To break such a bond, p.1
To Break Such a Bond, page 1
This is a work of fiction. Similarities to real people, places, or events are entirely coincidental.
TO BREAK SUCH A BOND
First edition. December 21, 2025.
Copyright © 2025 Mallory Wilde.
ISBN: 979-8218890438
Written by Mallory Wilde.
Table of Contents
Copyright Page
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Sneak Preview
About the Author
Cover Design | Acknowledgements
Chapter 1
London, 1987
Val slammed his bloody knuckles into the punching bag and wished he could feel the pain of it the way a human would. Wished he could tire like them, his muscles aching and his lungs gasping. If only he could sink down to the floor, exhausted and brutally self-battered, too hurting and tired to think, maybe he’d forget earlier that night, when he’d done the worst thing he could possibly have done, for no good reason at all.
He hadn’t meant to ever talk to her. It was something of a hobby for him, not talking to humans. There was one every few decades or so, someone he couldn’t shake. He supposed they were people who he might have loved, before. It was always the same cycle. He’d see them once and be unable to stop himself. He’d have to return to them, to follow them, to know them.
Never to talk to them, though. Talking was too dangerous. He had learned that the hard way. If he let himself get close enough to talk, if he let their voices swim into his mind, it was almost impossible to stop things from going sideways.
It was bad enough that he could smell them.
He’d tried avoiding humans altogether, once. He’d run away to where there was no one. He’d already been living off of animal blood. He thought surely he could survive alone, somewhere peaceful in the mountains.
He’d been so very wrong.
It turned out the most dangerous, uncontrollable version of himself was the version that was starved for human contact.
So he struck a bargain with himself, a compromise. He would let the obsession play out, but only from afar. When he couldn’t let someone go, he simply followed them over the years. He watched them grow and change, learned their lives intimately without them ever knowing he existed, and finally, watched them die of old age.
They always died of old age. He’d permit nothing to harm them. Benedict, when he swept into town for one of his infrequent bouts of fraternity, called them his “pets”.
It was excruciating, of course – knowing and not being known. And yet, it was what he could do. He couldn’t let himself get close to them, and he couldn’t forget them. So he just watched.
Until her.
The mistake, he realized afterward, was that he hadn’t anticipated how observant she would be. Most humans weren’t observant at all. They had a hard time noticing one another, let alone something like him. So it was a shock when, only the third time he’d frequented the bar where she worked, she looked up and met his eyes.
Nothing had shocked him for decades; that should have been his first clue. He should have turned around and run, vanishing into the night like all the stereotypes.
He really should have run, though, when she leaned over and spoke to him.
“You want to order a drink, or...?”
He froze, staring at her. She stared back, eyes big and dark and slightly amused. She tilted her head, ends of her hair brushing her right shoulder, and waited.
After a long moment, he managed to speak. Unfortunately, what came out was, “I wouldn’t want to bother you.” Like her serving him a drink would be a personal favor, and not the reason she was there.
“I appreciate that,” she said, smiling at him. He was alarmed to discover she had dimples and they were adorable. “It is sort of my job to serve drinks, though.”
“Right,” he agreed, and could find nothing else to say. He was stuck thinking about how he’d probably never get to look into her eyes like this again. He should just keep doing that.
She leaned deeper into the bar, the edge of it denting the roundness of her hips in a way that gave him some wonderful, terrible ideas.
“I’m Margot,” she said. “An ex-pat, like you.”
He’d actually been in London for the better part of a century but obviously he wasn’t going to explain that to her.
“Val,” he replied, because apparently they were having a conversation and he wasn’t going to do anything to stop it, even though it was a terrible, terrible idea.
“Val? Like Val Kilmer?”
Val Kilmer, he was dimly aware, was a film actor.
“Yeah. Kind of.”
She raised an eyebrow.
“Kind of?”
“It’s um, actually short for Perceval. My mother had an obsession with Arthurian legends.”
He couldn’t remember the last time he’d told someone that.
“Cool,” she said, even though he was pretty sure it wasn’t. “Like in Excalibur.”
Excalibur was the name of Arthur’s enchanted sword in the legends, but that obviously wasn’t what she meant, so he just nodded.
“So I’m guessing it’s a no on the drink, but how about some company?” she asked.
Yes, yes please.
No, absolutely not.
“Or are you just looking for a quiet place to sit?” she continued, perhaps misinterpreting the silence of his fierce inner battle as introversion. “If so, I’ll leave you alone, I promise.”
And then she winked at him.
If he’d had a heartbeat, it would have skittered to a stop at that wink.
