Page 4 of Heal Me (Immortal Vices and Virtues: All Hallows’ Eve #5)

Gideon

“ D idn’t your mother ever tell you it was rude to stare?”

The words cut clean as a blade—no tremor, no false sweetness to soften them.

She stood less than a stride away, all deliberate stillness and watchful blue eyes.

Blonde hair spilled over her shoulders in loose waves, catching stray threads of light from the sconces.

Scarlet silk poured over a body built for trouble, the faint press of a blade strapped high on her thigh.

Every inch of her said she knew exactly how to use it.

“She did,” I said, keeping my tone low, matching the rhythm of hers. “But she also told me I’d know when I was looking at something I shouldn’t walk away from.”

Her gaze didn’t waver, and I liked that more than I should have. Most people flinched from the weight of a vampire’s attention. She anchored herself in it.

I felt rooms before I read them—the subtle pressure drop of magic, the way heat gathered in corners, the hush that fell when Fae smiled with too many teeth.

This house was all of that and more: glassy polish over old rules, music engineered to sand down good judgment, laughter pitched a shade too bright.

It wanted you pliant. I preferred my edges sharp.

And then she crossed the threshold, and the careful glamour peeled away like steam. The same flash as weeks ago—one glance across an apothecary, a breath that hit like a punch to the gut, and she was gone. Sensible. Maddening.

I’d thought about her every damn day since.

Now she was close enough for me to count the breaths she measured on purpose.

Under the clean bite of wolf and steel was a cooler note I couldn’t name—cold smoke threaded with wildflowers, wild and tidy at once.

My instincts reached for it like a hand to flame.

Want wasn’t the right word for the thing pacing inside my ribs; hunger wasn’t either. It was recognition with teeth.

“You left in a hurry last time,” I murmured. “Didn’t even tell me your name.”

Her eyebrow cocked like a gun. “I didn’t realize I was meant to exchange pleasantries with a complete fucking stranger just because I caught his eye. My apologies.”

The words should’ve drawn blood. Her delivery was cool, deliberate—no apology, no explanation.

I almost smiled. Almost. “I’ll survive the slight.”

Her head tilted, studying me for a tell I wasn’t going to give. I was mocking her—just not in the way she thought.

“Still,” I said, “I think you knew I wasn’t just looking at you.”

“Oh?” She stood straighter, her single word pure challenge.

I stepped half a pace closer. Not enough to crowd, but enough that the faint hum of her magic brushed mine. Her wolf pressed back—alert, measuring. Not hostile, not yet. I marked the tells, the distance it would take her to reach steel, and the time I’d need to stop her without spilling blood.

“I was wondering,” I murmured, “what you were doing in Crossroads. Why you don’t keep to a House. Why a wolf like you would be in an apothecary at all.”

Her eyes narrowed a fraction. “I didn’t realize I needed clearance to walk through a door.”

“You don’t,” I said easily. “But I work out of my House’s embassy. I make it my business to notice when someone interesting shows up and disappears again without a word.”

There—the tiniest twitch at the corner of her mouth, a blade testing a sheath. She gave me a once-over that felt like a scalpel and a dare. “Maybe you weren’t looking hard enough. Because I’ve been in Crossroads for a long time. I haven’t been hiding. You’ve seen me before.”

That earned my smile. “I’d remember if I had.”

I didn’t say I had seen her—once—and it lodged under my skin like a splinter I couldn’t dig out: a doorway, her blue eyes catching on mine, that frost-edged scent cutting through yarrow and wardsilver before she turned and walked away. Sensible. Maddening.

Now, up close, the changes in her were a study in restraint.

The controlled cadence of her breath. The smallest dilation of her pupils when I stepped into the edge of her space.

The way her scent shifted—wolf musk sharpening with something warm and electric, recognition sparking it brighter.

Her wolf knew what I was to her, even if she refused the word.

My fangs pressed against my lips; I tasted copper and patience.

“You still haven’t told me your name,” I pressed, dying to hear it from her lips just once.

She tilted her head to the side, her gaze assessing in a way I craved. “You haven’t told me yours.”

“Gideon Ortega.”

Something flickered in her eyes—recognition or dismissal, impossible to tell—but her expression stayed unreadable.

“And you are?”

“Someone who doesn’t make a habit of giving her name to strangers,” she said, already angling away, her gaze shifting. She hadn’t even left yet and already I felt the loss like a blow.

“The apothecary,” I said. “You saw me. Then you decided the door was a better friend than I was.”

She stilled. Her attention snapped back, sharp as a knifepoint. “And I walked out.”

“Yes,” I said, holding her stare. “Without buying a thing.”

Her brow arched. “You make a habit of memorizing the shopping habits of random strangers?”

“No,” I admitted. “Just the ones I haven’t been able to stop thinking about since.”

I could feel the insignia ring against my glove—the signet I wore when the job wanted a polite face.

Not a crown; embassies didn’t grant those.

But the ring opened doors, and I’d learned how to step through without pretending the room belonged to me.

Crossroads didn’t belong to anyone. It tolerated you.

It tolerated me because I did my work clean.

She stayed where she was, red silk catching the light like a warning flag. She didn’t fidget. Didn’t preen. She simply existed with that unnerving economy that made other people overexplain themselves. The wolf in her watched me through steady blue eyes. I watched right back.

I didn’t tell her I’d known exactly who she was before she opened her mouth tonight.

Penny Blackwell. Wolf shifter. Blackwell Pack. Lived in that stone-and-glass fortress on the edge of Crossroads, where the wards tasted of kelpie magic and something older. Not a woman who announced herself unless she wanted to be noticed—and even then, only on her terms.

Up close, it wasn’t the red silk or the hidden blade that held me.

