by Renee Rose
Her hands pull against the binds, but she doesn’t break that knot. The sight of this woman pinned beneath me as I thrust into her is all I want for the rest of my days.
I want to hold her still while I give her more pleasure than she can handle. I want her to behave while I have my way with her. I want to take my fill of her so that I can give her what she needs.
I can feel my climax coming. When her sex clenches around me with another orgasm, I let go. I throw my head back and roar as my seed shoots into her.
It is bliss. I feel complete, whole where I didn’t know something had been missing. But something is still missing.
I feel Sanai’s hands on my back. When did she break free of the bindings? How did she break free?
She smiles at me, a dazed look in her eyes. Then I catch it. Something sharp in her mouth glints in the dim light of the room.
Fangs.
She’s still moving against me, her core still pulling at my semi-hard dick. She opens her mouth and strikes my neck.
My mind struggles to understand what’s happening. The beautiful angel I want to be the mother of my children is feeding from me. It should be wrong. But it feels so right.
There is a pinch of pain when her teeth pierce the skin at my neck. Something tells me to jerk away from the pain. To break free. To run.
A louder voice in my head tells me not to. I listen to that voice. Sanai’s lips wrap around the point where she’s punctured my skin. She pulls at the jugular vein in my neck, and it’s a total knock out.
The bliss pulls me under as her tongue laps at my skin. She moans around the wound she’s given me as she takes her sustenance. My dick comes alive inside her channel. With her next sip of my blood, my body explodes in another orgasm.
All resistance goes out of me as I come hard, harder than a moment ago. With her inner muscles pulling at my dick and her mouth pulling at my vein, I am lost. But something keeps whispering in my mind.
It’s something important that I should be wary of. Something that keeps trying to worm its way between me and this woman. This creature. This…
Vampire.
Chapter 10
His blood is like nothing I’ve ever tasted. I’ve had many men on my tongue. But none of them were virile and full of life. Apparently, something gets taken from a male when his manhood is snipped. The moment Arneis Serrano’s blood hits my tongue, I know that I will never be satisfied with another man’s again, regardless of whether that blood donor is intact or not.
As his potent blood slides down my throat, I feel another orgasm rising inside me. This time, when I find my release, it’s not just my body that shivers. My entire spirit explodes, like a supernova that recedes and leaves me with a new, shining soul.
I’ve lived for two hundred years, but now I feel alive. When my eyes open, I see new hues and tones in the colors of the world. My ears hear not only Arneis’s heartbeat but the working of the valves that pump his delectable blood through his body. My mind feels like the grooves laid in my brain have been repaved with a new understanding of the world around me.
What I don’t understand is why Arneis is pulling away from me.
Why is he looking at me with such horror on his handsome face?
Then it dawns on me. I should’ve known better than to take his blood without asking first. With a human, I have never asked. They have only ever been sustenance to me. But we vampires can’t make our own blood, which is why we feed off of mankind.
I’m not sure how it works between two vampires who can’t make their own blood. Will we need to have a human to replenish our stores? The idea of his mouth on another makes me see red: the human’s spilled blood as I slit their throat.
Arneis backs away from me—scrambles, is more like it. He pulls up his pants as he does so.
“I’m sorry,” I say. “I should’ve asked first.”
“You’re a vampire.”
His words are not what I expected him to say. I was expecting a scolding. Perhaps I’ve been looking forward to a punishment. Maybe that’s why I bit him without permission.
“Of course I am,” I say. “Are you going to bite my ass as a punishment?”
I expect Arneis to flash his fangs at me. Instead, he grinds his molars. The look of disgust that he gives me chills the blood on my tongue. My saucy grin turns downward as I watch his lips curl.
I’ve never tasted another vampire’s blood. I’ve only tasted eunuchs’ blood. It’s not possible that Arneis is human.
Is it?
“You’re not—”
“A monster like you,” he sneers.
Any hint of desire has fled from his features. His hand grazes his neck where I bit him. It comes away with a tiny smear of blood on his thumb.
My mouth waters at the sight. He catches it, and takes another step away from me. I pull my dress over my legs and tuck my knees under me.
It’s true; he’s human.
I have failed so hard tonight. I didn’t do as I was told and cancel this room. It got used, and used well. And now I see I’ve given my virginity away, and not to an ageless vampire of a renowned line. But to a human male, no less. I was prepared to take some risks with my actions this night. The queen will cast me out when she learns how royally I’ve screwed up.
“You enthralled me,” Arneis accuses.
My head snaps up at that. “I did no such thing.”
“It’s the only explanation.” He tightens his belt, looping the leather inside the buckling and closing the clasp.
On the other side of the glass, the man is pounding into the woman. The sounds of her wet sex are louder than her cries and his grunts. But all I can hear is the disdain and disgust in Arneis’s voice.
“I would never sleep with someone like you,” he says.
“Someone like me?”
“It’s not my first time being attacked by one of your kind.”
“Attacked?”
Arneis’s hand goes to his neck. Not the side where a few drops of blood trickle from my bite. There is a wound healed over on the other side of his neck. Whoever put it there was careless, as though they intended to cause him pain.