He suddenly lost control of his senses in a way he hadn’t in decades. The dim lights flared hot and bright to his eyes, and the smell of the other patron’s drinks wafted around him. He could hear mice in the walls and the thrum of electricity in the lamps and above it all, clear and strong, her heartbeat.
He practically jumped to his feet, finally heeding the warning voice in his head.
“Your company would be lovely, I’m sure. But I’m afraid I actually have to go.”
“Shame.” She frowned in a way that was not quite a pout and tilted her head again.
Cute, he thought with a warm spark of affection, followed by a cold shock of fear. Dangerous.
He looked away from her pretty eyes and her head tilt and her pout, quickly gathering his coat. He was already moving towards the door as he tossed a few bills on the bar.
“You didn’t get anything, there’s no bill,” she protested sweetly, and her voice grabbed him, begging him to stay. He couldn’t, he wouldn’t, but he had to turn back to her. Their eyes met and the speed of her heartbeat ticked up just slightly.
“It’s just a tip,” he managed to whisper. “For being so kind.”
He made himself turn away instead of savoring the smile she gave him. He pushed out the door and into the chilly pre-dawn hour. It was barely fall but the season was turning cold quickly this year, and he was grateful for it. The cold muted the city, made it quieter.
As he walked away from the bar and the feeling of her presence faded, he promised himself that he would never see her again.
He made it a whole week before he broke that promise.
There was nothing in particularly that caused him to stumble. Just a night like every other night, stretching before him like eternity, and an ache so deep it felt like it gnawed at his bones.
He went back to the bar, but told himself was okay. He had a plan. He didn’t need to interact with her. He only needed to see her, to claim her from afar like all the others. He would be better at lurking, at holding himself apart from the room, so that she did not notice him.
It worked for approximately forty minutes, and then she looked around, made direct eye contact with him where he sat tucked into a corner, and beckoned him over.
He stood and went to her. He could hear his mother, bless her long departed soul, saying cheerfully in his head, In for a penny, in for a pound.
And that was how it went, for nearly two months. He stayed away as long as he could and then returned. She drew him into conversation in which he mostly listened; he avoided talking about himself when he could, and lied when he couldn’t. He learned about her aunt back in the states, her only remaining family, who had encouraged her to finish her long-abandoned degree; about how she’d managed to find friends in her graduate program, a couple women her age, despite most of her classmates being men and younger than her; about how she spent most of her almost non-existent free time reading or seeing movies, and consequently where their tastes in books overlapped. (She tried in vain to discover the same for their taste in movies, but ended up scandalized by his lack of awareness of contemporary films.)
She was open and giving, as if these bits of her life were more precious when they were shared. He greedily took everything she gave him, desperate for the thrum of connection with every new revelation. It started to feel like he had been overreacting, all these years of careful abstinence from human contact.
It started to feel like maybe he could have this.
So of course, he ruined everything.
<
“What are you doing?” he asked, settling onto the stool across from her. She was spooling out a shimmering ribbon as if measuring it, several lengths of ribbon already cut by her elbow.
“Making Christmas decorations. Look,” and she reached under the bar and brought out a star shaped out of interwoven ribbons, dangling from a looped thread. “My grandmother taught me when I was a kid. I make them every year to hang around my place. I thought I’d hang a couple around the bar, too – make it a bit more festive.”
She glanced up at him from under her eyelashes.
“If you help, you can have one, too.”
It had been decades since Val had given Christmas a spare thought beyond avoiding nighttime holiday shoppers. The idea of a tiny woven star hanging somewhere in his otherwise sparsely decorated house was laughable.
He wanted it badly.
“What should I do?” he asked.
“You can cut the ribbons. Just measure them out like this.” She gestured towards the set she had already cut, and the several spools of ribbon of different colors.
“Which colors?” he asked.
“You pick,” she said, already focused on starting to fold the next star.
“I wouldn’t know which–" he began.
“You pick,” she cut in firmly. “We’re making them together.”
He obediently looked over the ribbons, chose two colors he liked together, and started to measure and cut the pieces like she had. She went back to crafting the next star, chatting away as she usually did. He felt content, and let himself slip into the rhythm of the task and the cadence of her voice.
In what seemed like no time she had finished the second star and then the third, and he’d cut four more sets of ribbon.
“That’s probably enough,” she said, scrunching her face into an expression he had learned meant that she was calculating something in her head. She turned to survey the bar, contemplating where she would hang the decorations. He absent-mindedly pulled a longer length of white ribbon with silver threads running through it and snipped it off.
“I think we should put one on the door and three along the shelves back here,” she said, gesturing towards the old wooden shelves that sagged with age and the weight of the bottled spirits they held. “What do you think?”
