Chapter 25: My human boyfriend
Alaric’s POV
The iron-bound doors groaned open at my touch, spilling torch-light across the marble like liquid gold. The audience hall my hall l was already packed, a living tide of vampires bound to my name. They stood in serried ranks beneath the rib-vaulted ceiling, eyes catching firelight like a thousand amber blades. Curiosity glittered on a few faces, boredom on others; here and there, a wiser pair of pupils gleamed with unease. Good. Let the caution bloom. Tonight, fear was the only language I intended to speak.
I refused the carved obsidian throne rising at the far end of the dais. Too distant, too ceremonial. Instead I stopped at the foot of the steps, folding my arms, letting the hush thicken until even the torches seemed to crackle more quietly. I held every gaze I could catch, peeling away composure the way one strips bark from a branch slow, relentless, inevitable.
"I’ll keep this simple," I said, voice carrying in the cavernous space like a drawn blade. "Someone hurt my human."
The reaction rippled outward: startled brows, the sharp breath of gossip suppressed, soft murmurs flaring and dying like sparks in bone-dry tinder. I let it wash over me. Let them know. I would never hide Enzo as though loving him were a weakness.
"His name is Enzo," I went on, pacing a few measured steps that made boot-heels echo off stone. "Call me sentimental, call me soft call me what you like. I care only that one of you crossed a line."
Silence greeted me. No movement, no voice, only the scent of old brick, candle wax, and faint apprehension. Pathetic. If they thought my mercy with Enzo would stretch to them, they had mistaken tenderness for impotence.
"He can scarcely stand," I said, softer now, the words heavy with memory. "Bruises blooming across his ribs, a fractured wrist, nights so knotted with terror he begs me not to let the dark in. I carried him to the bath with his heart pounding like a trapped bird, and every tremor of it pounded through me in return."
Nothing. A frozen forest of statues in fine coats and ancient velvet. They all stood like the nonliving things that they were.