"Are you alright?"

  Her voice was soft. Beneath the veil, her face carried something close to worry as her fingers closed gently around his wrist.

  His skin was cold.

  Raphael breathed through it — each exhale deliberate.

  "Evelyn." His voice came out rough. "Give me some distance. Or go to the medical bay and bring back a blood bag."

  She didn't move.

  "You're in pain, aren't you?"

  Instead, she reached up — fingertips catching a loose strand of silver hair, tucking it back behind her ear — and leaned slightly closer.

  Her skin was fine-grained and pale, her throat smooth and white in the corridor light. None of that was what his attention locked onto.

  The carotid. Even through skin, he could see it — not with his eyes exactly, more like a perception that had bypassed vision entirely.

  The pulse of it registering like something warm and sweet and unbearably close.

  The blood of a witch carried faint traces of arcane energy, and that distinction made it worse somehow, made the red in his eyes deepen and spread, made his expression do things he wasn't choosing.

  "...Evelyn. Do you know what you're doing?"

  He'd been on the receiving end of those fangs less than a day ago. He knew precisely how it felt.

  "It's fine."

  She interrupted him by taking his hand — gently, no force to it — and guiding it to rest against the side of her neck.

  "If it hurts that much, drink. I'm healthy. Clean blood, nothing transmissible."

  "...That's not the part I'm worried about—"

  "We're partners, aren't we?"

  She said it simply, like she was reminding him of something obvious.

  "We've slept crushed together on one carpet during a mission. Shared food from the same container."

  A slight tilt of her head. "So what exactly are you concerned about?"

  Before he could answer, she reached for the silver dagger at her hip.

  A single light drag across the side of her neck — barely any pressure — and the skin parted in a thin line, blood welling up and pooling into a small, gleaming bead.

  The smell hit the air.

  Warm. Sweet. Something underneath it that was specifically, uniquely her.

  The last thread of restraint snapped somewhere quiet.

  His hand moved to her face — palm resting against her cheek, tilting her head just slightly.

  He lowered himself toward her, hesitant. Extended his tongue and touched the blood.

  He pulled back and pressed his lips together.

  That was his first time drinking blood.

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  "Don't lick — that tickles—"

  Evelyn laughed softly, her head shifting sideways with the sensation, and the movement brought her cheek against his palm without either of them quite intending it.

  The breath she exhaled ghosted warm against his neck, feather-light and close.

  The last thread didn't snap so much as simply ceased to exist.

  "I'm sorry—"

  His fangs pressed in. Gentle, precise — finding the artery without searching, like the knowledge had always been in him and just needed an occasion to surface.

  "...Ah—!"

  She'd expected it not to be pleasant. The reality of it still drew her brows together, still pulled a soft sound out of her that she caught between pressed lips.

  The structure of vampire teeth worked like a siphon.

  Her blood came through steadily, and he swallowed it down with the singularity of someone who had been starving and had finally stopped pretending otherwise.

  Information surfaced suddenly in the back of his mind, quiet and unbidden.

  [Crossroads of Fate: Witch — Evelyn Vigo.]

  [Synchronization rate increasing: 13%]

  He didn't register it. His attention had narrowed to a single point, and it wasn't the system.

  Beneath his palm he could feel her trembling — small, involuntary, the particular tremble of someone holding themselves still against something that hurts.

  "...Is my blood..." Her voice came out unsteady. "...good?"

  He made a low sound in confirmation and kept drinking.

  His movements were slow. Careful.

  He was exercising more control than he'd expected to have in this state — small pulls, deliberate pacing, his free hand settling at the back of her head almost without decision.

  It was his first time, and the blood thirst had been severe, and he was losing track of the margin.

  "I think..." She said it quietly, like a footnote. "I'm getting a little dizzy."

  No complaint in it. She didn't push him away.

  He came back to himself in a rush.

  He pulled back.

  He looked at her face. The color had changed — the white of her complexion had moved from its usual clean pallor into something thin and drawn, the kind of pale that meant less rather than more.

  He'd nearly gone too far.

  "I'm sorry. Evelyn—" He exhaled. "Thank you."

  He meant it without ornamentation.

  The craving that had been threatening to hollow him out was gone.

  In its place was something like clarity and something like discomfort sitting next to each other.

  Evelyn smiled and waved it off with one hand.

  "It's nothing. We're Red Gloves, Raphael — not civilians who need protecting.

  The situations we walk into will be worse than this. This kind of contact isn't worth making a thing of."

  A beat, her eyes steady on his.

  "I'm glad you respect me the way you do. But I want you to know — if it's you, I don't mind."

  Raphael smiled, a small and almost unfamiliar shape on his face. He looked at her throat.

  Then leaned forward again.

  "No — if you do that again I will actually faint—"

  "Hold still."

  He brought his mouth back to the wound — not to drink, just close enough.

  His tongue traced lightly over the puncture marks, cleaning the beaded blood at the surface, and she shivered once, a barely-there tremor that ran through her shoulders.

  "Making sure it's sealed."

  He straightened. Took in the faint color that had risen in her cheeks and frowned at it with mild confusion, wiping the corner of his mouth.

  "What's wrong?"

  "You—"

  Evelyn laughed — a quiet, genuine thing — and shook her head.

  "Nothing."

  She got him upright properly and steered him toward the medical bay, her hand guiding without ceremony.

  Not that he'd have admitted needing the guidance out loud, but the medical bay was far, and what he'd been three minutes ago would not have made it there intact.

  She signed out a blood bag at the desk without asking him what he wanted.

  He took it without ceremony and drank the whole thing in one long tilt, like he'd simply decided this was a water bottle.

  "There we go."

  He exhaled. Stretched his back. Looked at his own hands with faint surprise. "

  This is what it means to be a vampire. Five minutes ago I was barely standing. Now I'm..."

  He trailed off.

  The surprise faded into something quieter. A complicated breath out.

  He'd drunk blood. Human blood.

  That was precisely the kind of thing he would have put in a report under concerning behavior six months ago —

  No different, functionally, from what the creature in Henry's office had been trying to do to him.

  But there had been no other option.

  This was what transcendence cost.

  This was what you paid in exchange for a Demon's power — not once, but continually, every time you needed to use it.

  He looked at Evelyn. Thanked her again.

  She laughed again and waved it away again.

  "Ace partners, remember? Now come on—"

  She caught his wrist without ceremony and turned, pulling him into motion.

  "Time to meet the other member of the team. My current partner. Eva."

  She walked ahead of him, her grip easy and matter-of-fact, leading the way through the corridor.

  He went slightly stiff.

  She glanced back. Eyes warm and unhurried and clear all the way through, the smile at the corner of her mouth carrying nothing complicated.

  Raphael's eyes opened a fraction wider than usual.

  [Crossroads of Fate: Witch — Evelyn Vigo.]

  [Synchronization rate: 15%.]

  [Fate Bond established.]

  [Skill synchronized: Profiler.]