“Whatever you want will be good, I’m sure,” he said, reaching to gently tug her hand towards him. He took the ribbon he had cut and looped it around her wrist, appreciating the contrast against her skin. Some dim thought in the back of his mind suggested this was not a good idea; it was a very important thought, but he refused to look at it to know why. Instead, he gently tied the ribbon into a bow, and then let go.
Her hand hung there for a moment before she withdrew it. She examined the ribbon with a small smile on her face – the thought in the back of his head grew louder, more insistent, he should listen – and looked up at him.
“Why’d you do that?” she asked, the smile in her voice as well.
“It means you’re mine,” he said, his tone light and the thought in the back of his mind absolutely screaming.
She blinked, and looked down at the ribbon, then looked up at him, and nodded.
“Okay,” she said, and the buzz of magic caught them both off guard.
It was strong, and knowing nothing of what had just taken place, she probably thought it was a very strange and sudden head rush. She had looked a little dazed, afterward. He’d asked if she was all right and she’d frowned, as if she didn’t like that she wasn’t sure of the answer.
He’d suggested she have some water, and was relieved when she nodded and fetched herself a glass. Later, he realized with a twist in his stomach that her compliance might have been the first effects of the new bond between them.
He’d left shortly after that, the star ornament she’d pushed at him as he went clasped in his hand like a compass, pointing him away before he could do any more damage. He’d barely noticed how he’d gotten home, heading for his punching bag on instinct, hoping his last truly human habit might help to ground him. He hadn’t even bothered to tape his hands, and at some point the skin over his knuckles had cracked. He’d just kept going, heedlessly chasing an escape that never came.
I never expected she’d just... agree.
That was his one small shred of justification, the one tiny sliver of unaccountability. In no world would he ever have predicted that.
He’d known the rules, though. Everyone knew them, because they were simple. Step one, tie a string around the human’s wrist. Step two, claim them. Step three, they accept your claim.
Stupid vampires with your stupid vampire traditions. Who makes a binding pact so simple? Shouldn’t there be complicated incantations and bloodletting for one or both parties, at the very least? How can binding your soul to someone be so ridiculously easy to fall into?
Chapter 2
He gave up on the punching bag, throwing himself onto his bed and letting himself sink into his morose mood. Tomorrow he would figure this out; tonight, he wasn’t prepared to do more than regret his entire existence.
Somewhere not far away, thunder clapped. The sky had been threatening a storm on his way home earlier, and now in the witching hours it made good on the threat. Rain followed soon after the thunder, sheets of it breaking against the house, pummeling the window in waves. The force of it felt like relief, like his life and all his stupid choices and their consequences could be swallowed up by the storm.
He pushed himself up and went to the window, watching for a long time as the sky repeatedly cracked open and the rain threatened to flood the garden. The storm finally began to abate, and he felt a spike of hunger. He wasn’t in the mood to eat, but he would anyway. That was part of how he kept things under control – careful, measured routines. No chance for anything inside him to get desperate. He tidied up and shuffled to the kitchen, heating himself some blood. He sat by the large kitchen window to drink it, appreciating the moonlight coming through it. He glanced at the clock – still a little time before he’d need to close the curtains.
Unlike electric light, which was fine so long as it was not too bright, sunlight hurt his eyes no matter how dim. And the brighter it was, the more it flooded his sight, everything blown out like the whole world was overexposed. It wasn’t like in the movies – no fear of bursting into flames at the touch of a ray of sunlight. It was so much worse.
The first time he’d felt the sun after he’d turned, he’d cried. Of all the things he’d imagined, he never expected the sun to feel cold.
Val had asked Benedict about it once, and he’d replied in typical Benedict fashion, shrugging his shoulders and offering only “Everyone knows sunlight is bad for us. Stay in it long enough, and you start to shrivel up. That’s where all those rumors about dust came from, I bet.” As to the why, Benedict neither knew nor cared.
Val cared, but there was no one else he could ask.
As he finished the blood, something caught his attention, a tiny pinprick on the edge of his awareness. He realized the vampiric part of him had been paying attention to it for a while. It grew bigger and bigger in his mind, started to pulse, became a heartbeat. And then he knew what it was. She was nearby. Nearby, and coming nearer.
And he knew, instinctively, that it was more than that. She was coming to him.
Where she belongs. Mine.
The words felt so good, so right in his mind, and he shoved them away, panicked. He hadn’t summoned her, he was sure. He had wanted nothing more than for her to stay away from him until he could figure out how to undo this disaster he’d brought upon both of them.
He looked out the window as if he expected to see her there, walking towards him, but all he saw was the moon, now so bright it sparkled in the raindrops that lingered on the window. He suddenly worried, thinking of how long it had been raining. Had she come by car or taken the tube? Had she been caught in the storm?
