by Renee Rose
“Sweetheart, we—vampires—do exist. No, it is not a Halloween thing, a prank, or a joke. I haven’t lost my mind. This is real, Butterfly. Tomorrow, I want to take you downstairs at Club Toxic. I want to take our relationship to the next level. I want you to know everything because I love you, and I want to share all of eternity with you.”
“How did you—”
“I can read minds. It is one of my powers.”
“If you can read minds, what number am I thinking of?”
The age-old, what number am I thinking question. Humans are so very predictable. I listen to Keri debate with herself over what number to settle on.
“One million, five hundred and ninety-three thousand, six hundred and eighty-eight point two three four six seven zero eight five two…” I recite the numbers out loud in succession as she thinks them.
“B-b-but, vampires do not exist.”
“We do exist, Keri. Let me show you.”
“What do you mean, show me? What are you going to do, drink my blood?” She laughs.
I stand up and blur to the other side of the room and then back to her side, then I do it again, going upstairs and grabbing her small stuffed rabbit off her bed. She starts to sway in her chair. I blur across the room to catch her before she falls. That must have been more than she could handle. She goes limp in my arms.
I carry her downstairs to her room and gently place her in her bed. I wait for her to wake, pacing the room. Keri is strong. She isn’t like Arabella. Arabella was weak. She couldn’t handle the truth of who I am. Keri can handle it.
She has to.
Chapter 3
Opening my eyes slowly, I feel the softness underneath me. It’s the bed in the room Bentley has given me to use. He is sitting at the end of it. My boyfriend is a vampire.
My boyfriend is a vampire!
“That I am.”
“I’m not sure I like you reading my thoughts. I feel like it’s a violation of privacy or something.”
“Is there privacy between a dominant and his submissive?” he asks me.
“You think I’m just ready to be your submissive again after all those lies?”
“I lied to you to protect you, Keri. That might not seem like a good excuse to you, but who I am, it is not something I can just tell anyone. I had to wait until I knew for sure.”
“Knew what? That you could trust me?” I hope he can trust me, we’ve been sleeping together for a year.
“No sweetheart, I’ve trusted you for a long time.”
“Then what?”
“I waited until I knew beyond all doubt that I loved you, and that I wanted to spend the rest of your life with you.”
“The rest of my life?”
“Yes. The rest of your life. I love you, Keri. Did you hear those words?”
He loves me. My vampire boyfriend loves me. That is why he brought me here, to his armed fortress, that is why he is telling me his secrets.
“Why?” I ask.
“Why do I love you?”
Drat. He read my mind again.
“Butterfly, I love you for many reasons. Some people have a disregard for all things good—you are the exact opposite, Keri, and that is what made me first fall in love with you. There is the way you treat people, everyone we come across. It doesn’t matter what they look like or who they are, you treat them with respect and dignity. It isn’t just your actions, I can read your thoughts. You have never judged another person. You look at the beggar on the street the same way you look at the rich man at the theater. You were looking for a man who met all of your check marks on that impossible list of yours.”
“Hey! I really feel like some of my thoughts should have been private!” I protest.
“And some of them seemed a bit outlandish. But, none of them are unreasonable. You aren’t looking for a rich man to spoil you, you are looking for a man with steady financial means to be able to provide for your children. You are a good person, one of the best I have ever known, and believe me, in nine hundred years, you get to know a lot of people.”
“I wish you had told me sooner.”
“Butterfly, I didn’t tell you because my history with women isn’t the best. One of the women I told, Ann, was horrible. She spread rumors and lies, rejected me. Then the last woman I told, the last woman I loved, Arabella, she killed herself afterwards. I confessed my love to her, and she…” He scrubs his face with his hand.
“Oh, Bentley!” The pain is written all over his features. That sorrow I saw yesterday when we arrived, when I asked him if he had a hidden family, it is back, and this time it isn’t fleeting, and I know I hadn’t imagined things.
