by Sarah Piper
“Anything,” I breathed.
Up to that point, he’d still been kneeling at my side, but now he climbed into the bed on top of me, kissing his way down my stomach, across the tops of each thigh, and inside each knee as he parted my legs. With a soft, seductive sigh, he lowered his head, flicking his tongue against my clit.
His silky hair brushed my skin, and I held my breath in anticipation, my thighs already trembling for him.
“More,” I breathed.
He licked a slow, teasing path up my center, sucking my clit between his teeth, and my whole body melted into the sheets like butter in a pan.
Between my thighs, I felt my vampire shudder.
“Darius,” I panted. “That’s… yes. Right there. I can’t…”
Darius groaned, searing my flesh with his insistent mouth. There were no more teasing touches, no more soft, slow swirls of pleasure. Suddenly I was being devoured.
His hands gripped my thighs and pinned them to the bed, and he fucked me with his tongue, his lips, his breath, all of it pushing me to the very edge of my limits, the edge of my sanity. The cabin walls spun around me, and I arched my hips off the bed, squirming beneath him, almost unable to take another minute of his hot, insistent mouth.
He overpowered me easily, tightening his grip on my thighs, shoving his tongue deep inside me in one last, powerful thrust, unleashing an explosive orgasm that rocked my core. There was no warning, no slow build. Only ecstasy. I fisted his hair and pulled him closer, rocking against his mouth, riding out the very last ripples of pure pleasure.
Before my muscles had even stopped trembling, Darius shifted between my legs, guiding them over his shoulders, pushing against the backs of my thighs as he leaned in for another kiss, my taste fresh on his lips. His rock-hard cock brushed my clit, unleashing another aftershock of pleasure that made me shiver.
He pulled back from our kiss and looked deep into my eyes, his own eyes dark with desire and lust and something else—something that made my heart beat faster and my stomach tremble. Something that went beyond mates and blood bonds.
Something I was afraid to name, because if I said it out loud, it might just disappear.
“You absolutely intoxicate me,” he whispered.
I couldn’t speak, so I only smiled, arching up against his cock, letting my body tell him exactly what kind of effect he was having on me.
Intoxicating didn’t even begin to cover it.
Darius moaned softly, but he didn’t break his gaze, refusing to sever the connection that seemed to be holding us both together. Here. Now.
Real.
Sliding a hand under my ass, he rolled his hips, plunging that perfect length deep inside me. I gasped in pleasure, and he captured my mouth in another searing kiss, fucking me deeper, harder, making me more delirious with every thrust.
I was coming unglued, even as his kisses held me together. I tried to fight it, tried to hold on a little bit longer, tried to savor it. But he was too perfect, too wild, too intense, and in the end, I had no choice but to let go.
With a final cry of pure ecstasy, I tumbled over the edge, falling and falling and falling, my body tightening around him as he fucked me harder and faster, both of us clinging to each other as our two hot, glistening bodies shattered into a million pieces.
When I finally caught my breath again, I opened my eyes to find I was still in Darius’s arms, still whole and alive.
I smiled, my eyes blurring with tears.
Somehow, he’d found a way to put my pieces back together.
Twenty-Five
Darius
“You know, vampire,” Gray said, turning over in my arms so her backside fit snugly against my front. We’d spent the last hour devouring each other without words, but I could tell from the teasing tone in her voice that I was quickly heading for a battle of wills.
“Just say it, little brawler.”
“I was just thinking about our deal, and all of our conversations since then, and I seem to recall something about pre-conditions.”
Biting back a smile, I said, “I’m certain I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“No? You don’t remember that whole ‘in my bed, I’m in charge, and you will beg me for it’ thing?”
“My memory is… not what it used to be.”
“This certainly doesn’t feel like your bedroom,” she went on, ignoring me.
I smiled into her hair, inhaling her sweet scent. “No, it doesn’t.”
“And I don’t recall having to beg you for it.”
“No, you certainly didn’t.”
