Title: The Marriage Counselor of the Eternal Bachelor
Author: Kassfinol
Genre: Paranormal Romance
All rights reserved.
Summary:
Luna García is a marriage counselor and believes she has seen it all, until Viktor Sanguis walks into her office. Rich, enigmatic, and with impossible standards, Viktor needs a wife, but no candidate manages to fit. Twelve women later, the failure is total, and Luna begins to suspect that what Viktor is looking for is not in her database. She will soon discover that her client’s secrets are older than she imagines, and that love can be billed in very unexpected ways.
PART I: THE CLIENT WHO RUINS STATISTICS
The last time a contract kept me awake was when I was twenty-six and signed the lease on my first office. Four months later, the landlord decided I had installed my “Luna García — Couples Consulting” sign exactly three centimeters outside the permitted area, and he almost bankrupted me over it.
I thought that was the maximum level of contractual stress my nervous system could tolerate.
I was wrong.
The paper in front of me was of a different thickness than normal paper. I couldn’t explain it. It was just a document, printed on what probably cost more per page than my entire jacket, but when I lifted it, it weighed differently. As if the clauses had physical mass. As if the words “penalty for breach equivalent to the full value of the consultancy plus forty percent of its annual projection” occupied three-dimensional space in the world.
“Do you have any questions?” said Viktor Sanguis from the other side of my desk.
He said it like someone asking if you want sugar in your coffee. No urgency. Not the slightest interest in whether the answer was yes or no.
I looked at him.
He was unreasonably handsome, which already put me in a bad mood, because unreasonably handsome people usually know it and behave accordingly. But he wasn’t doing that. He was sitting with the posture of someone who has spent decades owning every room he walks into and stopped finding it amusing. Dark suit, no tie, the first button of his shirt open as if he had decided formality was an unnecessary effort. Black hair. Pale skin of the kind that in my neighborhood indicated either that the sun never reached you or that something was wrong with your liver.
His eyes were a dark gray that worked almost like black, and they looked at me with the expression of someone evaluating a sales contract.
I was the property in question.
“Several,” I said, setting the document on the desk. “Starting with: why can’t a man with your résumé simply download a dating app like the rest of humanity?”
Something moved in his face. It didn’t quite become a smile. It was more like the distant ancestor of a smile, the kind of muscle movement that happens when your system registers that something has been said that, in other circumstances, would have been funny.
“Because dating apps require a photo,” he said. “And I prefer control over my image.”
“There are also marriage counselors less expensive than me.”
“I know. I hired them.” He crossed one ankle over his knee with a calm that irritated me. “None produced satisfactory results.”
“How many?”
“Four.”
“And what happened to them?”
This time there was something in his eyes. A glint that wasn’t exactly amusement, but wasn’t pure neutrality either.
“They retired,” he said. “Prematurely.”
I should have taken that as the sign it was.
Instead, I took the contract and signed.
Viktor Sanguis’s file had the length and internal coherence of a badly edited short novel. CEO of Sanguis Holdings, an investment firm with tentacles on three continents and enough discretion that most people had never heard of it. Apparent age: thirty-five. Real age: data not available, which was a rarity in itself because I had access to databases that found birth records for people adopted in the last century. What I did find was a record of the firm going back to 1487, with a marginal note on the last page that read: “Lineage obligations pending fulfillment.” I filed it in a corner of my brain for later.
No known partner. No public relationships. No scandals, leaked photos, rumors of a model or actress or anything else.
For someone with his level of resources, that record was almost supernatural.
Almost, I told myself as I prepared the candidate profile for our first work meeting.
For our second session, Viktor arrived punctual to the minute and declined the coffee I offered with a gesture so discreet I almost missed that he did it.
“This week’s candidates,” I said, opening the folder. “I selected twelve initial profiles based on your criteria: university education, financial independence, cultural compatibility, availability for…”
“What do you do at night, Miss García?”
I looked up. He had his eyes fixed on the profile at the top of the pile, but something in his posture suggested the question wasn’t casual.
“Excuse me?”
“At night. When your workday ends. What do you do?”
I looked at him a moment.