“Don’t try to mind wipe me,” he says, turning back to face me.
I’ve never tried the tactic. The humans in our hidden oasis know who and what we are. They keep our secrets. Outsiders have never found us out in the heart of the desert.
“You think I’d make you forget what happened between us?” I ask.
His gaze finds mine then. The anger and disgust slips. I see the man who desired me only moments ago. The man who was so deep inside of me that I couldn’t remember what being apart from him was like.
I know he sees it too. But only for a second. And then he shutters himself to me.
“I recorded everything,” he’s saying, tapping a button on his shirt. “The feed has gone straight to a hard drive that’s set to go live if I don’t stop it.”
With my sharp vision, I see that there are gears inside the object. A lens stares back at me. A camera has recorded what just happened between us. Meaning my first and only lover has recorded a sex tape of me. Could I be any more naive?
“Now the world will know about your kind.”
It looks like I could be a bit more naive than I originally thought. Arneis will expose not only me, but the secrets of the vampire world. I won’t have failed just my queen, I’ll have failed my entire race of people. There’s a part of me that worries he will be hunted down and killed if he shares any details of the supernatural world. But there’s another part of me that hurts worse than that: shame.
“You’d put what we shared on display for the world to see?” I say.
Arneis’s jaw tenses at that thought. Something proprietary goes over his features. His thumb fumbles as it rubs at the device on his shirt. The rest of his fingers scratch at his chest, where his heart beats.
I gaze into his eyes. I feel his will. He is strong. But I’m stronger.
I could do
it. I could dive into his mind, tug at his will, and make him forget. I could make him do my bidding.
Arneis looks at me as if he knows what I’m thinking. His hand falls away from the device, from his heart. He holds still under my gaze, as though he’s daring me to do it. Or willing me to.
We stare at each other for long moments, both unguarded as memories of the past hour replay in our minds. My channel aches from the loss of him. My fangs throb for another taste of him. My heart beats against my chest, urging me to close the distance between us.
I can hear his heart beating a rapid rhythm as well. I scent the arousal coming off his body. I see his hands clench around the air by his sides. And then I watch as he walks away from me and out the door without a word.
Chapter 11
She’s a monster. That’s what I keep telling myself as I drive away from the club. But my mind goes back to the look in her eyes when I’d called her that to her face.
She could have lashed out at me. Literally or physically. But she didn’t.
At first, she’d seemed embarrassed by her actions. Apologetic, even. There had been hurt there.
Hurt that I put there. Sanai looked lost and small when she came to realize I was disgusted by who she is.
No. Not who she is. What she is.
She is a monster. A demon that feeds off of mankind for sustenance as well as amusement.
She kissed me like I was a treat. I’m sure she only did that because she was warming me up, making my blood sweeter, like the fermentation process with grapes. I’ve learned vampires like the taste of a sexually aroused human’s blood. Hell, I was inside her when she bit me. Had she worked me up enough to give herself a toothache? Because dammit, if my teeth aren’t clenching now from the thought of that bite…
God, that bite. When her fangs impacted me, I came again, harder than the first time. Just the thought of her fangs grazing my neck has my dick jumping.
What in the hell is wrong with me? Am I forgetting what she is? She is a monster who took a piece out of me.
Except, this time, I liked it. I got off on it. I want to turn the car around and have her bite me again.
At a stop sign, I reach for my neck. The twin puncture marks throb as I graze them. There is no pain. With only a slight touch, my body shudders as it remembers the feel of her lips on my skin. I shiver at the memory of how her throat worked to pull my blood from me. My dick throbs in my pants, wanting in on the action.
That did not happen the first time with that nightmare, Domitia. That wound still smarts from when she ripped my flesh. When I touch it now, my passion for Sanai cools.
But not entirely. Her taste is still on my tongue. The vision of her laid out before me as an offering will never leave my mind.
Why didn’t she take these thoughts of her, these memories of us, from my mind? Is that her play? To leave me wanting more of her?
I yank the video pin from my shirt. I have the evidence in my hands to expose this world to all of humanity. To expose her. To have her hunted.
The thought of any pain coming to Sanai makes my gut sicken. The thought of anyone seeing her body exposed makes me rage.
I drop the pin. It clatters to the floor of the car. I give it my heel, twisting the circuitry for good measure.
I pull out my phone and call up the app. My finger hovers over the delete key for the stream. My thumb feels heavy as I press it. Somehow, instead of the delete key, I manage to hit play.
Sanai’s face comes into view. Her smile is appraising as she comes closer to the camera. Her gaze dips up and down, her brows lifting as though they like what she sees.
“You work for Frangelico?” Those are my words, the first I said to her.
“No,” comes that sultry voice that makes my skin tingle. “I work for no man.”
I’m sitting in the middle of the street, out in the middle of wine country. Instead of putting my car in park, my foot stays on the brake. My thumb stays away from the delete button as I watch the entire scene between me and Sanai play out.
“You’re not what I expected,” she says.
