by Ana Calin
“You can always tell me to stop, if something of what I’m doing or saying upsets you.”
I bite my lower lip, eyes fixed on the ivory mask of the vampire. Through the Asian-like yet big and almond-shaped contours of the eyes, Radek’s turbid blue irises stare right back into mine.
“Let me make this even easier for you,” he says huskily, moving faster. He’s close to coming, I can tell. “Do you want me to stop, slut?”
I sink my teeth into my lip harder, struggling to keep from saying, “no,” and making a fool of myself. I can sense the grin behind his mask as his theories are being proven to him—probably for the hundredth time. Some kind of telepathic connection has been established between us during this amazing intercourse, and I know he’s provoking and defying me, and women in general. And it will probably never be enough, he’s repeating some scenario in a struggle to heal a wound over and over again.
“Tell me to fuck you harder.”
“Fuck me harder,” I whisper. His power grips my jaw and forces my eyelids wide open, making me look clearly into his eyes that seem crazed with dark desire.
“Fuck me harder, my lord,” he specifies.
“Fuck me harder, my lord.”
“Pump all my holes, my lord.”
My nub swells, hurting with the need for release. I repeat the words exactly as he wants me to.
“You can’t believe how dark your desires actually are, isn’t it, Juliet?” He provokes. “Do you want me to stop?”
“I don’t want you to stop.”
“But what do you want?” The mask moves up and down as his cock slides between my folds and over my clit over and over, making my lip curl over my teeth with dirty satisfaction.
“I want you to fall in love with me.”
He stops, looking into my face from behind the mask. He wants to keep fucking me this twisted way, I can feel that, but he also wants to use this moment to make a point.
“Whose love do you want, Juliet? The love of the beautiful prince? Or the love of this masked man who’s giving you pleasure?”
“I want the love of Radek.”
He throws his head back, laughing hard. I notice the skin on his neck, now exposed to me, is as white as a corpse’s, with dark blue veins swelling behind it as he laughs.
“You don’t even know, Radek. All you’ve ever seen of him was his beautiful face. Hell, you don’t even like him as a person, you think he’s a crook.”
“This is the point where you wanted to bring me, isn’t it? The point where you prove to yourself that all women are shallow, frivolous, in love only with appearances.”
I use the glitch in his attention to my immobilization to bring my hands to his mask, caressing it. He lets me do it at first, searching my gaze for something, then his power pins my arms swiftly above my head. He laughs like I’ve just made the very point he was trying to prove.
“If you saw my true face, if you knew who I really was, you’d throw up.”
He starts moving again, very controlled this time, and I sense the defying fury behind his mask. He pushes the dildo inside my ass this time, and his cock inside my pussy, causing me an amazing sensation. It doesn’t hurt, because he prepared me with his finger, and he does everything so expertly. Soon his finger is inside my mouth, having me taste myself, while I come so hard around him that my head swims. The orgasm shakes me, draining me of all my juices and leaving me exhausted on the bed, still pinned under his power.
“Oh. My. God,” I say as he extracts himself from my still pulsing inside. His manhood glides up and down on my outer folds again, surely avoiding coming inside of me.
“Please, please let me touch you.”
“No,” he says, his breathing elaborate, betraying that he’s close to coming. He isn’t using any gadgets anymore, but grips to my hips like a beast hungering for my flesh.
“I won’t try to remove your mask, I promise.”
He keeps gliding on me without a reaction to my words, my hands still pinned above my head, his eyes now sweeping greedily all over my body from behind his ivory vampire mask with the blood-red lips and the shiny fangs. I resort to the one thing that could make him want to yield to my pleas.
“Please, my lord. Let me aid your pleasure.”
He hisses and bucks as his seed squirts from his cock onto my lower belly. He comes with animal growls, looking down at the place where we’re connected and giving me a view of what should be his glossy, thick chestnut hair. But what’s crowning his head is a dry mess the color of copper, like the hair of a corpse. I realize my hands are free, and I move to touch him. I doubt he’s letting me do it, rather, in his pleasure, he forgot to keep me immobilized.
