Chapter Two
Hunter's Maker
When Hunter came back, the office had settled into a different kind of silence, one that made it clear the room was occupied. Lily was seated in the chair across from his desk, her hands folded in her lap.
The jacket swallowed her whole. She had rolled the sleeves up twice and they were already threatening to slip back down.
Hunter set her folded clothes on the corner of the desk and was about to say something practical like "Here you go, all set," when light reflected on the wall briefly and he caught it.
It had come from a small blue stone on a thin chain, resting in the open lapel of his coat which Lily wore. The stone was deep and clear, the color of still water just before dark. It threw a brief glow across the wall.
"That's a beautiful necklace."
Lily touched the pendant and fiddled with it for a moment.
"It was my grandmother's. I wear it almost every day, actually." An embarrassed smile
crossed her face. "Nearly left the house without it this morning. I was halfway out the
door before I remembered."
"Well, I'm glad you remembered," he said.
"Me too." Her thumb moved over the stone, slowly. "I know it sounds a little silly, but I swear it brings me luck. Every time I've worn
it, things have had a way of turning out alright." She glanced up briefly.
"Today included, maybe."
Hunter looked at it a moment longer, the way it rested against her skin, the blue of the stone somehow richer for it, like the two were made to sit together. "It suits you," he said, and meant it. "It suits you perfectly.
"I would've liked to help you with your hair but I don't have a blow dryer for that," he smiled awkwardly, handing Lily his umbrella.
"Of course you would not have one here. It's your office." She laughed.
"Can I see you after your interview, Lily?" Hunter did not know when the words came out. He knew though, that he knew he needed to see those eyes again, and again.
"I'd love that. Thank you for everything." Her voice was like warm silk, soothing and almost enchanting to the ears.
As she made her way to the elevator just opposite of Hunter's Office across the hallway, he made a call to the HR Department of his Company.
"There's a Lily Sanders interviewing today for the Architectural Assistant position. You should see her right about now. Give her the job."
And just like that, the deal was sealed. With those few words.
Lily became the Executive Architectural Assistant to Hunter Blackwell, the
outwardly cold CEO of Blackwell Incorporated.
Now, Hunter pulled the sheets up around her shoulders and lay beside her in the dark, one arm tucked beneath his head.
Outside, the forty-two floors below the floor-to-ceiling windows, the city glittered. Chicago spread in every direction from up here, Lake Michigan, a huge black nothing to the east, the city lights running westward in a grid until they faded into the dark.
The wind pushed against the glass in long, slow waves. The city breathing, like it always did, sure of itself, cold, knowing exactly what
it was.
"You're doing it again," Lily said without opening her eyes.
"Doing what?
"Brooding."
"I don't brood."
She opened her eyes and looked at him flatly. He almost smiled.
"Fine. You win."
"A penny for your thoughts?"
Hunter was quiet for a moment. Outside, a plane crossed the sky in a slow diagonal, its lights blinking as it descended towards O'Hare Airport.
"I bit you tonight," he said at last.
"I know. I was there. I requested it, actually."
"I know you did." He turned to look at her. "That's what I'm thinking about."
She propped herself up on one elbow, her dark hair falling
across the white pillow. Even now, disheveled and half-asleep, she was still
the most beautiful thing he'd ever seen. It felt cosmically unfair to him— like
the universe reminding him precisely how much he stood to lose.
"Hunter." Her voice was patient but firm. "It was incredible. I enjoyed it. You were careful, and you stopped, and I'm fine."
"Your blood is extraordinary, in a very strange way," he said in a lower tone than he had intended to. "I've fed from humans for four centuries, Lily. I know what
blood tastes like." He paused. "I've never tasted anything quite like yours."
She blinked. "Is that… a problem?"
"It means," he said and paused, "that it will be considerably more difficult for me to stop next time."
The words next time hung between them like smoke.
"Then we set ground rules," she said in an off-handed way, as though they were negotiating something ordinary. Something uncomplicated.
This was another thing he loved about her, the way she approached the supernatural nature of their relationship with the same calm and practicality she applied to nearly everything else.
On the day Lily found out Hunter was a Vampire— caught him gulping
down bags of blood in his office— she had avoided the office for weeks.