“Sleep,” I said. “Like humans.”
“Mmm.” He turned the profile’s page. “Do you practice any nighttime hobby? Do you go out? Do you prefer to stay home?”
“Mr. Sanguis, I’m here to find you a wife, not to be the one interviewed.”
“I’m calibrating your perspective,” he said, and his tone was so reasonable that for a second I almost convinced myself. “A counselor who doesn’t understand alternative lifestyles can hardly match effectively.”
“Alternative lifestyle?” I narrowed my eyes. “What kind exactly?”
He held my gaze.
“The nocturnal one,” he said.
There was something in how he said it. Not threatening. Not suggestive in the ordinary sense. Just… definitive, like when someone establishes a parameter and expects you to process it without further explanation.
“I’ve had time to know what works,” he added, as if it were a minor detail. “A lot of time.”
I noted: Candidates: tolerance for nighttime schedule, no expectation of morning activities as a couple.
“Any other restrictions?” I asked.
“Special diet.”
“Allergies? Medical restrictions?”
“Something like that.”
I noted: Diet: ask for specifics.
“And the sun?”
I blinked.
“The sun?”
“Skin sensitivity. The candidate must understand that outdoor activities during the day won’t be part of the shared lifestyle.”
I looked at him for three full seconds.
“Are you looking for a wife or a cave companion?”
The corner of his mouth moved two millimeters upward. Two millimeters. It was the Viktor-Sanguis equivalent of a guffaw.
“A life companion,” he said. “With an understanding of my particularities.”
I noted: Nighttime activities exclusively. No sun exposure. No questioning of diet.
When I finished writing and looked up, he was watching me with that continuous evaluation expression I was already starting to recognize as his default state.
“Do you have candidates who meet that profile?” he asked.
“I have candidates for everything,” I said. “That’s what you pay me for — I’m very diligent.”
PART II: THE MAN WHO BORED TWELVE PERFECT WOMEN
The first date was a disaster.
Not one of the dramatic disasters that stay in your memory, but the silent, surgical kind you only recognize afterward. Valentina Herrera, thirty-eight years old, creative director, compulsive traveler, tolerant of irregular schedules and independent enough not to need her partner to be available during the day. On paper, perfect.
In person: she called me at ten at night.
“Your client,” she said, and her voice had the specific tone of someone who has processed something strange and hasn’t yet decided whether to laugh or worry, “is very… singular.”
“Singular how?”
“He ordered water. Just water. For three hours. And when I asked him what he wanted to eat, he told me he had already had dinner before and that in any case his diet was something he would explain later.”
“And?”
“And then he talked to me for forty minutes about the Roman Empire. With details that seemed… personal. As if he had been there.”
I noted: Avoid long historical conversations on first dates. And also: find out exactly what that diet consists of.
“Was there a connection?”
Pause.
“He’s fascinating,” Valentina said. “Cultured, attentive, he has that way of looking at you that makes you feel like you’re the only person in the universe. But there’s something. As if he already knew the ending of all the stories and was patiently waiting for you to discover it too.”
What she described didn’t sound like a flaw. It sounded like someone who had seen enough to have the perspective that time gives.
A lot of time.
I shook off the thought.
“A second date?”
“No,” Valentina said. “Thanks, but no.”
The second candidate lasted one date. The third, two. The fourth called before the night was over to tell me Viktor was “charming, but profoundly intimidating in a way I can’t articulate and don’t want to explore.”
At the sixth follow-up session, Viktor walked into my office, sat down with his usual calm, and waited.
“The candidates find him difficult,” I said, without beating around the bush.
“The candidates find difficult what they don’t understand,” he replied, shrugging.
“And what exactly is there to understand?”
He crossed his fingers on the desk. He had pianist’s hands, long and pale, and the gesture was deliberate in a way I found hard to ignore.
“Do you know how long the firm Sanguis Holdings has been operating, Miss García?”
“Since 1487, according to the public record. Although there are inconsistencies in the files suggesting it could be earlier.”
His eyes moved with something that took me a moment to identify as surprise. Just an instant, and then back to neutrality.
