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The monitors didn’t make noise anymore. There was no steady beep, beep, beep telling him his heart was still beating; Jesse sort of wished there was. The lights were dimmed, blood pressure cuff inflating every few minutes to squeeze his arm, then deflating again with dejected sounding trill. Nurses changed his IV fluid, injected medicine, gave him shots. Jesse offered his arm up meekly in a daze, again and again.
His neck was wrapped in thick layers of gauze and he had stitches running down the inside of one thigh. The bruises were starting to form now, hours after he’d gotten to the hospital. Blue and black and violet curling around his wrists, fingerprints on his throat.
You’re lucky someone found you when they did, or you would have bled to death.
Jesse didn’t feel lucky. Everything seemed unreal.
If he wasn’t hurting so much, Jesse would have wondered if he was dead.
They couldn’t give him any painkillers until the last of the thrall wore off, and Jesse could still feel it. Heavy in his blood, skin too sensitive, low level arousal simmering in him.
When the want flared, Jesse felt sick to his stomach, retching in the pan they’d given him and refusing to think about teeth in his neck and hands in his clothes and you go down easy, don’t you?
You taste divine.
His stomach turned, and lurched, and Jesse swallowed and breathed deeply until the need to throw up passed. There was nothing left to come up anyway, and the dry heaving and stomach acid were viciously painful. After a few minutes he set the pink plastic pan on the little rolling table next to his hospital bed and took a tentative sip of ice water out of the styrofoam cup they’d given him. He was so thirsty, but he didn’t want to get sick again.
There was no way he was going to make it to the clients he had scheduled for the rest of the week. What’s worse, the agency he worked for would dock his pay for every missed appointment, hospital or no. If he filed a report against the client who put him there, he’d be out of a job.
They hadn’t said it in so many words, but Jesse was good at reading between the lines. The VEA couldn’t prohibit blood donor agencies from operating without board certification— not yet, anyway— but it also meant the industry donor protections didn’t extend to the people who chose to work for them.
Jesse had done time. He wasn’t stupid enough to think some ritzy donor service would take him on as an employee with the kind of record he had, but he’d needed cash, and fast. When he’d first started he’d been on the tail end of his parole, desperate to make the payments he needed to keep from violating and getting sent back down for another nine months. Feeding a few vamps every week sounded like easy money, and sometimes it was.
Sometimes it wasn’t.
The clients he fed were… mostly okay. They got a little handsy, maybe, used their thralls more liberally than Jesse was led to believe was normal in his thirty minute mandatory training course. He didn’t always remember everything that happened, some of his visits a hazy blur when he thought about them. He fed more clients, too, and more frequently— Jesse stumbled home stoned off someone’s thrall more often than not, but he paid his last parole fees a few months back and he’d never been late with his rent.
It didn’t always feel sustainable. Jesse laid in bed dizzy with a headache half the time, swallowing too many biotic-infused iron supplements and hoping he wouldn’t fall over when he took a shower. Still, a job was a job, and Jesse couldn’t seem to find anything else that paid anywhere near what he was making.
It was something he could live with, until it wasn’t.
Then it was something he might die over. He’d gone to see a new client; Jesse remembered going into their hotel room. Remembered settling himself on their couch, making polite small talk, accepting their payment. Remembered them sinking their teeth in his throat, and then…
...and then Jesse woke up laying on the sidewalk near the hospital, blood soaked through his jeans, thrall so thick in him it was hard to open his eyes. All he has are flashes of memories after that— someone dragged him into the hospital. There were needles and bright lights and loud voices and he’s going into shock, we’re losing him!
A blood transfusion, fifteen stitches, and several bags of IV fluid later, and Jesse was officially out of the woods. A VEA liaison came to talk to him, gently but obviously pushing him to give up the name of the vampire he’d been feeding. Jesse had smiled, I don’t remember a whole lot, you know how it is.
He didn’t want to lose his job.
More than that, he didn’t want some vengeful vampire coming after him when they got out of VEA custody after serving whatever mandatory minimum sentence they were given. It would be different if he didn’t donate for a living, but the courts frowned upon it, even if they weren’t supposed to.
They didn’t say donors were asking for it. Not in so many words.
He’d been reading between the lines most of his life now, and Jesse knew better.
He was thinking about trying to sleep some more when there was a soft knock on the wall next to his door.
“Hello hello?”
