Bane's Choice

by Alyssa Day

  Of course, he didn’t want to ravish her. Men who looked like gods come to life didn’t frolic about with women who looked like her. Also, since when had she even thought the word frolic?

  He was throwing her completely off balance. Ravish her.

  If only.

  Damn.

  “It never occurred to me that you would,” she snapped.

  “Liar. I can hear your heart beating. Don’t you realize that? It speeds up and slows down depending on your emotional state, which isn’t really necessary, since everything you feel shows on your face, little human.”

  “Now, you’re just trying to insult me.” She slipped past him and stepped into the room, which felt like one of the bravest things she’d ever done in her life.

  Get clean, get a look at Mr. Evans, and get out.

  Get clean, get a look at Mr. Evans, and get out.

  Get clean, get a look at Mr. Evans…

  Holy cow, this is his study?

  It was enormous. Books on shelves lined every wall, and the ceilings had to be eighteen feet off the floor, just like in the ballroom. She gasped and turned in a complete circle. “This is the most beautiful room I’ve ever seen in my life. It’s like Beast’s library that he gifted to Belle. This is all yours?”

  “If I say yes, does that make me the beast in your analogy?”

  “More like the belle, O Gorgeous One,” she muttered, but clearly he heard it, because that lazy, sexy, far-too-seductive smile widened. On the other hand, if she distracted him with flattery, maybe it would be easier to find a way out.

  “So. You can leave now,” she said, not having much hope.

  Sure enough, he shut the door behind himself and leaned back against it, making her heart thud inside her chest.

  She was trapped. In a room.

  With a vampire.

  And, even if he’d been only human, he was much bigger than her, which meant that she was unlikely to escape unless he allowed her to do so. The anger that rushed through her at the thought—the memory of hands on her ass in classrooms, of “accidental” brushes against her breasts by men “just reaching for the instruments,” and the daily indignities and verbal assaults that came with simply being a woman in the world—that anger burned through the terror. She’d leave his room whenever she damned well felt like it, whether he allowed her to or not.

  Ryan wasn’t much for waiting for a man to allow her to do anything.

  “You like it?” He watched her, waiting for her answer, but she’d gone so far past their actual conversation in her mind that she had to cast back in her memory before she could answer him.

  “Oh. The room. Yes, it’s…it’s really lovely,” she admitted.

  And it was. The room had clearly been originally designed to be a library with a private study for the man of the house, and somehow, she knew it fit Bane to perfection. It was all rich, mahogany shelves holding hundreds or even thousands of books, leather chairs, and a cherry-wood desk, not designed to be the centerpiece of the room but just a place to work, from what she could see. There were papers and files on it, and a sleek, silver computer, which made her laugh out loud.

  “Something’s funny?” His voice was low and husky and deep, and it curled around her senses like the soft brush of cashmere on bare skin.

  “No, I just—it struck me as incongruous for a vampire to have a computer. It feels like you should have scrolls and a quill with an ink stand, you know?” She laughed at her own foolishness.

  He studied her, the expression on his face as puzzled and yet rapt as if she were a particularly fascinating specimen of talking parrot or trained monkey. “Do you always say everything that comes into your mind?”

  Irritation scratched at her. “No, I do not. I do not say, for example, I’m sorry, Mr. Smith, but this cancer is inoperable, which makes us pretty damn worthless to you, or We really can’t help you, Mrs. Jones, because your child is very ill, and we can’t figure out why, or even I must be ridiculous to be alone in a room with a man who either believes he’s a vampire, in which case he’s crazy, or really is a vampire, in which case I’m crazy. So no, Bane, which can’t possibly be your real name, I don’t blurt out everything that comes into my mind, and you really can’t read every emotion on my face. Maybe now that we’ve gotten that out of the way, you can show me to your bathroom, which hopefully has a door that locks?”

  He blinked, and then he started laughing.

  Damn the man, even his laugh was beautiful.