I can only see her face in the video—fitting, as she came up to my chest. Her gaze constantly roams up and down my body. A few times, she licks those lush lips. But as hard as I stare at her, I don’t see carnivorous hunger. Only carnal.
She said I wasn’t what she expected. She was not what I expected. I had gone into that club to take the supernatural world down. In truth, Sanai brought me to my knees with just a smile.
I was on my knees at this point in the video. The only view I got was of the floor. But I hear her cries of pleasure as my tongue worked to master her. I catch sight of her foot tethered to the post of the massage table. The sight of the twine crisscrossing her trim ankles makes my dick pulse.
“I’ll be good,” she says. “I’ll hold still.”
That’s what I truly wanted, for her to hold still while I tasted every inch of her skin. For her to behave as I fucked her senseless. For her to be bound to me for the rest of our lives.
And then I hear myself calling her a monster.
The camera catches her face as her regal features fall. Her lip trembles before it stiffens. Her throat works before that elegant column lengthens. And then she is gone.
She didn’t attack me. She didn’t walk away from me. I’d left her. And I have no idea how to find her again.
I lift my foot from the brake. The car rolls forward. With a tap of the gas pedal, I am back in motion.
My car stops in front of the Serrano vineyard. I had been heading home, but I feel the need to be around family.
The door at the front of the Serrano manse isn’t locked. Why would it be? The males inside would scent any danger as it came into the gate. They could rip out the throat of any threat.
When I walk inside, I find both men with their arms wrapped around my sisters. Cari is curled in Hadrian’s lap, her head resting on his heart. Marechal sits next to Gaius, her head leaning against his shoulder.
On the television is the old black and white family sitcom, The Munsters: the show where Frankenstein’s monster and his vampire bride live in a suburbia that struggles to accept them.
“Arnie, you came.”
“Ouch,” I grunt as I’m nearly crushed when Cari embraces me.
“Careful, Carignan,” warns Hadrian. “Unless you want to break your brother.”
“Sorry, Arnie,” Cari says as she pulls away. “I don’t know my own strength.”
My baby sister smiles at me. It’s the same goofy grin she wore as a child. She looks the same, except instead of a gap-toothed grin, she has fangs.
I wait for the fear to arise. It doesn’t come. Only the fraternal love I’ve had for my sister since I watched her take her first steps.
I pull Cari back to me. This time it’s Cari who protests as I hug her tightly.
“You okay?” asks Marechal, rubbing me on the shoulder. “Rough day at work?”
“Yeah,” I say, as I reach out to include her in the embrace.
“Didn’t get everything checked off your list?” Marechal asks.
“No, I accomplished what I set out to do.” I let my sisters go and scratch at the ache in my chest. “There were just… unintended consequences.”
“Uh oh,” says Cari, returning to Hadrian’s lap. “You should know my brother does not like surprises. He likes things to go exactly as planned.”
Hadrian smiles at his bride, looking at her like she is both the star he wished on, and wished for. Only a couple of weeks ago, I determined that Hadrian has an unhealthy obsession with my sister. I see it clearly tonight. That is the look of a man hopelessly in love.
“Anything we can help with?” asks Gaius as Marechal comes back beside him.
I chuckle at the offer. I’m not sure which would be the funnier ask. Should I tell Gaius about my intent to expose his kind to the world? Or should I regale him with the account of my misstep of falling for one of his kind and then calling her a m
onster, thereby ensuring she will have nothing to do with me, ever?
“You’re family now,” Gaius is saying. “I know we’re not the brothers you would’ve liked, but we’re the brothers you’ve got, and we take care of our own.”
He’s right. This is my family now. A collection of munsters trying to fit into the world we all find ourselves in.
The theme song to the sitcom plays through the television set, signaling the end of the show. There is a knot in my stomach. A dull heaviness in my chest.
“Why don’t you get some rest?” says Gaius. “Whatever it is, we can talk about it tomorrow night.”
He doesn’t need to compel me to take that direction. I go to the guest room Gaius indicates. My eyes are closed before my head hits the pillow. But even before my lids shut, all I can see is her face.
Deleting the video saved her and my family from a world that would struggle to accept them. But I have to face facts. Sanai’s face will play on a loop in my mind for the rest of my life. If I don’t find her and make things right, the color will drain from my world.
Chapter 12
“You’re still in bed? It’s nine at night. You’re usually up by the first moonbeam.”
I turn away from the moonlight that enters the room as Fay spreads the curtains. I’m not ready to greet this new night. I don’t know when I’ll be ready to greet any other night.
“You’ve already missed the first meal. The queen gave the eunuchs honeyed wine, and I have to say I like the sugary taste of the meal.”
The thought of another male’s blood makes my stomach churn. Fay thinks blood tinged with wine is sweet to the tongue. If she has a sip from a virile male, she’ll be incapacitated with one draw. A male high on the endorphins of sex would send her walking into the sunlight for a dust bath.
“What’s gotten into you?” Fay sits on the edge of the bed. Her slight form barely causes a dip in the mattress.
Her question is a loaded one. Little does she know, something has definitely gotten into me. More like someone.