But she returned with a list of questions, to Hunter's surprise. He had anticipated a resignation letter, but there stood Lily at the entrance to his office — a breathtaking figure and the very object of his devotion and his deepest desires— with
a list of seventeen questions, demanding detailed answers to each one.
Prior to that day, they had been having sex for months, and it had stopped feeling casual somewhere around the third or fourth time. However, neither of them had said anything about that.
Their affair began one evening when Lily was working late. She had walked into Hunter's office to let him know she was clocking out of work for the day. Hunter who was also working late, looked up from his desk and
looked at her for a moment too long. They both knew they had to have each other or be consumed with yearning.
After that, they did it everywhere. His office with the door locked and her dress pushed up around her waist. Ontop of the board room table once, after a long meeting and everyone was gone.
His hands in her hair in the elevator when it was just both of them inside.
Then one evening, Lily walked in on Hunter in his office, chugging blood from blood bags, so hungrily that it terrified her. Instantly she began to rethink everything she thought she knew about him.
That evening, she had gone home and sat with the bone chilling discovery for
exactly forty-eight hours. Then she went back to Hunter with a long list of
questions she had typed out on her phone.
He answered every one, after which
Lily disappeared again, but this time, for several weeks.
When she resumed at the office, she acted normal. Disturbingly normal.
Greeting him the same way, moving through the office as thought nothing had
changed.
It crept Hunter out more than any reaction would have. What he did not
know was that she had spent those weeks silently terrified of him, folding her
fear into composure or at least something that seemed like it.
It all came apart on a day she went to Hunter's office to drop off a few files.
She set them on the edge of his desk, wordlessly, and turned to leave.
"Wait," he said quickly, getting up from his chair.
Lily stopped but didn't turn around.
"You've been doing that for three weeks," he said. "Coming in,
doing what you need to do, leaving. Not looking at me."
"I look at you."
"You look near me."
She turned around then. "What do you want me to say, Mr. Blackwell?"
"Mr. Blackwell?" Hunter repeated, the horror and pain in his voice apparent. You've never me that, Lily."
"What do you want me to do, Hunter?"
"Anything. Something real." He took a step toward her. "I'd rather you scream at me than whatever this is."
"I was scared of you."
"Was," he said.
"Was," she confirmed. "I'm working on it."
"Then work out loud, Lily," he said. "Talk to me. This silence is killing me."
"Killing you? You're fucking immortal. Do you know how that changes everything? Everything was a lie, Hunter."
"I swear to you Lily, it wasn't. None of it was."
She walked gently towards him and touched his chest. Hunter held her hands.
"I've been mad with thoughts of whether you would ever touch me again."
"Me too."
They talked well into that night, Lily asking things that weren't on her original list. Hunter answered all her questions in great detail.
He told her about Selene. About being twenty-five years old, gutted with grief after losing his parents in a house fire, how Selene had found him in that open wound of a moment and turned him before he'd fully understood what was being offered.
"Did you want it?" Lily asked. "At the time."
He was quiet for a moment. "I wanted to stop hurting.
"How old are you," she asked. "Actually."
"A hundred and sixty five years old."
Lily almost gasped, her mind racing like a frantic lizard. She quickly did the math without meaning to, her eyes going somewhere distant for some seconds. He watched her work through it. She blinked, came back, looked at him directly.
"So Selene turned you in…"
"1886."
She swallowed hard.
"Okay," she said.
"Okay?"
"I'm still here, aren't I?"
He looked at her for a long moment and then he kissed her. The kiss was not hurried, it was slow and intentional as though he was giving her room to change her mind. She didn't.
She dropped the last of her composure
and kissed Hunter back, her fingers moving into his collar and pulling him
closer.
"Maya is definitely locking me outside tonight," she admitted against his mouth.
"Then I suppose it's time we got you your own apartment."
Lily's eyes flew wide open, but before she could respond,
Hunter smiled and kissed her, pulling her in by the waist.
"Shhhh. It wasn't a suggestion. Come here."
They knocked things off his desk without meaning to. Lily ended up on top of it, his hands sliding up her thighs and Hunter thrusting passionately as they moaned into each other's mouths.
She could feel terror which she had carried for weeks burning off into something else entirely.
They ended up on the floor at some point, breathlessly savoring each other deep into the night.
"Stay?" he said afterward, even though he didn't mean it as a question.