Jesse startled, sitting up straighter with his brows furrowed. No one knew he was in the hospital, let alone what room he was in, and the nurses weren’t in the habit of knocking when the door was open.
“Uhhh… hey there,” Jesse said, watching as the person slipped further into the room.
“Sorry to bother you, I know you aren’t exactly feeling great right now. Name’s Lúcio! I’m a… an unofficial resource liaison for the VEA here. Off the books, so to speak. Wanted to talk to you for a bit, if that’s alright with you? Can I sit?”
Lúcio was small, but that didn’t matter much; his soft smile revealed the unmistakable glint of fangs. He had a head full of dreadlocks held back from his face with a headband, and a gift bag dangling from one hand.
He was fucking gorgeous, but a lot of vampires were; the thrill of lust than ran through him tasted like the thrall, and he had to swallow around nausea again. Spending time alone in a closed room with a strange vampire didn’t exactly seem like the best idea when he’d just had his throat damn near torn open by one, but sending him away didn’t seem wise, either. Jesse scratched at the back of his head, squinting one eye and shrugging as he reached for the nurse call cable and tucked it next to his hip.
“Sure. Already talked to one of you VEA folks, though. I can tell you like I told them, I don’t remember much ‘bout what happened.”
Lúcio nodded and smiled, but it was more of a grimace than anything else.
“Yeah, I know. Ah, here, I got you something. Not much but still.”
He passed over the gift bag and Jesse took it warily, peering inside. There was… a big stuffed frog, and what looked like a couple of gift cards to restaurants near the hospital. A pocket knife.
A spray bottle of vampire mace.
“Uhhh… thanks?” Jesse said, and Lúcio laughed.
“I know, I know. You mind if I cut the bullshit here?” Jesse shrugged, and Lúcio must have taken it for permission, because he continued without pause. “When someone who works for an uncertified blood donation agency comes in here after a severe predation incident and elects not to file charges, and one of my friends is on duty, sometimes they give me a call.”
“Sometimes, huh? I’m a special case, or?”
Lúcio sat back in his chair, tucking his hands into the pocket of his hoodie.
“When they have reason to believe a donor isn’t pressing charges because of fear of reprisal, either from the agency in question, or the perpetrator of the predation.” Jesse just stared. He must have looked as baffled as he felt, because Lúcio continued, simplifying his language. It wasn’t that Jesse didn’t understand.
It was just hard to believe a vampire he’d never met would go out of his way to help Jesse out.
“If they think someone is afraid of getting fired, or afraid a vampire is gonna come after them for filing charges, then I try to step in when I can. We have legal teams in place to make sure offenders are prosecuted to the full extent of the law, and the resources to relocate donors to different residences if theirs has been compromised. We can get you another job, donating or otherwise, with an agency that will take care of you. We can help you get into new living arrangements. We can make sure the vampire who did this to you doesn’t walk, and if they do, that they can’t find you. But only if you help us help you.”
Jesse picked the mace up, turning it over in his hand. The agency he worked for had explicitly forbidden he carry it, saying it violated the inherent trust in donor-client relationships.
That trust had landed Jesse bleeding out on a sidewalk with his thigh torn open and his throat covered in bruises and bite marks.
“Who’s this ‘we’ you keep talking about?” Jesse asked. Lúcio pulled a business card out of his pocket and held it out to Jesse, who took it carefully from his extended fingers.
Lúcio Correia dos Santos
Regional Donor Safety Representative
Blood Apron LLC
There was a phone number there, as well as a physical address; an office number, his email.
“Blood Apron has a lot of resources tied up in activism— prevention of predation, providing for underprivileged fledgelings, fighting prejudice in the legal system. Ensuring donor protections, most notably, in your case. I don’t care about your record. I don’t care about your history. I just want to keep you safe.”
Lúcio’s eyes roamed over Jesse, taking stock of his injuries one by one. The blood on his thighs, stitches still oozing. The bite marks savaging his throat, the bruises peppered all over him. Jesse pulled the sheet up higher, feeling exposed— if he hadn’t been so reckless this wouldn’t have happened.
Everyone kept saying it wasn’t his fault, but Jesse wasn’t sure he believed them.
Lúcio’s eyes flashed black. His teeth looked longer, sharper.
For some reason, Jesse didn’t feel afraid.
“If they let this guy walk, I will take care of it personally. I promise you.”
