn’t mean to show. The ones I try to tuck away.”

Stack’s jaw flexed, almost imperceptibly.

“Do you feel safe?”

“Yes,” she said, before she could second-guess it. “But not in the way that makes me comfortable. In the way that makes me want to give more. More than I should.”

He knelt down in front of her. His eyes flicked up to hers, slow and deliberate.

“I want you to stop feeding with anyone else,” he said. “If you ever have.”

“I haven’t,” she said. “Only you. I didn’t even believe this was real initially. Sometimes it still feels too good to be true.”

He looked relieved. Or as close to it as a man like him could look.

“I want us to be exclusive,” he said. “You and me. No other donors. No other exchanges. This doesn’t have to be permanent. But I want to walk this further.”

“Why me?”

“Because your blood tastes like truth,” he said. “And I haven’t tasted that in a very long time.”

Eden’s breath caught.

No one moved.

She didn’t lean in.

Neither did he.

But something shifted between them anyway. A thread pulled tight and quiet. And for the first time in days, Eden didn’t feel like a woman unraveling. She felt like a flame being watched. Nursed. Fed.

Stack didn’t speak right away, and Eden didn’t fill the silence. The fire crackled behind him, casting long shadows against the floor. He was still kneeling, his body so still it almost startled her when he finally moved, sitting back on his heels, gaze steady and waiting.

But Eden wasn’t ready to say yes. Not just yet.

She tilted her head, voice quiet but unflinching. “What do you get out of this? Really?”

Stack’s lips curved slightly. “You.”

She didn’t flinch, but something fluttered behind her ribs. Still, she leaned forward.

“I want something too,” she said. “Something more than candles and soft chairs. More than whatever it is we do when I let you feed.”

Stack didn’t blink. “Say what you want.”

And just like that, the air between them shifted.

Eden exhaled through her nose, gathering the pieces. She hadn’t known until this moment how badly she needed to speak these things aloud.

“I want a guarantee,” she said. “That I make it. That all this work I’ve done, the nights I’ve spent singing songs into a busted mic, rehearsing with a sore throat and a busted engine... I want to know that it’s not for nothing. That I don’t have to keep begging DJs to play my music or chasing tips in half-empty lounges where people talk over my lyrics like they cost nothing.”

She stood up slowly, letting her words stretch out into the quiet room. Her feet padded across the rug as she walked toward the window, not facing him now, but her reflection hovered ghostlike in the glass.

“I want to live like my voice means something,” she said. “I want the kind of apartment where I can record properly. A bathtub I can actually fit in. A kitchen that doesn’t hum when I run the microwave and the lights at the same time.”

She turned then, arms folded.

“I want my father to stop looking at me like I’m a disappointment. Like I picked a hobby instead of a future. I want him to hear me on the radio one day and have to sit down.”

The words hit the floor between them, heavy as bone. Stack rose from his knees slowly. He moved with that same careful grace he always had, like every inch of him was aware of the space he occupied.

“You want power,” he said.

“I want my life to stop feeling like a question mark.”

He stepped closer. “Power has a price.”

“So does silence,” she replied.

He studied her for a long moment. The firelight threw gold across his skin, catching the line of his jaw, the gleam of his eyes. Something stirred there. Not desire. Not yet. But recognition. A flicker of ancient memory that lived in the marrow of people like him. People who had once been human. Who remembered the hunger of wanting.

“Come with me,” he said at last.

He led her down the hall, through a tall door she hadn’t noticed before. Inside was another room; darker, smaller, but warmer. A set of tall French doors opened to a back courtyard lit by string lights and the hush of wind in the trees. Eden followed him outside.

The garden beyond was wild and fragrant, lined with herbs and climbing roses, citrus trees heavy with fruit, and deep stone planters brimming with mint and marigold. A wrought iron table sat near the center, its surface dotted with candle stubs and something else. A long velvet pouch.

Stack pulled the pouch open and emptied it slowly. What spilled out didn’t glitter. It shimmered. A small collection of items, old and strange. A ring that pulsed faintly. A coin that made the air tighten when you looked at it. A spool of black thread that seemed to swallow the light around it. And a mirror, no larger than a pocket watch, but so polished it looked wet.

“Each of these belonged to someone who asked for more,” he said.

Eden leaned closer but didn’t touch. The ring was carved with a language she didn’t recognize. The coin looked ancient. The mirror... the mirror seemed to watch her.

“These are tokens,” Stack said, “tied to old favors. Old debts. None of them came cheap. But each one delivered exactly what was asked.”

Eden licked her lips. “Are you saying you’ll make it happen? Everything I want?”

“I can’t force the world to bend,” he said. “But I can show you the door. I can give you the key. The rest…”

“Depends on whether I walk through it.”

Stack nodded once.

“And the cost?”

He looked at her then. Full, quiet, unguarded.

“Your trust,” he said. “Your willingness to let this be more than a transaction.”

Eden swallowed hard. “You want me to belong to you.”

“Not as a possession. As a choice.”

She looked down at the items again. Her skin buzzed like it did right before she sang something new. Like a current lived under her bones and had just found a way out.

“And if I say yes?”

“Then I will show you what that life feels like,” Stack said. “Tonight.”

She lifted her eyes to his. “Just a taste?”

His smile was slow. “Enough to remember.”

She nodded.

He held out his hand.

Eden placed her palm in his, warm against his cool fingers.

They returned to the house, but the room had changed. Or maybe it hadn’t. Maybe it was only Eden who had.

She moved through it like it was already hers. Like the fire had been lit for her. Like the walls had heard her stories before. Stack handed her a glass of wine. Rich, dark, with a scent like fruit and something metallic. She drank, slow, the warmth blooming down her throat.

Music began to play from the record player. Vinyl, smooth and slow. Something older than jazz. A voice that knew longing intimately. Stack sat across from her. Not close. Just present.

“Close your eyes,” he said.

Eden obeyed. The air shifted. She smelled the roses again, but stronger. Felt the weight of silk brushing her arms. Heard the soft applause of a stage. A microphone buzzing to life. Her name whispered through a crowd.

She was singing.

No scratchy feedback. No static. Just her voice, clear and honey-deep, filling every corner of the room. The crowd leaned forward. Held their breath. Hung on her words.

She saw herself, bathed in light. Smiling. Steady. Not begging.

Owning.

A man in the front row pulled out his phone, and she heard a familiar voice on the radio. Her voice. A car zipped past a corner store with her face on the side in a local station ad. Her boots were new. Her apartment had tall windows and shelves full of vinyl. Her father’s voice cracked on the line. He told her he was proud.

She opened her eyes. And gasped.

The fire had dimmed, but the heat remained. Her hand still held the wineglass. Stack sat exactly where he had before.

“Was that real?” she whispered.

“It can be,” he said. “If you want it.”

She set the glass down. Her heart thundered.

And for the first time in years, it didn’t feel like she was chasing a dream.

It felt like it had finally turned to look back at her.

“Where do I sign?”

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