  “Do you really imagine that a lock would keep me out?” His voice was mild, but his eyes still sparkled with amusement.

  “You don’t actually think you’re coming into the bathroom with me, I hope?”

  “Hope. Ah. The last resort of disappointed humans.” He stalked her across the room, a predator cornering his prey.

  Too bad for him that she was definitely not prey.

  “Then let me put it this way. You should stay out of the bathroom while I take a shower. If you can’t promise that, then I’m out of here.”

  His eyes gleamed a hot blue that seared through her all the way to her toes.

  “There is no should to a vampire, Dr. St. Cloud,” he said, reaching out to touch her hair.

  She yanked her head away. “Ask.”

  He froze, his silken brows drawing together. “Ask what?”

  “If you want to touch my hair, ask me,” she told him, hating that her voice sounded far more breathless than demanding, but still proud of herself for forcing out the words.

  “Ah.” He took a step back. “You demand consent?”

  “Yes. I demand consent.”

  In a fraction of a second, he put his hands on her waist and lifted her into the air, pushing her back against the wall, until only Meara’s towels and not even a breath of air was trapped between them.

  “I am a vampire. I don’t give a damn about your consent,” he rasped.

  Something heavy, with sharp, jagged edges, sank from her heart to her stomach, but she glared defiance at him. “Then you will never, ever have it.”

  He tilted his head to one side. “Do you know that your skin glows when your emotions are heightened? I wonder why that is.”

  “I what?”

  He leaned even closer and whispered into her ear. “I want you, little human, and I always, always get what I want. Do you think to tame me with your refusal? I am not human. The Turn stripped me of any gentle emotions that you might expect or prize. And you forget—I can hear your heartbeat. I can see your skin glow. I know that you want me, too.”

  “Put me down. Now,” she gritted out. “Enough about this glowing skin lie. And you might want to remember that anger and fear make the heart beat faster, just as much as arousal, not to mention several varying degrees of cardiovascular disease. And yes, in case you’re wondering, I just compared my feelings about you to my feelings about atherosclerosis.”

  Instead of putting her down, though, he threw her over his shoulder, opened another door, marched through an enormous bedroom that she was too furious and too upside-down to really see much of beyond deep, rich colors of midnight blue and burgundy. Then he shoved open the door to an equally large, though blindingly white, bathroom and, finally, put her on her feet.

  “Here you are. You wanted to get clean. Strip. Now,” he demanded, his voice hard and dark with anger or lust.

  Or both.

  Fine. Fury and a spectacularly misplaced wave of arousal were surging through her body, making her skin feel hot and tight. But not glowy. She glanced down at her arms, just in case.

  No. Not glowing at all. Whatever the hell that was about. She bared her teeth at him. “Not this time, Vampire. Just go ahead and kill me. I’d rather die than get naked with you.”

  He took a step back, the fire in his eyes banking and then hardening to blue ice.

  �
�Fine,” he snarled. “Prepare to die.”

  Chapter Fourteen

  Edge tilted his head and took a mental inventory: beat all to hell, but still alive.

  Good enough, then.

  The Were staring at him must be Carter Reynolds, president and alpha of the Wolf Pack MC. Luckily, the man was acting like he might be reasonable, although that wasn’t what Edge expected from a werewolf.

  He could feel his lips curling back from his teeth and forced his face into a neutral expression. Bane’s reaction to the dying human, and then Evans attacking Meara…it was no wonder Edge had been blindly racing away from the mansion on his bike.

  He should have flown, but flying was dangerous. Sometimes, after all, humans did look up.

  The silver net that had flown across the highway and knocked him off his bike had been powered by the stinking fuel of blood magic, and the warlock had laughed in his face before her thugs had knocked him out and transported him here. If the crash hadn’t beaten him up so badly, Edge could have easily overpowered or escaped the three men, but he hadn’t fed in a while, and his recuperative powers were at a low point.