“There is grief, Keri… an enormity of grief that comes with being a vampire. A dark side of existence that people, that humans, don’t ever have to feel. I’m in a continuous hell, don’t you see? I’m living in an eternal Groundhog Day that includes watching those I love die, over and over again, day after day. My life is a never-ending funeral. I bury people, my people. My family died first, and then woman after woman whom I loved. My grief is heightened, all our emotions are, but the grief… sometimes, it feels like it’s trying to explode right out of me and take my heart along with it.”
He pauses for a moment, staring out into space. I let him have his moment, sitting quietly, knowing he just needs me to listen. “After Arabella died, I stopped letting myself grieve by stopping letting myself care. I loved her deeply. I wanted to marry her. I wanted to turn her, and I had never been tempted to turn a human before, not after what had been done to Erik and me. I was convinced that she was my soulmate. When she took her life instead of being with me… I’ve had to live with that for the past two hundred years.”
“Bentley, I can’t even imagine.” I scoot closer to my incredibly handsome dominant. I want to crawl onto his lap, to wrap my arms around him, to hold him, to take away his grief. I don’t. I listen, intently, not just to his words, but the feelings he is expressing behind them.
“I allowed an overwhelming amount of loneliness to seep in, which I tried to fill with one night stands, scening with submissives at clubs around the world. I pushed down my need for a connection and tried to cover it with fulfilling the needs of the flesh. Until you. You filled my veins, my thoughts, my loins with an all-consuming desire that I could no longer push away, it erupted into this… this insatiable love I feel for you. I told myself: never again, I would never again fall for a human, for a mortal. I wouldn’t allow myself to feel the pain of watching another one die. Then you came along and made me question every promise I ever made to myself. Damnit, Keri.”
His lips crush mine like an iron searing the wrinkles out of cloth. It’s almost punishing, although I don’t understand what I did wrong, I didn’t make him fall in love with me. He grasps my head, pulling me tighter to him. I submit to his tongue protruding, opening my mouth wider for it. It mates with mine, the ritual as old as time. I wonder briefly how many women he has done this with, being as old as he is, it would be many more than any human man I have been with.
But then again, what does it matter? His experience will benefit me, and does indeed benefit me in many ways. The pleasure he has already demonstrated on my body, the masterful way he can bring me to orgasm again and again, who cares how he learned those skills? The important thing is that I am the recipient of them.
“I love you, Keri. I brought you here this week to tell you that, and to tell you my secret. To ask you if you could be with me, knowing that I am a vampire. You don’t have to decide now—in fact, I would like you to wait until Sunday. I will ask you again then, okay? Until then, we’ll go on as we always do.”
“As we always do? That might be hard to do knowing what I know now.”
“I am sure you have many questions. You can ask them of me or Erik anytime. This week, you will meet other humans who have committed themselves to vampires, and I’m sure they will be open to answering questions too. There are some lovely women at Toxic who have been where you are
.”
“I do have many questions. Is this why you don’t sleep with me? Do you turn into some crazy monster when you go to sleep? An uncontrollable beast?” Am I in danger from you? Will you accidentally kill me? You would never kill me consciously… My thoughts continue where my sentence ends.
“Butterfly, I hear your thoughts. You might as well speak them.” He gently nudges me. “No, I don’t turn into a monster. Sunlight is deadly to us. Think of me like a battery, I need to be recharged.”
“Like the energizer bunny?” I tease him, lightening the mood some.
“The energizer bunny with fangs? Sure. If you must. I need to recharge or I get weak. The sun burns us, kills us. I can’t ever be out in it, Butterfly. That is why I sleep during the day.”
“I get it.”
“I prefer to sleep in complete dark, cold conditions. My bedroom is…”
Is what? I imagine a walk-in freezer like the butcher uses to store food in. Oh, he’s a vampire, does he sleep in a coffin? I gag at the thought.