“Perceptive,” he said. “You’re right. It’s earlier.”
“How much earlier?”
The pause lasted exactly long enough for my brain to start making connections it then decided not to complete.
“Enough,” he said, “for certain… selection criteria to be non-negotiable.”
“Criteria like.”
“Someone who doesn’t expect answers to questions she’s not prepared to hear.”
I looked at him.
“That’s not a criterion,” I said. “That’s a warning.”
This time the smile went one step further. It was still small, but it was real.
“Sometimes the two things coincide,” he said.
By the tenth session, I already had a system. Candidate. Meeting. Nighttime call. Varied reasons, but with a common denominator: Viktor Sanguis was perfect in every parameter I could measure and fundamentally incompatible with all the ones I couldn’t.
What I didn’t have was a rational explanation for why the only person with whom he seemed to have real conversations was me.
I started noticing it in session eleven. We’d spent forty-five minutes reviewing the next candidate’s profile, and he had asked more questions about my personal opinion than about the characteristics of the woman in question.
“What would you have answered?” he said, when I described how the candidate had reacted to his comment about the temporality of human relationships.
“I’m not the candidate.”
“I know. That’s why I’m asking.”
“I would have said,” I replied, because the alternative was pretending the question didn’t exist and I had a limit for evasion, “that the temporality of relationships depends on who builds them. That nothing is permanent, but some things last longer than seems possible.”
Viktor looked at me for a long moment.
“Do you really believe that?”
“I’m a marriage counselor. If I didn’t believe it, I’d be in the wrong business.”
“Or,” he said slowly, “in exactly the right business?”
I didn’t answer. But I didn’t change the subject either, which probably said more than I wanted to admit.
PART III: THE PRACTICAL LESSON
Session twelve began like all the others and became something completely different the moment I closed the folder on the table and decided enough was enough.
“I need you to tell me the truth,” I said.
Viktor, who had been looking out the window with that “I’ve spent centuries looking at things and nothing surprises me” expression, turned his eyes toward me.
“The truth about what?”
“About what you’re really looking for.” I leaned my elbows on the desk. “Because we’ve been at this for three months and twelve candidates and none of them works, and it’s not because they’re inadequate. They were all perfect for the profile you gave me. The problem is that the profile you gave me isn’t the real one.”
Silence.
“What do you think I’m looking for?” he said at last.
“I don’t know. That’s why I’m asking. And I warn you that if you tell me something vague about ‘deep connection’ or ‘spiritual compatibility’ I’m going to assume you’re dodging the question and proceed accordingly.”
He stood up. I didn’t see it coming because for someone his height he moved with a stillness that made the movement seem to happen between blinks. He walked around the desk, and I followed his path with my eyes without yet understanding what was happening until he was standing beside me and I had to lift my head to look at him.
“What are you looking for?” I repeated.
“This,” he said.
And he kissed me.
It wasn’t the kind of kiss that serves to establish attraction. It was the kind of kiss executed by someone who has had centuries to perfect the technique and has the patience to use it. One hand on my jaw, his thumb on my cheek, and his mouth on mine with a pressure that wasn’t urgent but inevitable, like the current of a river that has been flowing in the same direction for a long time.
It took me exactly four seconds to process what was happening.
It took me exactly four more seconds to decide that processing it could wait.
I put my hands on his chest. Not to push him away but to feel whether he was real, which was a completely irrational reaction that my brain filed as “analyze later.”
He was real… solid, cold through the fabric of his shirt, and when I breathed, he smelled like the air before a storm and something else, something that had no category in my inventory of olfactory references.
“Mr. Sanguis,” I said against his mouth.
“Viktor,” he said.
“Viktor.” The word came out softer than I intended. “This isn’t exactly what I had in mind when I asked for clarity on your criteria.”
“It is exactly that.” His thumb traced the line of my cheekbone. “I’m looking for someone who doesn’t back away.”
I hadn’t backed away.
The thought landed with the delicacy of a diagnosis.