“Interesting, D. I really thought you’d stick to your guns on this one. Are you really that much of a pushover that you’d let one little witch take advantage of you?”
“We’re in the Shadowrealm,” I reminded her. “Technically, it doesn’t count.”
“Ah, I see. The old ‘what happens in the Shadowrealm stays in the Shadowrealm’ defense.”
“Indeed.”
“So you’re saying you want to take it all back?”
“What I’m saying, little brawler…” I nipped the back of her neck, making her squeal. “…is the moment we get back home, all the old rules apply. I will take you in my bed, and you will beg me for it.”
She wriggled against me, the touch of her soft, warm flesh making me hard as steel. “Ha! I think we both know who’ll be doing the begging in this arrangement.”
“You win,” I said, knowing full well she was right. Now that I’d tasted her, filled her, there was nothing I wouldn’t give her, nothing I wouldn’t do to hear the hum of pleasure in her blood as she screamed my name.
I pressed another kiss to the back of her neck, then reluctantly crawled out of bed. The temperature outside had dropped to below freezing, and I worried she’d grow cold again.
After seeing her in the snow like that, bent and broken, so pale she was nearly blue… I never wanted her to be cold again.
I placed a few more logs on the fire, stoking it back to a crackling roar.
When I returned to our bed, she was staring up at the ceiling, her face contemplative.
I crawled back in beside her and pulled her against my chest like before, her back to me. I liked her this way, safe and protected in my arms. “What are you thinking about, love?”
“Our blood bond,” she said, her voice made even softer by the crackling fire before us.
“What of it?”
“Does it connect our memories, somehow?”
I considered her question. “I suppose it’s possible. It allows me to sense you and your magic, so it stands to reason it might allow you to sense certain things about me as well. Why do you ask?”
“You said you healed me with some of your blood.”
“Yes, but it was a very small amount. Nothing that would harm you.”
“I remember tasting it now,” she said. “The richness on my tongue. It wasn’t like Jonathan’s. It was… soothing. I felt it sort of… I don’t know. Like I wasn’t actually swallowing it, but letting it sink into me, deep down. Immediately after that, I drifted into this strange dream… But now I’m thinking maybe it wasn’t a dream at all.”
“Tell me,” I said.
“It was a long time ago, back when people still had horses and carriages instead of cars. I was in London, and I thought I saw…” She trailed off, almost as if she were afraid to say it out loud. Afraid she’d seen a ghost.
In many ways, I believed she had.
“What did you see, love?” I asked gently, though I already suspected her answer. There was only one reason she’d be dreaming of my home city, my home century.
“Your… your family,” she said, each word laden with pain. Hers, mine, that of my children… What did it matter now? I was so tangled up in her, so deeply connected to her that her pain felt like mine, mine like hers.
I’d been thinking of them when I’d healed her. How could I not? The threat of actually losing Gray stirred a deep sense of fea
r and loss inside me, reminding me of so many other losses in my life. My human life.
Somehow, I’d transferred those memories to her.
“There was a woman,” she continued. “With gorgeous curly black hair and olive-green eyes.”
I pressed a kiss to her bare shoulder, pulling her closer to my chest. “My wife, Emmaline,” I said. It’d been a long time since I’d said her name out loud, but it still hurt just the same. “We had two children—Devin and Katarina.”
“I saw them, too. Your daughter had hair like her mom, right?”
“Oh, yes.” I laughed, the memory bittersweet. “Emmaline loved her curls, but Katarina hated them. She begged us to cut her hair short like her brother’s. Said her curls always got tangled in tree branches, preventing her from climbing as quickly as the boys. Emmaline spent more time pulling leaves and sticks out of Kat’s hair than she spent bandaging Devin’s skinned knees.”
Gray let out a soft laugh, the sound of it as bittersweet as mine had been. “Your family was beautiful, Darius.”
“Yes,” I said, because it was true. They were beautiful. Loving. Happy. They’d been the joys of my life. I had been blessed.
“Do you still think of them?” she asked.
