2. Chapter 2 (1/1)

i'm sorry. i am so, so sorry. dark angsty things. try to enjoy.

disclaimer: not mine, fortunately for the poor characters.

afterwards, they lay side by side, staring up at the darkness. it was a few moments – moments that felt like hours – before ingrid spoke."i prefer to sleep alone." she didn't say please; she didn't have to. bertrand gathered his clothes, slipped them on and made his way to the door without a word."goodnight, ingrid," he muttered as he pulled it shut behind him, knowing she would hear.

vlad raised an eye

ow, emerging from his room at precisely the worst possible moment just as bertrand closed ingrid's door. the chosen one looked as if he was contemplating something distasteful, but then he smiled tightly."well, you two don't waste any time." bertrand frowned; on the contrary, it had been almost a week since vlad had ordered this… arrangement into being and until today they'd barely done anything about it. they'd both been busy; bertrand had been making sure that vlad's training took up as much time as it could and ingrid seemed to have acquired piles of paperwork from nowhere, no doubt to cement her position as vlad's number two.

tonight, though, vlad had demanded a night to watch

eather films with his girlfriend, and ingrid hadn't heard back from the clans she'd contacted, and they had run out of excuses. bertrand had been swept up in the vampiress' boredom, and it was hard to imagine any situation in which he could be more powerless to resist.

ingrid hadn't been opposed to the idea of sleeping with bertrand. on the contrary; the man was attractive, intelligent, devious and ruthless. he wasn't will – her cold, dead heart clenched at the thought of his name – but he would do as a half-fang toy until a better prospect came along. she had rather thought vlad might call dibs on him, but then he'd made that ludicrous comment about loosening his tutor up and she'd had permission to get her claws in.

she'd buried herself in paperwork for a week, something at the back of her mind pulling her away from bertrand, as far as she could get, and for his part the tutor hadn't seemed exactly thrilled by the thought of her. then they'd both run out of other diversions, and she'd let him know, through a variety of less-than-subtle means, that a little coffin gymnastics would not go unappreciated. it wasn't until they both lay, staring at the ceiling in the dark, that she realised what a tiny, dark corner of her heart had been trying to warn her all along. she had been sold again, auctioned off to the most convenient suitor for her male relatives."i prefer to sleep alone." at least he had left without a fuss.