“Not a coffin.” He chuckles. “Come. I’ll show you.” He takes my hand and leads me down the hall and around the corner, to a section of the house that the guards forbade me from exploring earlier. Off to the right is another set of stairs that lead down. There is an even deeper basement than this? My room looks out onto the rocks, what is his view of, dirt?
We walk down the curved staircase and around to a heavy wooden door. He opens it and pulls me in. Complete blackness surrounds me. I can’t see anything. I take a deep breath. The air is damp, cold. I shiver.
“Humidifier.” He reads my thoughts again. The humidifier in itself isn’t strange, a lot of people sleep with humidifiers running. The air is damp enough in Washington State that we don’t need them there, but my cousin in Colorado had one installed that runs through her full house.
We are walking again. I still can’t see anything, not even my hand in front of my face. “Ouch!” I stumble into something. The foot of the bed.
“It is a California king bed, Butterfly. It is the only thing in the room.”
“Where is the light switch?”
“There isn’t one.”
“The windows?”
“None.”
“So… you just sleep in a room with just a bed? Nothing else?”
“There are no windows in here. No light source. It has its own thermostat. I keep it cold and moist. These are the conditions I sleep best in. I can’t expect you to sleep with me, these conditions aren’t for everyone. I will make love to you, tuck you in and retire to my chamber. Do you know, back in the day, men and women, even married, didn’t sleep in the same bed? It isn’t that different of an arrangement.”
There are chills going up my spine, and it isn’t from the temperature. The room is closing in on me, the feeling of claustrophobia is squeezing around me like an iron fist. I can’t see anything, it feels like I am in a dungeon or a prison cell. I want to get out of here as fast as I can, but I am disorientated, I don’t know where the door is. I feel myself being lifted in his strong arms, he’s carrying me out of the room.
I blink twice, a third time, letting my eyes get accustomed to the light in the hallway. “When I wake from my rest, I come this way.” He puts me back on my feet, takes my hand again, and leads me to the door next to the room we just exited.
“This should make you more comfortable.” He flips on the light switch. The room is gorgeous. A huge four-poster red mahogany bed sits in the middle of the room, with matching furniture surrounding it. There’s a beautiful leather couch against one side of the wall.
“There is a walk-in closet over there with my clothes in it, and the master bathroom is through that door.” Bentley gives me the tour. “This is where you would assume I am sleeping, if I hadn’t told you. There’s a hidden door in the walk-in that connects to where I sleep. I can sneak in and out of it…”
“I wouldn’t want that. I don’t want you to sneak around or hide things from me, ever again. Please promise, no more secrets.”
“Butterfly,” he takes my hands in his and looks at me, “I can’t promise no more secrets ever. There might be times where I have to keep a secret for your safety, or because of work. But, I can promise you that to the best of my ability, I will always be truthful with you. Does that work?”
His pleas hurt my heart. My strong, strict dominant has never pleaded with me for anything. He has always been very demanding, never asking. Here, he is asking me for understanding and grace. I nod my acceptance. Truth be told, I love him.
“You can sleep in here or in the room I designed specifically for you. If neither of those work, we can remodel a room of your choice. If you ever get comfortable enough to sleep in there, that is fine. If not, I won’t be upset.”
“There are so many choices. I’m still trying to wrap my mind around the fact that you’re a billionaire. I’m just trying to make enough money to pay off my student loans and have a comfortable living. Being a successful journalist has been important to me for so long, even though I will never make a hundredth of what you have, it has never been about the money to me.”
He chuckles. “What you do with your life is important, yes, Butterfly. The most important part of life isn’t how much money you make, or how far up the corporate ladder you get, or how much success you have in the workplace. The most important part of life is who you are with when you are living it.”