  The warlock must have put him in a temporary magical stasis spell, too, once they’d carried him inside the building and dumped him on the floor. With a final whisper that if he moved, he died, and a searing pain from a burning blast of magic, she’d disappeared just before the wolves entered the room.

  But he’d been awake for her conversation with Reynolds, pulling up the alpha’s file in his eidetic memory.

  Carter Reynolds: 32 years old, parents deceased, one sister living

  Alpha, Savannah Wolf Pack MC, for 13 years

  Reputation: Lethal

  Second: Maxine Washington, goes by Max, female, 28 years old

  Reputation: Also lethal

  Pack status: 47 current members

  Reynolds nodded at him again. “So, you said we need to talk. Talk.”

  Edge glanced around the room, and Reynolds took the not-very-subtle hint.

  “My people can be trusted. If they couldn’t, they wouldn’t be here.”

  Edge shrugged, trying not to wince when one of his broken ribs protested the movement. “Fine. As you’ve seen, we’ve got warlocks. They want to kill us and take our territory.”

  Reynolds’s eyes narrowed. He was a big man, thickly muscled and maybe six feet tall. He had very short hair, dark brown skin, and sharp brown eyes that missed nothing.

  “I think you got that wrong, vampire. They want to kill you and take your territory, according to the lady. She gave you to us as a gift, in fact.”

  Edge laughed, but there was nothing happy about the sound that came out of his throat. “That would be the worst fucking present of your life, wolf. And I said us, because I’ve never met a werewolf who’d be willing to roll over and show his belly to a warlock. Or do I have that wrong?”

  The second, Max, still in wolf form, crouched and snarled at him, but Reynolds held up a hand. “Easy, Max. He’s an asshole, but he’s not wrong. There’s no way we’re letting blood magic users encroach on our territory. From what little I’ve heard of this Chamber, they’re seriously bad news.”

  Edge snorted. “Calling the Chamber bad news is like calling a tornado a little bit of wind. They’re powerful practitioners with delusions of godhood, and they’ve sent at least one necromancer.”

  Reynolds swore and jerked his chin toward a door in the rear of the room. “A necromancer. Fuck that. Let’s go into my office and chat. The rest of you, get busy. We need to find out more about these damn warlocks and what they want. Make sure all the families are protected. We may need to get them out of town. Move.”

  They moved.

  One thing you could say for a werewolf pack, after all: they followed chain of command.

  At least until they didn’t, and somebody ripped the alpha’s throat out.

  In the office, which was strictly utilitarian, with a couple of desks, each with its own computer, and a few filing cabinets, Reynolds pointed at a chair. “Sit. Want a beer?”

  Before Edge could answer, Reynolds narrowed his eyes. “You’ll get nothing else to drink here.”

  “I don’t drink wolf. You all taste like wet dog.”

  Hot amber flared in the alpha’s eyes, but he just waited.

  “Yeah,” Edge told him. “A beer would be fine.”

  The wolf got a couple of Savannah Brown Ales out of a small refrigerator, opened them, and handed one to Edge.

  “Never thought I’d be drinking beer with a vampire.”

  Edge raised his bottle in a mock salute. “Believe me, it wasn’t my plan for the day, either. Fucking warlocks.”

  They both drank, and then the wolf aimed a direct stare at Edge. “What do you know about them?”

  “Unfortunately, not a hell of a lot. We wiped out a nest of them a few days back, north of here in the Savannah National Wildlife Refuge.”

  “We go up there and run sometimes,” Reynolds said, his voice hard. “Fucking warlocks, indeed. They have time to kill off all the local wildlife?”

  “It was definitely on the decline, but we think we got them before the situation was beyond repair. It was bad. Three warlocks are dead, but the worst of them—a necromancer—managed to escape. We’re looking for him, but the Chamber is very good at covering its tracks.”

  Reynolds sat back in his chair, eyes narrowing. “That’s bad.”