His mouth returned to mine, and this time there was less content and more declaration, and my hands, which had begun flat on his chest, ended up with their fingers tangled in the fabric of his shirt. He moved me away from the desk with no apparent effort, just a guidance of his hands on my hips that reoriented my position in space as if physics were a suggestion he could interpret at his convenience.
“We should—” I began.
“Yes,” he said.
“I wasn’t going to say that.”
“I know.” There was something in his voice, deeper, with an echo I hadn’t noticed before. “But it’s what we’re both thinking.”
He was right. I hated it. I hated it in the specific way you hate it when someone names exactly what you’re thinking yourself before you can reorganize it into something more defensible.
My desk was left behind. The sofa in my waiting room, long and dark leather, which I had bought thinking of clients who needed space to cry in private, was ahead. Viktor looked at me with that evaluation expression I now recognized as his way of asking without words.
“I’m still your counselor,” I said.
“I know.”
“This is deeply irregular.”
“I know.”
“Do you have anything to say in your defense?”
The two millimeters of smile.
“That you’ve spent three months being the only person I have real conversations with,” he said. “And that the idea of marrying someone who isn’t you bores me profoundly.”
“And how long have you been bored with people in general?”
“Long enough to know when something is worth it,” he replied, and his voice had that echo again.
The silence that followed lasted long enough for me to take inventory: the contract I had signed, my consultancy, the six months I had left, the penalty clause, the fact that all of that should matter to me more than it mattered to me at that moment.
“That technically doesn’t solve the problem,” I said.
“No,” he agreed.
“The problem is still that you need a wife.”
“The problem,” he said, and his voice had that echo again, soft, as if it came from farther away than his throat justified, “is that I’ve already found the one I want. The contract is a detail.”
“A detail with a bankruptcy clause.”
“Resolvable.”
I wonder what the version of me from three months ago would say if she could see me there, in my work suit with my session notes on the desk and Viktor Sanguis looking at me as if he had been waiting for this moment with the specific patience of someone who has all the time in the world.
She’d probably say to take notes for the book.
I kissed him first this time.
It was different. Not the current but the leap into the river all at once, and he responded with something that wasn’t surprise, but like someone receiving exactly what he had expected. His hands went up my back with a precision that suggested cartography, as if he were tracing coordinates for future use.
“The sofa,” I said.
“The sofa,” he agreed.
I sat on it and he followed, and the space between us disappeared with the efficiency of someone who has eliminated distances all his life. I unbuttoned the second button of his shirt and the third, and he let me do it with that characteristic patience I was beginning to understand wasn’t indifference but the opposite: the absolute attention of someone who isn’t in a hurry because every second matters.
His chest was pale, hairless, and when I put my palm flat over his heart, it took me a second to process what I felt.
“Your heart,” I said.
“Yes.”
It was beating. But more slowly than mine. Much more slowly. The calm rhythm of something that doesn’t consume oxygen urgently because time isn’t a concern.
“Viktor.”
“Later,” he said, and his mouth found my neck. “I’ll explain everything later.”
“And your diet?” I asked, my voice catching.
“I already ate,” he answered against my skin. “A few hours ago. I don’t need solid food.”
The information was filed in my brain along with the slow beat of his heart.
His mouth on my neck produced a specific reaction that ran up my spine from top to bottom and reached my hands, which gripped him harder. His lips, cold, traced a line from my jaw to my collarbone and kept going, and my jacket ended up on the floor without me remembering having moved.
“Are you okay?” he asked against my skin.
“Yes.”
“Sure?”
“Viktor, if you keep asking I’m going to become irrational.”
That produced the equivalent of a laugh in Viktor language: an exhalation with sound, brief, genuine. I liked it. I liked it more than was reasonable.
What followed didn’t have the urgency of two people who have waited too long. It had something different: the attention of someone who observes carefully and learns fast, and I had the simultaneous awareness that for him “fast” probably meant something completely different than for me.
His hands knew exactly what they were doing and had no intention of hurrying. My skirt disappeared. His fingers found the inside of my thigh and traced a line that made me tense my muscles and bite my lower lip so as not to make a sound that didn’t fit the professional image I had clearly already completely abandoned.
“You don’t have to keep quiet,” he said.
“I’m in my office.”