Jesse ran his fingers over the raised letters on the business card, humming low in his throat.
“Blood Apron, huh?”
Lúcio nodded.
-
The safety representative offices are on the third floor of the building where Blood Apron’s regional headquarters are housed. The common areas are fancy in a boring, corporate kinda way. There are paintings that are mostly colorful blurs, sculptures that aren’t any person or animal or object he recognizes; big metal blobs and weird stacks of rocks. People in expensive suits give him impersonal smiles as he heads through the halls. He makes his way on autopilot, nodding politely at the employees he passes, hat held over his heart.
Lúcio’s office is different from the rest. Cozier, with soft leather furniture and low lighting, pictures of rainforests and waterfalls on the walls. At first Jesse only ended up there for quarterly safety evaluations.
He made it to one annual donor safety refresher course before he met the Shimadas at an event that Blood Apron catered.
Now he’s a frequent flier, as Lúcio calls the donors who are in and out of his office every few weeks with exasperated fondness. Sometimes it’s something as simple as forgetting too many check-ins or violating policy and procedure.
Sometimes it’s something as complicated as getting hit with a thrall so hard he can barely walk and has to let Lúcio drive him home. Jesse knocks on the wall next to Lúcio’s open door with a grin. Lúcio is at his desk, tapping away at his keyboard.
“Hey boss,” Jesse says, and Lúcio looks up as though he’s only just noticed him there.
Lúcio is old, and he’s had enough of Jesse’s blood over the years that he could probably tell the moment he walked in the building. It’s a practiced kind of obliviousness Jesse has noticed in a lot of older vampires— all the little ways they pretend to be human.
Survival instincts that are impossible to shake, even after living for centuries in the open, now.
“Hey there, deathwish. Come in. I was just filling out your retraining certification.”
Jesse flops down on the couch that runs along one of the walls, setting his hat on the table next to him with a lascivious expression on his face.
“You sign it already? We gonna skip out on all this boring shit and get straight to the good stuff, or?”
Lúcio rolls his eyes as he gets up from behind the desk, sucking air through his teeth.
“Man, you know better than that by now, don’t you? I’ll sign it when you show me you still know how to shake off a thrall before it sets in, like I know you do, because I’ve seen you do it.”
Jesse tilts his head in contemplation while Lúcio closes his door, clicking the lock shut and closing his blinds. They weren’t gonna be doing anything untoward— not here anyway— but donor privacy necessitated discretion.
“I ain’t never been hit with nothing like that before, not even from you. I don’t think there’s any shaking that shit off, honestly. Felt like getting hit by a train or fucking… falling in a hole and never hitting the bottom.”
Lúcio sits down on the couch next to him with a frown.
“Even with the high intensity training I put you through after that catering clusterfuck?”
Jesse shakes his head.
“A lot heavier shit. It was…” Jesse sighs dreamily and manages to look a little sheepish. “It was fuckin’ amazing, boss.”
That’s the problem, when it all comes down to it. When Jesse is safe, when he’s with someone he trusts, when he knows nothing bad is going to happen to him?
He loves the thrall. The way it seeps into him, warm all over and pliant like he’s floating in water. Not a care in the world, nothing to do but relax into it. Lúcio pinches the bridge of his nose with a sigh that’s far less pleased. He can tell when Jesse is going to behave, and when Jesse is going to be difficult, even before Jesse himself.
All Jesse can think of Gabriel’s thrall, how overwhelming it had been. How it had pulled him under before he could even dream of getting a hold of it. It hadn’t felt like some impersonal, predatory thing.
It had been heated, and soft, and full of need— the need to have Jesse.
The need to keep him. Gabriel doesn’t know him well enough for it to be more than some formless, instinctive urge, but it’s enough to have Jesse daydreaming. It’s impossible to focus on anything else, but Lúcio knows how to motivate him.
They know each other a lot better than Blood Apron would probably like; it isn’t Lúcio’s fault. Jesse is dogged when there’s something he wants, and he’d wanted Lúcio since the first time he’d fed from Jesse during his initial enthrallment training all those years ago. They don’t have some whirlwind fairy tale romance, but Lúcio is gorgeous and clever and funny and he’s always so soft with Jesse.
