Four hours. Exactly four hours, elven biology was nothing if not precise, and Astarion's eyes snapped open.

He was alert. No groggy transition — one moment trance, the next awake, every sense sharp.

The wound was healed. The venom was gone. His body was restored — muscles responsive, senses sharp, reflexes intact.

His throat, however, felt like someone had lined it with sandpaper and set it on fire.

The hunger hit him like a fist. Not the dull ache from earlier. This was a need — clawing, screaming, animal. The fight. The venom. The magical antitoxin burning through his system. All of it had drained whatever reserves he'd had left, and his body was demanding replenishment with the subtlety of a battering ram.

He didn't move. He shifted his gaze, slowly, carefully, across the log.

She was still there. Awake. Huddled against the far side of the fallen trunk in a tight, miserable ball, her arms wrapped around her knees, her teeth chattering in a continuous, exhausted rhythm. The torn pajama dress was dark with dew. Her lips had a faintly blue tinge. Her eyes, wide and bloodshot, ringed with dark circles, were locked on the canopy above, darting at every sound.

She had stayed awake. For four hours, in the freezing cold, in her nightdress, she had sat in the dark and watched the shadows and kept guard over a vampire who had tried to hunt her.

Something lodged itself behind his ribs. Indigestion. Obviously.

The wind shifted. He smelled her — warm skin, cold sweat, blood from the briar scratches on her legs. His pupils dilated until the red was nearly gone.

No.

He dug his nails into his palms. The old trick. The one that had gotten him through two hundred years of Cazador's dinner parties without breaking character. The pain sharpened the world back to manageable proportions.

He needed to move. Needed to get downwind. Needed to put distance between his nose and the scent of her blood before his willpower gave out.

Slowly, deliberately, he shifted his weight. Then he crunched a dry leaf under his boot — loudly, intentionally — announcing his movement before it could startle her.

She flinched anyway. Her head snapped toward him, her body coiling tight, ready to run.

"Well, look at you," he said softly. The raspiness was still there — hunger made his voice rougher, less controlled — but he kept it gentle. Non-threatening. He raised his hands slightly, palms out. "Still awake. You really are a stubborn little thing, aren't you?"

Her eyes tracked his every movement.

He looked down at his leather doublet — thick, lined, heavy enough to block the wind — and then back at her shivering frame. The imported linen shirt underneath was already ruined. Spider ichor and his own blood had seen to that. But the doublet was intact.

He unbuckled it slowly. Shrugged it off his shoulders with a small, involuntary wince — the wound was healed but the memory of it lingered — and held it out across the log.

"You look pathetic over there, darling, and I mean that with the utmost affection." A flicker of the old charm, but softer. Careful. "Take the jacket. Put it on before your limbs freeze solid. I promise I won't bite." A pause. The corner of his mouth twitched. "Unless, of course, you ask me to."