“The building closes at eight. It’s nine-thirty.”
Damn it. He was right. When had he processed that?
“When did you learn that?”
“I’ve spent weeks observing the building’s patterns.” His fingers found exactly the right place and I made a sound that definitely didn’t fit any professional image. “Just in case.”
Just in case. Centuries of existence and he had been planning this.
“That’s—” I said, and lost the thread of the sentence when his thumb traced a circle that tore another cut-off breath from me. “That’s disturbingly meticulous.”
“I’m meticulous about everything that matters to me.”
I said nothing. Partly because the next answer would have been something about how much he mattered to me, and I wasn’t ready for that conversation. Partly because his fingers had stopped tracing circles and moved on to something more specific that required all my attention.
I came with my hands gripping his shoulders and my face buried in his neck and a muffled sound that might have been his name. He didn’t speed up or slow down while it passed, he just kept the rhythm with that characteristic patience until I finished trembling.
“Good,” he said quietly.
“That’s—” I said when I got my breath back, “a very sparse evaluation.”
“Would you prefer adjectives?”
“I prefer reciprocity.”
He looked at me. His gray eyes had something different, darker, an intensity that made them almost black.
“You’re sure.”
It wasn’t a question, but I answered anyway.
“Completely.”
When I straddled him and guided him to where I wanted him, the sound he made was the first I’d heard from him without control. Low, deep, with that echo I found inexplicable and which I filed in the same folder as the slow heartbeat and the temperature of his skin. The folder labeled provisionally: Questions with answers pending.
He moved with me and I moved with him, and there was no clumsiness or negotiation of rhythm because he adjusted to mine with a naturalness that suggested he had been paying attention for a long time, which was an idea that did complicated things to my body temperature.
His hands on my hips were cold and firm and never let go of me. His mouth returned to my neck, and when I felt his teeth, not biting but barely pressing, something in me decided that that specific sensation was going to be hard to forget.
“Viktor.”
“Yes.”
“Don’t bite me.”
“I wasn’t going to.” A pause. “Not yet.”
The word “yet” arrived with an implication I didn’t fully process because at that moment his angle changed and my brain prioritized more immediate information.
We finished with my back against the sofa’s backrest and his hands on my face and the kind of silence afterward that happens when two people have just crossed a line they know they won’t be able to uncross.
He looked at me.
I looked at him.
“About next week’s candidate,” I said.
The real laugh arrived this time. Small, contained, but real. It was the sound of someone who doesn’t quite remember how to laugh, but is remembering.
And I knew that laugh wasn’t for the counselor. It was for me. And that was much more dangerous than anything else that had happened that night.
PART IV: THE CANDIDATE NOBODY ASKED FOR
Seraphine Voss arrived at my office on a Tuesday without an appointment, which was already irregular, and sat down in front of my desk with the posture of someone used to spaces adjusting to her.
She was beautiful in the way I had grown accustomed to associating with Viktor: that cold, effortless beauty that works less as attraction and more as a warning. Platinum blond hair, light eyes, and skin of the same tone of perpetual pale.
“Miss García,” she said. “I think there’s a situation you need to know about.”
“Situation?”
“With your client.” She smiled, and the smile didn’t reach her eyes. “Viktor has ancient obligations. Commitments that existed long before you showed up with your folder of candidates.”
I observed her.
“And you are?”
“The most suitable candidate. I always was.” She crossed her legs. “I was simply… waiting for the right moment to let the right people know.”
“What people?”
“The Elders of his clan, for example.” She tilted her head. “The same ones who demanded this marriage from him. To whom, if I inform them that Viktor is being influenced by a human with no knowledge of our nature, they might find that… problematic.”
Our nature.
The brain can’t ignore patterns. It can try, it can file the pieces in provisional folders and postpone the synthesis, but at some point the accumulation becomes inevitable: the slow heart. The temperature of his skin. The “yet” about his teeth. The firm from 1487 that was older. The eyes that in moments of intensity became darker than physiology should allow.
“What is he?” I said.
“Haven’t you deduced it already?” Seraphine seemed genuinely curious. “I thought you were perceptive.”