It was the way she stood—weight balanced, right foot angled for a pivot instead of retreat.

The way her eyes tracked not just me but the shifting shadows in the hall, cataloging exits the way I did.

Even her breathing was trained to keep her heartbeat from giving anything away.

Beneath her scent was a whisper of something older that made my fangs ache in a way that wasn’t about hunger. I’d caught it in the apothecary; it had been under my skin ever since.

“You’re staring again,” she said, voice low.

“I know.” And I let her see I wasn’t sorry.

Her mouth bent into something between a frown and a smile, deciding whether I was worth the trouble. A single tendril of golden hair caressed her neck, and I ached to brush it away. To touch her pulse point, to bury my nose in the crook of her neck and breathe her in.

“Do you always make a habit of cornering strangers at parties?” she scolded.

“Only the ones who walk into a Fae estate in a dress meant to distract and a blade meant to kill.” My gaze dipped—briefly, deliberately—to her concealed thigh before I met her eyes again. “Only the ones who keep their hair down so no one sees them check the door twice before stepping through it.”

Her wolf shifted in the subtle change of her stance, in the faint prickle at the edge of my senses. Most wouldn’t notice. I did. I noticed everything about her. That was becoming a problem I had no intention of solving.

“I’m not in the mood for games,” she warned, her gaze flashing gold for a single moment before settling back to blue.

“Neither am I, Penny.”

The name landed between us like steel striking stone. She didn’t move, but the air tightened—reflex, instinct, the wolf inside her taking one step closer, even if her boots didn’t.

“You already know my name.” Not a question.

“I know a lot of things,” I said, letting the words settle. “And I’ve been curious if you’re as dangerous as they say.”

Her chin lifted. “Depends on who’s asking.”

I smiled then, slow and sure. “Someone who isn’t planning on walking away.”

A beat passed, and then the house breathed in—a ripple from the ballroom as the music jumped tempo. The press of bodies began to flow toward the entertainment rooms, bright and heedless. Magic tugged on the crowd like a gentle leash. The Fae who built this place liked their choreography.

Penny angled sideways to avoid being swept with it. I matched her pace, close but not a cage. Two masked Fae males slid past, one letting his gaze linger where mine had. My temper twitched; my control put a hand on its throat and squeezed.

“You don’t like crowds,” I said, steady, even as I plotted the most efficient way to break a wrist without spilling a drink—her honor deserved at least that much courtesy.

She didn’t answer, just mapped the corridor—counting doors, gauging sightlines, weighing every possible escape.

Smart. Beautiful. Infuriating. Her scent edged hotter, more awake, the wolf pressing up against her skin.

Want hit me low and hard, ugly in how clean it felt: not a mindless hunger for blood—this was a wish to pin, to taste, to mark. To be chosen back .

“That’s not a sin,” I added. “Some of the best predators prefer open ground.”

That earned me a look—sharp, measuring—and for a breath, I saw it: the faint hitch in her inhale, the shadow of an old scar at her throat, mostly hidden by hair and light.

I kept my face even, but the knowledge curled inside me like a promise.

I knew the whispers. What had been done to her.

What Styx and Corvin had done to keep her alive.

A pack didn’t forgive that.

Neither did I.

She must have felt the shift in me, because her eyes narrowed. “What?”

“Nothing,” I said lightly, though my senses stayed locked on her. “Just making sure you don’t get swept under the crush.”

Before she could press, the house tugged attention toward the grand staircase—no announcement, just a collective redirecting of eyes. The corridor dimmed, leaving us in a pocket of shadow.

Stair-light bled gold into the hall, brushing her cheekbones, catching in her hair.

For half a breath, she looked less like a wolf on guard and more like something you could lose yourself in.

Dangerous either way, just measured in different currencies.

Her pupils flared, tiny, involuntary. The scent of her shifted again—warmer, nearer, the kind of thing that made an old part of me bare my throat and my teeth in the same heartbeat.

“You’re not staying for the show?” I asked, aching for anything she could give me.

“I’m not here for the show.”

Her voice remained even, but the edges of it rasped across my senses like silk on fang. She never stopped counting exits. I admired that. I wanted to ruin it.

“You plan your exits before you’ve even picked a drink.”

“I like options.”

I let the smallest real smile show. “Options keep you alive. Sometimes they keep you from seeing what’s right in front of you.”

Her eyes narrowed, weighing whether that was a threat or a promise. The crowd swelled again—perfume and heat and rustle—and she ended up a step closer without meaning to. The space between us tightened. My self-control dug in its heels and bled for it.

I didn’t move back.

“Careful,” I murmured, just for her. “Once I’ve got you this close, I’m not inclined to give the space back.”

Her mouth curved—not quite a smile, not dismissal either—and I wanted to hold her there until I knew which it was. But she slid sideways into the tide and vanished between two masked Fae like a knife slipping between ribs.

I let her go. This time.

Wolves circled unfamiliar ground. They tested fences.

They came back to scent what they couldn’t shake.

And she’d already shifted toward me twice—breath, pupils, scent—small tells the body gave when the mind refused the word.

Her body knew. Mine did, too, if I were the kind of fool who admitted to it.

I’d mapped the ballroom’s choke points with the same care other men saved for poetry.

I knew where the flow narrowed and where it pooled.

I knew where she’d have to pass if she wanted air and where she’d end up if she wanted quiet.

I knew the moment she’d be forced to choose between the crowd and the corridor and how easy it would be to step in and offer her a third option: me.

I wasn’t planning to walk away.

And when she circled back, I wouldn’t waste it on small talk.

I’d take what the night had already promised: heat, teeth, and a bond that would taste like blood and frost and home.