CHAPTER 67: CHAPTER 67: THE PLAN

"IF THE FEEDING failed tomorrow... and you had to choose between saving me or saving yourself... who would you choose?"

Her words hovered in the silence, fragile as glass yet deadly as steel, threatening to shatter at any breath.

Mailah watched Grayson’s face, searching for any flicker of hesitation, any moment where he might weigh his options.

There was none.

"You," he said without missing a beat, his voice carrying the absolute certainty of gravity itself. "I would save you. No questions asked. No discussion needed."

The immediate, unwavering response should have brought her comfort, but instead it sent a chill racing down her spine.

There had been no pause, no consideration of alternatives, no hint of self-preservation in his tone. It was the voice of a man who had already made his choice long before she’d asked the question.

"How?" she whispered, her throat suddenly tight. "If you were in a feeding frenzy, lost to instinct and hunger, how could you possibly maintain enough control to save me?"

Something dark flickered across Grayson’s features—a shadow that made her remember, with startling clarity, that for all his gentleness with her, he was still a creature capable of destruction on an unimaginable scale.

"I have a backup plan," he said quietly, his fingers stilling on her skin. "Something I’ve prepared in case the feeding goes... south."

The careful way he chose his words made her stomach clench with unease. "What kind of backup plan?"

For a moment, she thought he might actually tell her.

His mouth opened slightly, as if the words were balanced on his tongue, ready to spill out. Then his jaw tightened, and she watched him swallow whatever confession had been building.

"The kind you don’t need to worry about," he said instead, but his voice carried undertones that suggested she should worry very much indeed.

Mailah studied his face in the dancing firelight, noting the way his eyes had gone carefully blank, the sudden tension in his shoulders.

Whatever he had planned, it was something he believed she couldn’t handle knowing. Something that would horrify her, perhaps. Or something that would make her run.

What could be so terrible that even after his confessions about genocide and centuries of manipulation, this was the line he wouldn’t cross? What backup plan could a starving incubus have that would guarantee her safety at the cost of his own?

A terrible thought occurred to her, one that made her blood run cold.

"Is it something that would hurt other people?" she asked, unable to keep the question locked behind her teeth.

Grayson’s smile was sharp-edged and utterly without warmth. "You’re assuming there will be other people present."

The implication sent ice through her veins.

If his plan involved isolating them completely, cutting them off from any possible help or intervention, then what happened in that feeding session would be entirely dependent on his control. And if that control failed...

"I don’t like this," she said, sitting up despite the way the movement made her head spin with lingering arousal. "I don’t like the way you’re talking about tomorrow night like it’s a foregone conclusion that everything will go wrong."

"Because it might," Grayson said with brutal honesty. "Deep feeding is dangerous under the best of circumstances. Doing it with someone I..." He stopped, seeming to struggle with the words. "Someone who matters to me makes it exponentially more risky."

The weight of his words pressed into her chest, leaving her breathless and her heart stumbling in its rhythm.

The weight of emotion behind those words, the vulnerability he was showing her, should have been romantic. Instead, it felt ominous—like a final confession before an execution.

"Then don’t do it," she said urgently, reaching for his hands. "Call it off. Tell Kieran we’ve changed our minds."

Grayson’s laugh was bitter. "And then what? Mason will come for you himself." His jaw clenched with barely controlled fury. "If I call off the feeding, he won’t hesitate to feed on you. And unlike me, he won’t care about your survival."

"There has to be another way," she insisted. "Some other solution we haven’t considered."

"If there is, I haven’t found it in three centuries of looking," Grayson said, his thumb tracing gentle circles on the back of her hand. "Trust me, Mailah. This is our best option."

Trust him. How much trust was she willing to place in a being who admitted to causing genocide? Who spoke casually of backup plans too terrible to share? Who looked at tomorrow night with the resigned acceptance of a man preparing for his own execution?