“I am. I just wanted confirmation.”
She smiled again, and this time the smile had teeth.
“Viktor Sanguis has spent fifteen centuries avoiding formal commitments. The Elders have patience, but they also have limits. And I,” she tilted her head, “am exactly what they need to see: someone of the same nature, from the right clan, with the right background.”
“And if he doesn’t want that?”
“What Viktor wants,” Seraphine said, “and what Viktor needs are different things. And what you want, dear human, is irrelevant in this conversation.”
She stood up. It was when she did, when she went from cold courtesy to something more direct, that I understood the conversation had stopped being diplomatic.
She moved toward me with the same inexplicable speed I had learned to associate with Viktor, and before I could step back she had her fingers around my wrist with a pressure that wasn’t painful yet but communicated clearly that it could be.
“You’re curious,” Seraphine said. “I understand the appeal. But you’re a distraction Viktor can’t afford.”
“Let go of me.”
“When you agree to…”
“Let her go.”
Viktor’s voice came from my office door, which I hadn’t heard open, with a tone I hadn’t heard in any of our sessions. It wasn’t the Viktor who got bored with the candidates nor the one who smiled two millimeters nor the one who said “yet” with that specific implication. It was something older. Something that made the normal tone of his voice seem like a reduced copy.
Seraphine let go of me.
She turned toward him, and what followed was a conversation in a language I didn’t recognize, brief, with the cadence of an argument that had already happened before in other versions. I stayed where I was, with my wrist pressed against my chest, watching.
Seraphine took a step toward him.
“The Elders will know,” she said in Spanish, probably so I would hear. “You can’t ignore the obligation for a…”
“The Elders,” Viktor said, “can know.”
Seraphine tensed. And then Viktor did something I couldn’t have described if they’d asked me ten seconds later: his eyes turned black. Not dark. Black, the absolute black that reflects no light, and when he spoke again, his voice had an echo that seemed to come from more than one place simultaneously.
“Withdraw.”
It wasn’t a request. It wasn’t exactly an order in the human sense of the term. It was something more like gravity: a force that simply was and in the face of which resistance was a theoretical option with no practical viability.
Seraphine left, stepping harder than necessary.
“Is she going to tell the Elders?” I asked.
“Probably,” Viktor said without flinching. “But that’s not a problem.”
“Isn’t it? It seems like one to me.” Though something told me I wasn’t aware of anything.
“I have a plan. And I have centuries of experience making plans work.”
The silence that remained had texture.
Viktor sought my gaze and his eyes were the usual gray ones.
I said nothing for a moment. I organized the pieces I already had. The pattern that was already inevitable.
“Fifteen centuries,” I said.
“Approximately,” he confirmed, and there was no pride in his voice, just a calm acceptance.
“That explains the Roman Empire details.”
“Front row,” he said, and for an instant his eyes seemed to look at something that wasn’t in the room. “It’s not the same as reading about it.”
I sat on the edge of my desk because suddenly staying on my feet felt like it required more effort than usual.
“You should have told me.”
“And would you have signed the contract?”
Pause.
“Probably not.”
“That’s why.”
I looked at him for a long while. He let me look at him, which was consistent with everything I knew about him: the patience of someone for whom time is a different resource.
“What do the Elders want?”
“Appearances. Visible stability. A marriage that communicates permanence.”
“And Seraphine was the most viable option?”
“She was the most convenient option for them.”
“And for you?”
His eyes moved.
“For me,” he said, “the most viable option already has a consultancy and a contract with my name on it.”
PART V: INVOICE FOR EXTENDED SERVICES
I spent an entire night sitting in my apartment with a cup of tea that went cold without me touching it, thinking about everything I knew and everything I didn’t know and the proportion between the two columns.
Viktor was a vampire. This sentence, under normal circumstances, would have belonged to the category of things that don’t happen in real life, but it turned out that normal circumstances weren’t the natural habitat of my life lately.
He was a vampire who had been around for fifteen centuries and had the most discreet investment firm in the world and couldn’t stand the sun and had marriage criteria that no conventional human could sustainably satisfy.