  “Bad. Yeah. If by bad, you mean apocalyptic. Listen, we should work together on this.” Edge said this without consulting Bane first, because he knew that they’d be in perfect agreement on this one. They already had a truce with the wolves, and as much as he hated to admit it even to himself, even werewolves were better than warlocks.

  Barely.

  Reynolds thought about it for a minute, to his credit, and then he stood up and held out his hand. “Yeah. Even vampires are better than warlocks.”

  Edge almost grinned to hear his own thoughts paralleled so closely, but instead he stood and shook the wolf’s hand. “We’ll be in touch. We’ll find out what we can during the night, and you take the daytime. We’ll send these bastards back to the hell they worship.”

  Reynolds nodded. “This is our territory, and we’re not going to let any fucking warlocks take it over. We’re with you, man. Have Bane check in.”

  “Will do.” Edge put the empty bottle down on the desk and turned to go, his mind running scenarios for possibly tracking the Chamber operatives through the dark web.

  That’s why he wasn’t on guard against the wolf who attacked him when he opened the office door.

  Chapter Fifteen

  The doctor didn’t run.

  She didn’t scream.

  She didn’t do anything that a thousand other humans had done when confronted with Bane in his most fearsome, almost-feral state.

  Instead, she laughed in his face.

  After the long, long moment it took for him to swallow his shock, he started laughing, too.

  “Okay, that was a bit much,” he admitted.

  “Prepare to die?” She put one hand against the glass wall of the shower, as if she had to hold herself up because she was laughing too hard to stand upright.

  “It wasn’t that funny,” he growled.

  She wiped her eyes with the corner of one of the towels she still held. “Oh, no. It really, really was. I mean, kill me if you must, but spare me the melodramatic threats. You’re no Inigo Montoya.”

  A dark spear of anger caught him by surprise. “Who the fuck is this Montoya? Is he your lover?”

  Does he need to die?

  Her eyes widened. “Is he my…are you kidding? Have you never seen The Princess Bride?”

  The conversation was spiraling out of control, fast. On the other hand, the way she was laughing was doing extremely interesting
things to her curves, and suddenly he forgot about everything but the way she looked and the way his cock was hardening nearly to the point of pain.

  If she’d only quit laughing, maybe he could convince her to let him strip her clothes off her lush body and carry her into the shower, where he’d soap down every single inch of that pearly, nearly translucent skin until she begged him to put his mouth on her.

  Interesting how the glow in her skin calmed down when she started to laugh. It was definitely a symptom of heightened emotion. He’d seen fear, anger, and—he hoped—arousal cause it.

  He stood there, frozen, listening to her musical laugh, wishing she were laughing with him and not at him, and realized the truth: he’d started giving a damn about her consent exactly when she told him she’d never, ever give it to him.

  He stilled. He’d never taken a woman’s body without her agreement, but he’d taken blood from many people—both men and women—without their consent. Many, by force. He’d made them forget afterward, but that didn’t mitigate his sins. He had done horrible things in his centuries in the dark, and he could never be redeemed for any of them.

  Even to touch this brave human—this healer—would be a grotesque affront.

  Darkness besmirching the sunlight.

  She’d braved his wrath and even taken the knowledge of what he was—what all of them were—in stride, in her fervor to protect a man she knew only as a patient.

  He should be on his knees to her for her courage, and instead he’d insulted and threatened her. He shook his head, trying to dislodge the copper taste of shame from his throat, but stopped when he realized how richly he deserved to feel it.

  And then he backed up until he was just outside the room.

  “I’m sorry,” he managed to say, forcing the words past the boulder in his throat. “I was wrong.”

  And how long had it been since he’d uttered those words to anyone?

  Her slightly hysterical laughter slowed and then stopped, and she drew in a huge, deep breath. “I—what?”

  “I’m sorry. Please, lock the door. I’ll stand guard, but out in my study. No one would dare to come into these rooms, in any case. You will be quite safe.” He could barely manage to meet her gaze, so he didn’t. He looked at the sinks—at the shower—at the towels she held.