“Before, when I let myself feel, all I felt was pain. I stopped allowing myself to feel. I liked BDSM because it gave me the release I needed. I was able to be in control, fulfill my desires, and then walk away at the end of the night. I have my favorite clubs all over the world—Club Toxic, though, is my favorite. Not only do I get to master my prey, I get to feed off the willing sweetbloods. The human clubs don’t have that added benefit.” I wink at Keri, after answering her question about my favorite BDSM club. We have been talking for two hours, her curled up in my arms in the window seat in the bedroom I have designated for her. I try to answer every question she has honestly.
“Does it hurt?”
“It doesn’t hurt me one little bit; see what I did there?” I wink.
“Haha!”
I feel her tremor as she imagines, in great detail, being bitten. Why is the imagination so much worse than reality? I can’t fault her for being afraid. After all, most humans only have the Hollywood version of vampires to go off of. I am not a ripper tearing apart humans in the night, and I sure as hell don’t sparkle or glitter.
“Club Toxic has willing sweetbloods who come back time and time again. If it is terribly painful, do you think they would keep returning? Feeding can be rather intimate, the best orgasm of your life, so to speak. It is unlike anything you have ever experienced, and when done correctly, an experience you will never forget.”
Keri squirms. Morbidly curious. That’s what her thoughts tell me she is. I will have to change that. I will expose her to some beautiful feeds at the club in hopes that she will see it as something more sexual and less animalistic… or perhaps, animalistically beautiful.
“Butterfly, look at me.” I wait for her obedience. “I will not touch you until you verbally give me consent. Only then will I feed from you.”
“You won’t, like, hypnotize me into it, right?”
“Hypnotize?” I can’t stop myself from laughing. “I will never influence your thoughts in that way, or any other way. I want your submission to be of your own free will and not manipulated or controlled. Nor would I ever allow anyone else to do such a thing to you.”
She visibly relaxes with those words. It angers me that she would think so little of me.
“So, what is the plan then for this weekend?” she asks.
“Tomorrow night, we will go to Club Toxic for the Venetian-themed masquerade ball, followed by the Day of the Dead parade and celebration Sunday. I’ve arranged for a hair and makeup artist to come to the house on both days. I’ve set aside a gown and mask for you for tomorrow, and th
en I thought you might want to choose your costume for Sunday. I’ve put several options in your closet.”
“Thank you.” Her reply is no less than I would expect from her: gracious, grateful, and authentic. She grew up poor and pulled herself up by her bootstraps; no help was offered along the way. Her strength, in many ways, rivals mine. I am constantly blown away by her.
“You’re welcome, Butterfly.” Her long yawn reminds me that although I have only been up for a few hours, she has been up all day. She hasn’t acclimated to our schedule yet, and has to be exhausted.
“Why don’t we get you into a long, hot bath?” I ask. “I bought the tub that you had staked.”
“Pinned. I had pinned. On Pinterest.”
“Yes, that.”
“You would think that a vampire would stay away from the word staked.” She laughs at her own joke. There is little I love more in this world than the sound of Keri’s laughter.
“Would you like me to bathe you tonight?” I offer. Normally, I wouldn’t give her the choice. I sure enjoy dipping the cloth between her legs… but tonight, I have dropped many things on her, and she might want some time alone with her own thoughts. I am right.
“If it’s okay, I’d like to soak myself tonight, Sir.”
“It is perfectly okay. I’m not sure if you’ve had a chance to look in the dressers yet, but I had a new wardrobe bought for you. You will find your favorite brand of silk pajamas in the top drawer.”
“For me?”
“For you, Butterfly. Take your time, and then hit the button on the top of the light switch, it will let me know you’re ready for me to come say goodnight. I’ll have your favorite wine and a bottle of cold water brought up.” I kiss her forehead gently.
“Thank you.”
“How is she?” Erik asks me as I come up the stairs and into the parlor. I knew I would find him in here. He holds out a glass of golden liquid with two whiskey stones in it, exactly as I like it. Taking a long swig, I enjoy the warming effect of the whisky as it goes down my throat.