Of course he’s going to jump at the chance to spend time in Lúcio’s bed. He’s not entirely sure what Lúcio sees in him; Lúcio tells him nice things about himself constantly, not just when they’re naked with his teeth in Jesse, but he’s not sure he believes them. Still, he doesn’t complain about ending up at Lúcio’s ritzy apartment a few times a year, violating every one of Blood Apron’s fraternization policies with unabashed enthusiasm.
“Alright, here’s the deal,” Lúcio starts, pointing a finger at Jesse. “You take this seriously— I mean it, now— and maybe later on we can see how all powerful this asshole’s thrall really was.”
Jesse grins wide, biting his lip and raising his eyebrows.
“Oh, can we now? Back at your place?”
It’s been four or five months since he last spent the night with Lúcio. A month since he’s gotten laid at all— the Shimadas have been busy with some rival yakuza uprising. They have things mostly settled, he thinks, but they don’t have him booked until well into the next week. Lúcio’s face is serious, but he can’t hide the way his eyes flash black for a moment before clearing.
“Yeah, back at my place. If you can get this done without letting me hit you just because you wanna fantasize about your new client’s thrall for a while.”
From anyone else it would sound jealous, but Lúcio’s grinning. It had taken Jesse days to convince Lúcio not to pull his booking with Gabriel and put someone else in his place. He’s overprotective of Jesse, the way he’s overprotective with all his donors that he meets after predation incidents. Jesse doesn’t blame him, but he also doesn’t think Gabriel’s dangerous, or at least not to him. If he wanted to hurt Jesse he could have, not to mention it was hard to believe that Jack Morrison, human rights activist icon, would be married to someone who’d victimize a blood donor.
Jesse raises his palms in the air in a gesture of surrender.
“I’ll be good. Promise.”
Lúcio takes Jesse’s wrist and pulls it up to his mouth.
“You better,” he says, and sinks his teeth in.
The thrall comes gently at first, then pushes harder, rolls higher. Coming from Lúcio, it feels almost like home, well-worn, like he’s come back to bed or pulled on an old shirt he hasn’t seen in a while. It would be easy to sink into it— Lúcio is so good to him, and Jesse is safe here— but he keeps his promise. Lúcio might break the rules, but he won’t do it at work surrounded by his colleagues. Jesse can behave himself long enough for Lúcio to sign off on his retraining.
There are better things to come.
-
Lúcio’s apartment is in the upscale part of town, a penthouse sitting high above the city with a view that took Jesse’s breath away the first time he laid eyes on it. He doesn’t spare it a glance on his way inside today.
He’s seen it before, and there’ll be time for that later.
Lúcio’s bed is more comfortable than Jesse’s own, mostly because Lúcio is in it with him. They’re both naked, Jesse on his back with Lúcio straddling him, dreadlocks loose around his face. His eyes are black. He doesn’t bother trying to clear them.
Jesse likes to see his hunger there; likes to see the want in Lúcio so obviously manifested where others might do their best to hide it. He has his palms on Lúcio’s thighs, and he slides them higher, thumbs rubbing circles where they meet his hips. They’ve already fucked once; he’s still inside Lúcio, come dripping messy between them. Jesse’s spent, but in a moment, that won’t make much of a difference. He squeezes Lúcio’s hips, tilting his head to the side to expose his throat.
“You gonna show me what’s what with that thrall of yours, boss?”
Lúcio had heavily implied that he’d been holding back on Jesse, concerned the full strength of his venom might be too much for him. He wasn’t prideful, not the way Gabriel seemed to be, but he also didn’t appear too keen on Jesse enjoying being hit with such a powerful thrall from someone he didn’t entirely trust.
Lúcio would rather give it to Jesse himself than have him seek it elsewhere and endanger himself. He wraps a hand around the back of Jesse’s neck and tugs him up off the bed a little, pinning him in place with that black-eyed stare.
“You’re not gonna be able to shake this, but I want you to resist for as long as you can, alright?”
Jesse grinned.
“Awfully confident, ain’t we?”
Jesse knows damn well that Lúcio can put him on his ass if he wants to, but the temptation to tease him is too strong to ignore. Lúcio tugs gently at his hair.
“Don’t know why everybody likes you so much,” he says, but there’s so much fondness in his voice that the effect is ruined.
Lúcio bends down and presses a wet kiss to Jesse’s throat just over his pulse point, licking across the scars there. Jesse knows what he’s thinking— that he wishes he’d gotten to Jesse sooner. That he could have saved him from having them in the first place.