“It was a long time ago, Gray.”
“Darius,” she breathed, and I could tell from the deep note of sadness in her voice that she’d finally decided to ask me the inevitable question. Rolling onto her back and gazing up into my eyes, she said, “How were you turned?”
I traced my thumb across her lips. If we were to share memories, I would’ve much rather she’d seen my family, the precious time that I’d been given with them. I would’ve wanted her to hear my children’s laughter, smell the apple cakes my wife baked for our birthdays. But when it came to the story of my past, I couldn’t cherry-pick the highlights. This, too, was part of that story. Part of my very creation. It was ugly and terrible, but it had happened. I could no more change it than I could snap my fingers and take us out of this realm.
“It is not a pretty story, Gray.”
“I know.” Her cheeks darkened, and she lowered her eyes. “I’m sorry. You don’t have to tell me. I… I didn’t mean to pry. I just—”
“It’s not that. It’s…” I traced my thumb across her lips again, and she looked up at me once more, catching me as always in her soothing, blue-eyed gaze.
Something in my chest tightened—a warning that had been lingering in my heart from the moment Gray and I had connected at Black Ruby. From the moment I’d sealed our blood bond.
Learning someone’s deepest, darkest secrets carried inevitable consequences. Gray would never look at me the same after this. Where now there was passion and friendship and desire and trust and maybe even love, as soon as I said the words of this tale, there would be pity. It would recolor everything she knew about me, everything she saw in me.
I supposed I could’ve made it easy on myself—on both of us—and fabricated a more comfortable explanation. That I would’ve died without turning, perhaps. Or that becoming a vampire had been my choice.
But the feelings I had for Gray were real, growing deeper every moment I spent with her. And a love built on deception, no matter how pure the intention, was no better than a paper boat set upon a stormy sea. It might float for a time, but in the end, it would only disintegrate.
“A year prior to my turning,” I began, “my younger brother Marcus disappeared. He’d always had a touch of wanderlust in his blood, like our father before us, so initially we’d thought he’d stowed away on a merchant ship to America, or taken a train to Eastern Europe. He’d done that sort of thing before, and had always turned up back in London after a time, with a happy glint in his eyes and plenty of stories to tell. But this time, weeks stretched into months, and after four months without word, we began to worry. We sent messages to his associates far and wide, contacted the police, did everything we could to try to track him down.”
“Did you hear back from anyone?” she asked.
“No one had any information. We began to worry that he’d gotten into trouble with the law in a foreign country and was imprisoned, or that he’d been injured or incapacitated with no way of reaching us. Eventually, we mourned him as dead.”
The fire hissed, shooting sparks into the chimney. I watched its orange light dance on the wall beside the bed. Gray remained silent.
“Exactly one year and a day since his disappearance,” I continued, “I returned home from my office in the city to find Marcus sitting in my gardens, dressed in fine silks and looking for all the world like an aristocrat. He was still Marcus, of course, but it seemed as though someone had erased all the flaws and imperfections that had made him human. He had no wrinkles, none of the cares that he used to wear like a heavy coat over his shoulders. And his eyes, once a deep brown, had lightened to a warm gold that caught and held the light in a way I knew couldn’t be natural.”
“Like yours,” she said, her hand warm against my cheek.
I nodded, kissing her palm.
“I’d heard stories about vampires,” I said, “but until that moment, I’d never considered them real. Then Marcus smiled at me, his teeth glinting in the moonlight, and said, ‘Do you know what I am, brother?’ And I found myself nodding, even though my mind was railing against the very thought of it. I was holding out for a sane explanation, a punchline on a year-long joke my brother had most certainly played on us.”
I closed my eyes, not wanting to see the change in her eyes that would inevitably come from hearing these words. This confession.
“My brother offered to turn me,” I said plainly, recalling that moment as if it were yesterday. “When I refused, he overpowered me and did it anyway.”
Gray’s gasp sent a pang into my heart. “But… why? Why would your own brother do something like that?”