And he had kissed me in my own office and had planned weeks in advance to make sure we were alone.
I drank the cold tea in one gulp and went to look for letterhead paper.
I handed it to him at our next session, which technically was the closing session of the contract, given that I hadn’t fulfilled the objective of finding him a wife in time.
Viktor took the envelope and opened it with the same calm with which he did everything, and read the contents without changing expression, which I had already learned to interpret as him processing something that mattered to him.
“It’s an invoice,” he said.
“For extended consultancy services.” I crossed my arms. “Twelve candidates. Sixteen work sessions. Three months of profile research. And,” I paused, “the additional fieldwork from session twelve.”
The corner. The two millimeters.
“The additional fieldwork,” he repeated.
“It was professionally informative. It confirms that your criteria are specific and that only one candidate in my database meets them.”
He raised his eyes from the paper.
“And which candidate is that?”
“Me.”
The silence lasted longer than any before it. And Viktor Sanguis, who by his own account hadn’t had reason to laugh in centuries, laughed.
It wasn’t a small or contained laugh. It was real and slightly bewildered, as if he himself hadn’t expected that sound to come out of his own mouth, and it was the strangest and most beautiful sound I had heard in my entire career as a counselor.
“Luna,” he said, when he stopped.
“Viktor.”
“The contract specifies that you must find me a wife. Not be the wife yourself.”
“The contract,” I said, “also specifies that the selection criterion is determined by me based on demonstrated compatibility, and I determine that the compatibility is demonstrated.”
He looked at me.
“That’s a very liberal interpretation of the terms.”
“I’m the expert. It’s my professional interpretation.”
“And if the Elders don’t accept?”
“I already spoke with them,” Viktor said calmly. “I explained to them that I have a candidate who meets all the criteria, and that my plan includes a controlled transition when she’s ready. They accepted.”
I blinked.
“When did you do that?”
“Last night. While you were sleeping.”
“The Elders,” I said, recovering the thread, “will accept because you’re the one presenting the candidate to them, and because, according to paragraph three of their requirement, what they need is visible permanence. And I’m perfectly capable of being permanently visible.”
“You’re human.”
“That,” I said, “is a detail negotiable with time.”
“I know,” Viktor said, and his eyes softened in a way I hadn’t seen before. “And when you decide the moment has come, I’ll be here to guide you. No rush. With all the time you need.”
The pause that followed was different. Not the silence of someone processing, but of someone who has already processed and is deciding how to respond to something that took him by surprise in a way that is, against all expectation, completely welcome.
He stood up. He walked around the desk. And he stood in front of me with that height and that patience and those eyes that I now knew could turn absolutely black.
“The original contract,” he said, “is rescinded.”
“Agreed.”
“You’ll need to sign a new document.”
“I have my own letterhead paper.”
“It will be a prenuptial agreement.”
“Very, very detailed, I hope.”
“Fifteen centuries of assets,” he said. “It requires detail.”
I held out my hand.
He took it, and its temperature was the same as always: cold, steady, the cold of something that has no urgency to warm up because time isn’t the same problem for him as for everyone else.
What also wasn’t the same problem for him was the patience to build something that lasts.
That, I thought as I shook his hand and held it, was a compatibility criterion not to be underestimated.
EPILOGUE: ETERNAL BONDS
Three weeks later, the sign for “Luna García — Couples Consulting” was replaced.
The new one was smaller, in gold letters on a black background:
ETERNAL BONDS — Specialized consultancy for niche clients.
My first client at Eternal Bonds was, of course, the same one who had been the last of my old consultancy. Viktor signed the prenuptial contract on a Thursday at midnight — because he preferred Thursdays at midnight, and I had already learned to negotiate schedules with the same flexibility as any other criterion of living together.
But before getting to that, we had to resolve the matter of the Elders. Their initial objection was, predictably, my human nature. Viktor handled it with his usual efficiency: first with patience, then with arguments, and when neither of those two things worked, with that tone that made theoretical options become impracticable. Then he told me the details.