Then Lúcio growls softly, and sinks his teeth into Jesse with a sigh. His hips are already rolling in anticipation as he starts pushing his venom into Jesse, the thrall starting to simmer in him. It’s almost nothing at first— like a fledgeling who hasn’t learned to control it, or someone who is accidentally forgetting to reign themselves in.
Jesse moans quietly; even without a thrall he enjoys being fed from, and Lúcio is one of his favorites. He can feel when Lúcio starts pushing harder. The venom makes the bite itself feel different, but there’s also a haze at the edges of everything, threatening to swallow him. It’s much stronger now— stronger than most of his clients have ever summoned. Stronger than the asshole who almost put him in the ground.
It’s easy to resist, now, even if arousal is climbing high enough that he can’t ignore it. He’s hard again, fucking into Lúcio lazily as he breathes through the impulse to let the thrall have him. Lúcio is strong, and safe. Maybe it’s not some happily ever after love story, but they do love each other, in their own ways.
Lúcio pets his fingers through Jesse’s hair, and then suddenly it isn’t easy, anymore.
Everything he’d felt before had been the tide coming in, and now Lúcio was dragging him into the depths of the ocean. Jesse whimpers, trembling all over as he’s pulled down. Lust spikes bright and hot through him; he comes again, helpless to stop it, clinging to Lúcio with shaking fingers and mewling like an animal. It does nothing to diminish how impossibly hard he is, grinding into Lúcio, fingers digging into his thighs.
Even the thrall Gabriel hit him with pales in comparison. This is something ancient, drawing Jesse in until there is nothing but Lúcio’s teeth and Lúcio’s touch and Lúcio’s skin. Jesse wants to give him everything.
Jesse wants Lúcio to keep drinking until there is nothing left.
He tries to say something— to beg Lúcio, please, don’t stop, keep going I need it— but all that comes out is an incoherent mumble.
When Lúcio pulls his teeth out, Jesse is crying. He pulls weakly at Lúcio’s hair, trying to coax his face back to the wound. Jesse needs him to take more. Needs him to take it all.
“Oh, sweetheart,” Lúcio says, licking at the blood that’s dripping down his throat and moving sinuously atop him. “I gotchu, okay? I’m right here, Jesse.”
Jesse nods, so drunk on Lúcio’s thrall that he can’t do anything but collapse on the bed and let Lúcio ride him. Lúcio leans down to keep himself pressed against Jesse— knows Jesse needs the contact. Needs the kisses, and the hands on his face, and Lúcio’s voice murmuring soft in his ear.
Needs the praise, you’re so good Jesse, just relax.
I’ll give you what you need, baby.
Jesse knows he will. Knows Lúcio backs up his promises with action.
Knows that if someone genuinely hurts Jesse, he’ll put them in the ground. He’s done it before.
He’d do it again.
It’s hours before Jesse comes back to himself, still fucking idly into Lúcio, both of them filthy with blood and sweat and come.
“You with me again?” Lúcio asks, and Jesse nods dumbly, a ridiculous smile on his face.
“Go ahead and say it. I can tell you wanna.”
Lúcio grins, pressing a kiss to Jesse’s forehead and brushing the hair out of his eyes.
“Told you so, baby. Ain’t nobody got nothing on me. Especially not some fuckboy client who can’t keep his thrall in check when he barely knows your name.”
Jesse huffs a laugh.
“I don’t know that he’s a fuckboy. He’s married to Jack Morrison, that’s gotta count for somethin’.”
Lúcio shrugs, looking over Jesse with a smirk.
“There’s no accounting for taste, I suppose.”
“HEY!”
Jesse smacks his ass, rolls him onto his back, and fucks him until he’s making breathy little sounds and coming between them with a hiss. Lúcio feeds again— just a few mouthfuls, mostly because Jesse offers his throat and Lúcio has a hard time saying no.
Lúcio isn’t worn out but he stays in bed with Jesse anyway, nosing through his hair as he dozes.
The thrall is still there, lingering on the edges of Jesse’s awareness. As hard as Lúcio hit him, it’ll be there well into the next day. He’s got an appointment scheduled with Genji and Hanzo then. He wonders if they’ll taste Lúcio on him.
Wonders if Lúcio knows they will, and put his mark on Jesse on purpose, like a beast marking its territory.
Jesse rubs the bites on his throat and smiles.