And yet, when she looked into his eyes, she saw no deception there. Only a bone-deep weariness and something that looked suspiciously like affection.

"We should sleep," Grayson said suddenly, as if sensing the direction of her thoughts. "Tomorrow will be... demanding. Kieran will want to push your limits, explore every fantasy and desire until he’s mapped the deepest recesses of your subconscious. You’ll need your strength."

The thought of another session like tonight’s, of having her most private thoughts dissected and analyzed while Kieran watched with that predatory interest, made her stomach churn.

"What about you?" she asked, noting the tension still coiled in his frame, the careful way he held himself as if afraid to move too suddenly.

"I’ll manage," he said again, though his voice was rougher now, strained with the effort of maintaining control. "It’s nothing I haven’t dealt with before."

But it was something new, wasn’t it? The way his body responded to her, the hunger that seemed to build rather than diminish with each touch. She could see it in the rigid line of his shoulders, hear it in the careful modulation of his breathing.

"Will you..." She hesitated, suddenly shy despite everything they’d shared. "Will you visit my dreams tonight?"

Something like pain flickered across his features. "I’ll be resisting that particular temptation," he said carefully. "Given the state we’re both in, dream contact would be... inadvisable."

"I’ll guard your dreams," he added, his voice carrying an undertone of steel. "You’ll be safe, I promise you that."

The idea of him standing sentinel over her subconscious while she slept was both comforting and deeply unsettling.

It spoke to a level of intimacy that went far beyond the physical, a connection that transcended the boundaries between waking and sleeping consciousness.

"Nothing will go wrong," Grayson said with absolute certainty. "Not tonight. Tomorrow..." He trailed off, leaving the sentence unfinished and all the more ominous for its incompleteness.

They settled together on the thick rug before the fireplace, Grayson’s arm a warm, solid presence around her waist.

Despite everything—the looming danger of tomorrow’s feeding, the mysterious backup plan, the weight of secrets still unspoken between them—Mailah felt herself relaxing into his embrace.

"Sleep," he murmured against her hair, his voice a low rumble that seemed to resonate in her bones. "Let me watch over you."

As she drifted toward unconsciousness, Mailah was dimly aware of a subtle shift in the air around them.

Her last conscious thought was how strange it felt to trust so completely in something she didn’t fully understand.

Consciousness returned to Mailah like rising through deep water.

The first thing she registered was silence—not the comfortable quiet of early morning, but an absolute absence of sound that felt wrong somehow.

The second thing she noticed was that she was alone.

Her eyes snapped open completely, immediately scanning the space where Grayson should have been. The rug beside her still held the impression of his body, and when she pressed her palm to the fabric, she could feel the faintest trace of residual warmth. But he was gone.

The fire had burned down to barely glowing embers. Dawn light filtered through the heavy curtains, pale and watery, suggesting she’d slept far longer than intended.

But it was the quality of her sleep that disturbed her most.

Despite the emotional turmoil of the previous evening, despite her fears about the feeding session and Grayson’s ominous backup plan, she’d slept deeply and dreamlessly.

Peacefully, in fact—more peacefully than she could remember sleeping since arriving at the estate.

That peace felt wrong. Unnatural.

A distant sound broke through her growing unease—voices raised in what sounded like argument, coming from somewhere deeper in the house. She couldn’t make out words, but the tone was urgent, almost frantic.

Mailah sat up quickly, ignoring the way the sudden movement made her head spin.

Something was wrong.

Every instinct she possessed was screaming warnings, and the absolute silence that had greeted her awakening suddenly felt less like peace and more like the calm before a storm.

She reached for her discarded dress, fingers fumbling with the zipper as more sounds drifted through the walls—a door slamming, footsteps running, what might have been shouting.

The noises were muffled by distance and the estate’s thick walls, but their urgency was unmistakable.

As she struggled to her feet, still disoriented, one thought echoed in her mind with crystal clarity:

Where was Grayson, and what had happened while she slept?