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Together.

Epilogue

Ophelia - Six months later

“So we meet again, sweet Ophelia.”

The lights in the bar are low, and music pounds through every inch of exposed brick and reclaimed hardwood floor, but I’d know the warm, soft voice at the back of my neck anywhere. Just like I’d know his hands where they rest at my waist and the scent of him washing over me as he leans in close.

“Casimir.”

It’s still not a great opening line, but that hardly matters as I turn on my barstool and once again come face to face with an incredibly handsome vampire.

Only this time, his crimson eyes sparkle with an entirely different kind of heat and affection and humor.

“I’d ask if someone stood you up,” he says, sending a shiver of pleasure down my spine with the deep rumble of his voice and the light touch he places on my thighs. “But you know I’d never dare.”

Cas skims his lips over my throat, pausing for a moment to pay special attention to his mark—worn bold and brazen for all the world to see—before he leans back and looks me up and down.

“Can I tempt you with a dance?”

“I might let myself be tempted.” I take one last swig of my drink—club soda, tonight, because I don’t want to be anything but stone cold sober for what’s coming later—and hold out my hand.

He takes it and leads me into the throng of people on the dance floor. Humans and paranormals both, bodies pressed close and moving in time with the music’s heavy beat.

For a moment, I let myself pretend.

Cas is some dangerously handsome acquaintance and I’m a woman letting him draw me away into temptation. Though it’s not entirely possible to see him as anything but the vampire I’ve fallen so very deeply in love with over these past six months, it’s fun to get lost in the fantasy of it for just a little while.

A new memory, to drive out the old.

I’d thought it was a little corny when Cas first suggested it, but now that we’re here together under the dim lights in the bar—a different bar this time, because we both agreed it would be a cold day in hell before we’d ever step foot back inside the Raven—it doesn’t feel corny at all.

It’s exhilarating as he holds me close and moves with me, as he takes his time mapping the curves of my body over the tight fabric of my dress, as he gets a little bolder and scrapes his fangs against my throat.

I turn in his arms and loop my own around his neck, dragging myself closer to him. “You think I’d let some stranger sink his fangs into me in the middle of a crowded dance floor?”

Cas chuckles. “That depends.”

“On what?”

He turns me around and holds me tight against the broad, muscled expanse of his chest. With one hand collared lightly at my throat, he murmurs into my ear.

“On if you’re feeling everything I am, sweet Ophelia.”

I don’t answer him. I just sink into all the sensation and let myself feel.

The strength of him, the familiarity. The beat of his heart in time with mine. The heat building in my core and the ache at my throat and the unshakable certainty that this is where I’m supposed to be.

“You know, don’t you? Ever since that night, ever since the first time we spoke, you’ve known how right this is, haven’t you?”

We’ve talked about it at length, what life might have been like if things had gone differently. If I hadn’t behaved so carelessly, or if Cas had taken the time to truly hear me out and believed me.

And while I don’t really enjoy living in the past or losing myself in what-ifs or could-have-beens, some part of me does still mourn those years we might have spent together.

At the same time…

Would twenty-three-year-old Ophelia have truly known herself well enough to handle Cas? And would Cas have been able to step beyond his past and accept a partner into his life?