Surely she would come.
He heard the sound of soft footfalls on the grass, and he knew it was not an ambush. Vivianne hurried across the lawn, her cheeks flushed and her eyes shining with some emotion he could not name. For a moment, it was enough. “I’m glad you came,” she whispered when she reached him, and in spite of his own promise to wait out her hesitations, Klaus could not repress a smile.
He couldn’t remember the last time he had felt this way about a woman—a century? More? She’d asked to see him, and now she was here...If Mikael had been standing behind him with a white oak stake at that exact moment, Klaus might have died a happy man. Better than that, though, was to live—to live in the astonishing glow of this remarkable young woman, and to know that it was within his reach to win her over.
“I could not have stayed away,” he murmured, speaking the absolute truth. He had never seen her handwriting before that evening, but he had recognized it on sight. Nothing could have kept him from this meeting, not even the very real possibility that it might have been a trap.
He had never truly believed that, though, not really. This was not Klaus’s first midnight rendezvous with a woman, and they usually all had the same purpose. Crickets sang nearby, and the scent of honeysuckle wafted toward them from the vines that climbed the garden wall. It was perfect.
“I needed to see you again,” she breathed, so softly that at first he thought he had misheard her. Then she lifted her face to gaze at him earnestly, and he knew there had been no mistake. “I thought I knew who you were before I even met you, Niklaus Mikaelson,” she told him, “but every time we speak I seem to learn something new. There is depth to you, and passion of course, and a kind of honor I didn’t expect to find. I am more drawn you to every time I see you, but we could never be together. Now that I’ve come to know you a bit more fully, I feel it’s only right to tell you so myself, face-to-face. I have asked you here tonight to make you understand that you must let me go.”
Klaus found himself at a rare loss for words. So he kissed her instead, his lips pressing firmly against her warm ones and his hand gently holding the back of her head in place. She kissed him back, tentative but curious. When she pulled back she rested her dark head against his chest, and he could feel her heart racing. He could have stood there just that way for the rest of the night, if she would agree to it.
“Niklaus, I’m engaged,” she reminded him. Her voice was a bit muffled against the collar of his shirt, but to his keen ear she sounded confused and indecisive. Then she straightened, running her hands over her face as if to brush away any lingering traces of him. “I wish that the things you said the other night could become our reality, but my engagement is too far gone already. I have made promises, and I made them of my own free will. I have an opportunity to seal the peace for good, and if I back out now there will be a slaughter. Hundreds dead on both sides, and it will all be because of me. Because I was weak, and because I put my own selfish desires above the lives of everyone else I love.”
It was unsettling that she chose the past tense when speaking of him, but he did not feel that hope was lost. “Nothing needs to be decided tonight,” he urged gently. “You are not yet married—there is time to consider.”
“It’s not just that.” Vivianne would not meet his eyes, and Klaus felt a stab of fear. Why had she said that she could “seal the peace for good”? What did that mean exactly? It could not be the simple act of her marriage. There was something more, and it was something that he needed to know.
“Tell me,” he insisted, and he saw her shiver.
“They want me to change,” she whispered. “The Navarros. They say I was raised as a witch, and so I need to become equally werewolf.”
Of course they did. Klaus understood it all immediately. If Vivianne were to activate the wolf within her, then the alliance would be undeniably skewed in favor of the werewolves. She would be truly stuck between both worlds, and married to a man who belonged to only one of them. “And they do not want you to speak to anyone else about this,” he guessed.
Her answering nod was small, and she glanced over her shoulder at the villa behind her. She knew something was wrong with this request, no matter how much she wanted to believe that neither family would let her come to harm. She was young, and for all of her steely intelligence, she was also naive. She did not yet understand how vulnerable her sweetness made her, and so it would fall to Klaus to rip the throats out of anyone who attempted to use it against her.
“It was part of the pact,” she admitted haltingly, “that they wouldn’t ask me—that I wouldn’t have to—”
The witches had been wise, but it may have been all for nothing. The werewolves weren’t as interested in the pact itself as they were in using it to gain the upper hand. “That you wouldn’t need to kill a human and become a full werewolf,” he finished sternly, wanting to make her hear the full measure of what she was considering. In order to activate her werewolf side, she’d have to commit murder, and then she’d change on the full moon...and every moon after that. “I can’t imagine anyone who loves you wanting that for you.”
Not to mention that there were those who believed it was bad enough to be one type of supernatural being, and the thought of two active powers living in the same body sounded hellish. Klaus himself had killed thousands of times, and yet he could not become a werewolf, because his mother had prevented it. She had cast a spell to cut off that part of him, locked it away forever and called it “balance.” Her magic honored nature, except when her pride or infidelity perverted it. Because of Esther’s hypocrisy, this was a path down which he could not follow Vivianne, should she choose to go.
“I don’t want it for myself,” Viv retorted, her lovely face betraying her agony. “But I want it for them. For us. For New Orleans and my parents and the werewolves and the witches and the humans who won’t be caught in the crossfire anymore. Becoming a true werewolf is the only way I can ever really be a part of their pack, so that they will listen to me and accept my marriage.”
Why would they bargain for it if they didn’t intend to accept it, Klaus wanted to ask her, unless it was to spring this on you when the moment grew near? But she wasn’t ready to hear that truth, he knew, and it would only drive her away from him. “If they do not want you as you are, they do not deserve to have you,” he growled instead, and then wrapped an arm around her waist and pulled her near to kiss her again, despite her halfhearted resistance. “Come with me tonight, and leave this trap before it can close around you.”
She rested her forehead against his collarbone, closing her eyes, struggling with herself. “This has to end, you and me,” she argued, and her voice was rough with tears. “I felt like I had to tell you in person, but I am sorry if that only caused you pain. It hurts me more than you know.”
“Then undo it,” Klaus said. “I will forget that you ever said these things, and you can do the same. Nothing is done yet. No one is married; no one is dead.”
“It is done,” she argued, pulling back and staring up at him earnestly. “It was done as soon as I was born. I can’t know what is required of me and walk away. How can I? You don’t understand what it’s like, to live between two warring worlds like this. I never asked for the responsibility, but there is no one else who can accomplish what I can. If I refuse now, it will ruin everything.”