She was quiet for a moment, her head on his chest, and the files she had brought in, scattered across the floor.
"I'm not going anywhere," Lily said.
Hunter pressed his mouth to the top of her head.
"Be my lover, Lily."
Lily lifted her head and looked at him.
"What?"
The word fell flat as her forehead puckered, her features tightening as she tried to replay his words in her mind. She had barely began to piece it together when Hunter said it again.
"Be my lover, Lily Sanders. My partner, My girlfriend. Whatever it's called these days."
Lily smiled.
"I have not felt this way about a woman in over a hundred years. I swear it."
"Hunter?" Lily said softly as she sat up. Hunter followed suit.
"Please say yes."
"Yes. With my whole heart, Yes."
...
"Ground rules," Hunter repeated.
"You feed beforehand. From a bag, or — however you usually do
it when you're being responsible." She gave him a pointed look. He had a
supplier. She knew this and chose not to examine it too closely. "That way the
hunger is already half-managed before we —" She gestured vaguely at the general
situation.
"That's actually not an unreasonable approach," he admitted.
"I know." She settled back against the pillow, satisfied. "I'm very reasonable."
Hunter smiled and watched her for a long moment. Then he reached out and
tucked a few strands of hair behind her ear, letting his fingers linger at her temple.
"I'm definitely going to ruin your life, Lily" he said softly. His love for her was the closest thing to genuine fear he had experienced in over a century.
Lily looked up at him with those striking amber eyes.
"Hunter," she said. "You are my life. You have been since that lobby."
He didn't answer. But he pulled her closer, pressing his lips to the crown of her head, and for the first time in a very long time, he
allowed himself the dangerous luxury of wanting tomorrow to come.
At four in the morning, while Lily slept curled against his side, her breathing slow and even, Hunter carefully got off the bed.
He moved through his penthouse without turning on a single light — he
had no need for them — and poured himself two fingers of scotch whilst he stood at the window.
Chicago lay below him the way it always did. The wind pressed steadily against the
glass, forty-two floors of it, and the building held firm. Hunter had made sure of that. He had designed it to last centuries to come.
Hunter pressed one hand flat against the cold glass.
He had told Lily she deserved better than his darkness. That was true. What he hadn't said and was only beginning to understand was that over a hundred years of practised solitude had left him dangerously, terrifyingly unprepared for someone like her.
He was the apex predator in every room he entered. He had more money than most small nations. He had watched cities burn to nothing and rise again.
And one twenty-two year old woman with a voice like silk, and the most enchanting amber colored eyes had undone him completely in eight months.
Hunter heard Lily stir in bed.
"Hunter?" Her voice was soft but thick with sleep.
"I'm here," he called back. "Go back to sleep."
"Come back to bed."
Hunter set down his glass and went
back to her.
He pulled her close in the dark, listening to the steady rhythm of her heartbeat, that extraordinary blood flowing in her veins.
Hunter closed his eyes.
He was almost at peace.
Which was precisely why he heard it.
A sound that did not belong, barely perceptible, somewhere
below the frequency a human ear could register.
A heartbeat. Slow and deliberate and ancient, the way only one kind of creature's heartbeat could be. It was outside the building, but not far.
It was waiting, with the kind of patience one only has when they have found something they have been searching for for a long time.
Hunter's eyes opened.
Every muscle in his body went rigid.
In the one hundred and forty years, since he turned, he had encountered many vampires. Old ones, powerful ones, dangerous ones.
He had learned to identify them the way a
sailor learns to read weather — by texture and pressure and a feeling in the
chest that arrived before any conscious thought.
He knew this particular heartbeat.
He had not heard it in one hundred and forty years, and had spent a significant portion of that time believing, hoping that he never would again.
His jaw tightened. Slowly, mindfully, he looked down at Lily sleeping soundly against his chest, her dark hair fanned across his skin, the tiny marks on her neck still faintly visible.
He slipped out of bed, moving to the window in silence, scanning the street forty-two floors below. Chicago glittered back at him, vast and simply the same as always. For a long moment there was nothing.
Then, in the shadow of the building directly opposite,
something looked up.
Hunter couldn't see a face from this distance. He didn't need
to.
He already knew who it was.
After one hundred and forty years of silence, his maker had
come to Chicago.
Selene.
And from the way she was looking up at his window—perfectly
still— She had not come alone.