“I spent a lot of time thinking about that, looking for some deep, complex explanation that would allow me to understand and—ultimately—forgive him. Perhaps he was coerced, I’d thought. Or maybe he truly believed he was offering me a precious gift, that my life would be so much better once I’d made the change.” I swallowed through the tightness in my throat, shocked that even after so many centuries, I still couldn’t accept the fact that he’d actually done it. “But in the end, I kept coming back to the truth as he’d confessed it the very next day: Marcus simply couldn’t bear the thought of living an eternity alone.”
“Did you kill him?” she whispered. “Once you were strong enough?”
“Oh, I thought of it, certainly. But I knew that wouldn’t change my fate. Wouldn’t return my life to me, wouldn’t return my family. In those early days, the bloodlust was terrifying; I didn’t trust myself not to hurt Emmaline and the kids, so I implored my brother to help me fake my own death in an accident, knowing it would bring them more peace that way. An accident was a horrible thing, but a real one, not a fairytale. They would grieve, they would struggle, but they wouldn’t lose their minds. Ultimately, they might find peace again. Maybe even happiness.”
Gray was silent for so long, I wondered if she’d fallen asleep. But then she shifted onto her hip and took my face in her hands, waiting patiently until I finally met her gaze again.
Her eyes shone with emotion. Not with pity, but sympathy. Empathy. She, too, had lost someone she loved to a person she thought she could trust. She, too, had had her choices taken away, her life’s trajectory altered as a result.
She understood this pain. I didn’t know why I’d ever feared she wouldn’t.
It was a strange thing, connecting with someone so deeply over such betrayal, such loss. There was a certain comfort in knowing you weren’t alone, but that knowledge was a double-edged sword. It meant that someone you loved had also endured the kind of pain that had nearly destroyed you. The kind of pain you’d give your own life to spare them from.
I brushed a curl from her forehead, tucking it behind her ear, staring at her in wonderment. How had fate seen fit
to bring this woman into my life? To crack open the heart I’d sealed off centuries ago?
“And Marcus?” she asked softly. “Where is he now?”
“Several weeks after turning me, he was traveling in Scotland, where he inadvertently crossed paths with a local vampire hunter. He was beheaded. Quite painlessly, from what I was told.”
“So he turned you just so he wouldn’t have to face immortality by himself, and then he got himself killed a few weeks later?”
“A cruel twist of irony,” I said. “Soon after, I relocated to America. I didn’t want to be reminded of my family. I knew eventually my wife would remarry, and my children would grow and have children of their own—that’s what I wanted for them. Eventually, they, too, would die, and so would their children, and all of the children who’d come after. Yet I would linger endlessly, forced to watch their lives begin and end from a distance, like a stranger trapped outside with his faced pressed to the glass.”
A tear slipped down her cheek.
“I don’t know what to say, Darius. I… I hate that you had to go through that. You lost your family. Your life. All because of someone who should’ve loved you enough to spare you that fate.”
“Love is funny that way, isn’t it? You think it comes with all these guarantees, all these failsafes—especially with family. With blood. But in reality, ‘should’ has nothing to do with it.”
Gray frowned, the faint line between her eyes deepening. “I’m sorry,” she whispered. “For all of it.”
“It brought me to you, Gray. How could I possibly wish for another outcome?”
“You’re saying that now, but if you’d never met me—”
“If I’d never met you,” I said, cupping her face and stroking her cheeks with my thumbs, “the world would be a pale imitation, the monotony of which I’d wander through like a ghost.”
“But—”
I captured her mouth in a bruising kiss, swallowing her words before she could voice any more protests. She yielded easily, melting softly in my arms.
I rolled on top of her, cradling her head as she parted her legs and invited me inside her once again. It was an effort to hold back, to stay present, to not explode inside her the moment her soft, warm flesh enveloped me again. I had never felt anything so perfect, so exquisite as this woman. Her warmth called to me, and as I slid deeper inside, my eyes closed in ecstasy, in wonder, in gratitude, and I thought of home.