“I reminded them that a human with your negotiating ability was a more valuable asset than a textbook girlfriend,” he explained, with a slight elevation of his eyebrow. “And I presented them with the invoice for your extended services. The detail of the clauses convinced them they didn’t want you as an enemy.”
As for Seraphine, Viktor assured me she found another clan. He said it was a “voluntary relocation.” I decided not to ask for the details.
The prenuptial agreement ended up having forty-nine clauses. The first forty-seven were his: fifteen centuries of assets require a lot of legal precision. Number forty-eight I added, and it specified that “criteria consultancy” sessions could take place outside office hours, on the office sofa or on any other surface both parties found suitable. Viktor signed without objecting.
Number forty-nine he added afterward, almost as a postscript. It specified that, when I was ready, the transition process would begin. In the margin, in his small, meticulous handwriting, he had written: “No rush. With all the time you need.”
When he finished signing, he raised his eyes and looked at me with that expression I, after four months, already knew how to read without effort. It wasn’t evaluation. It wasn’t calculation. It was the absolute attention of someone who has decided that what is in front of him deserves all the centuries he has left.
“Do you have other potential clients?” he asked.
“Eventually.” I folded the contract. “That’s what the consultancy exists for.”
“And if one of them turns out to be as complicated as me?”
I put it in the drawer and held his gaze.
“For complicated ones,” I said, “I have special rates.”
The two millimeters of smile became something more. Not dramatic. Not the kind of smile that stays in memory for its size, but for what it communicates: that someone who had spent centuries finding the world predictable had found something that wasn’t.
And then, without warning, he leaned in.
It wasn’t the kiss in the office, the one that had been a declaration. This one was different. Slower. More deliberate. His hand found the back of my neck with a softness that belied the coldness of his fingers, and drew me toward him as if the gesture were as old as he was, as if he had been rehearsing it for centuries without knowing it.
“Viktor,” I said against his mouth.
“Luna,” he replied, and my name in his voice sounded like a promise, not an introduction.
His mouth was cold, but I didn’t care. I no longer cared about anything that wasn’t the weight of his hand on the back of my neck, the way his thumb traced circles on my skin as if memorizing every centimeter. The waiting-room sofa was three steps away, but neither of us moved toward it. There was no need. The kiss was enough, it filled the empty space between what we had been and what we were about to be.
When he parted his lips, he rested his forehead against mine and closed his eyes. It was the first time I had seen him close his eyes. They were always open, evaluating, measuring, waiting. But now they were closed, and that, more than anything else, told me everything I needed to know.
“I’ve waited a long time to find someone who wouldn’t back away,” he said quietly, without opening his eyes. “So long that I had stopped believing such a person existed.”
“And now?” I asked, my voice hoarser than I intended.
He opened his eyes. The usual gray ones, but with a brightness I hadn’t seen before. It wasn’t darkness. It was light, of the kind that only turns on when someone has stopped searching and has found.
“Now,” he said, and his smile went further than the usual two millimeters, “I have to learn to share my things.”
“Share?”
“Time. Space. The fridge, even though you only use it to store things I don’t eat.” His thumb kept tracing circles on the back of my neck. “All of that is new to me.”
“And does it scare you?”
The question came out before I could stop it. But I didn’t want to take it back. Because in his answer was everything I needed to hear.
“It terrifies me,” he said, and there was no pride in it, just a naked honesty that hurt. “But it’s also the best thing that’s happened to me in fifteen centuries.”
I didn’t know what to answer. So I kissed him again, and this time the kiss wasn’t a declaration or a promise. It was an answer. The only one I had.
When we finally separated, his hand was still on the back of my neck, and mine was on his chest, feeling that slow beat that no longer surprised me, but seemed to me the most natural rhythm in the world.
“Turn off the light,” he said quietly.
“Are you sure you want to stay in the dark with me?”
He smiled. His eyes narrowed a little.
Was that mischief?
“Luna,” he said, “I’ve spent more than a thousand years waiting for someone to ask me that question. And no one had asked me until you arrived.”
I turned off the light.
Outside it was night, which was no longer an observation, but simply the rhythm at which my life worked.
It seemed fine to me. It seemed better than fine.
The End
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