Slowly, gently, I sink my hands into his hair, letting it fill the space between my fingers. It feels like straw at first, but then, at my fingertips, it starts to feel glossy, growing thick, sliding between my fingers like satin.
“What the hell,” Radek reacts, his head jerking up. The leather covers him up to his throat, leaving only a strip of skin between it and the mask, but it’s enough for me to notice the difference—it’s the ivory skin of Prince Radek. It doesn’t take a genius to realize—He IS the Prince of Midnight, and he’s changing shape. The legend is true. At night, he becomes a monster.
I freeze with my mouth open as the truth hits me. I’m tipsy-dizzy from whatever power he’s exerting on me, but I must say this: when you realize that paranormal stories are real, it feels just....freaking normal. Because of the shock, no doubt. Sort of like, What? That shit is true? Oh, okay.
I’m still fixed on that last idea as the prince gets off of me, staring at me from behind the mask as if I’m the eerie thing in here. As if I’m the anomaly. I blabber, trying to tell him something, but I fail. Bracing himself as if he’s suddenly in pain, he begins retreating to the door, keeping his eyes on me until he reaches it. He stands there for as long as his seemingly hurting body allows him, then he crumbles and growls like a transforming beast, gripping to the handle. The door flashes shut behind him.
CHAPTER VII
Radek
I retreat like a wounded animal to my chamber, keeping the cape tightly around me. As soon as I’m inside I throw off my mask, gripping to the table with one hand and to my cock with the other. The craving for this woman is driving me wild, as if I’m not done coming for her. This never happened before, not once in all my centuries.
I need to go looking for a mirror. I don’t keep one in my chamber, for obvious reasons, so I grab the oil lamp and head down the secret stairs to the cellar. On my way there, I wonder how long it’ll take until Juliet realizes there are no mirrors anywhere except in her chambers, and down in the cellar where we met earlier.
Hunched under my cape from this craving that whirls through my veins, a tormenting sensation not far from pain, I push the door to the cellar. Sure enough, the mirrors ripple like the disturbed surface of lakes, as always, but something feels different. Placing the oil lamp on the floor by the first one, I grip to its golden frame for support, and look into it.
I swallow hard, staring at my image forming against the glass, the liquid surface turning solid to reveal half my face as young and treacherously beautiful as it is during the day.
Juliet’s touch did this? I lean closer, taking my fingers up and tracing my own cheek. The mirror doesn’t reflect the rest of my monster flesh where it would be visible to the naked eye. Normally, I’d be looking at a cape and a mask, floating in the air on an invisible support. Mirrors don’t reflect my hideous self, only my daytime version.
This explains the ache I feel for Juliet. It’s easy to understand what’s happening here—she has the power to restore me, and now that I’ve gotten a taste, my dead flesh screams for more. It screams for healing, for its chance of coming back to life. But I am an angel of death, a curse to this world supposed to endure forever, so what does this mean? And what does it mean for Juliet?
The ache for her squeezes my stomach, and I have to cry out�
��another thing I haven’t done in centuries. I crouch down in a corner, bracing my knees. The pain becomes more bearable, but even after a long while of rocking and focusing it away, it still doesn’t totally give in. All I can think about is Juliet, her sweet white flesh that I’m craving, the rosy nipples I glimpsed through her nightgown, her lips turned red from all the blood that rushed to them in her intoxicated desire for me. At least I share one talent with my consistently beautiful brother, Dracula—mesmerizing humans. Hadn’t it been for that induced drunkenness, she would have probably screamed and kicked me away, probably even died of shock.
Fuck, the more I try not to think of this unusual human, the more thoughts of her fill my mind. It must be because my dead flesh tasted life from her, and now it’s raging for more. I have to find someone to look into my face, and feed this need for living flesh. I haven’t done it in centuries, but now that Juliet has awoken the big bad demon, there’s no way around it.
Juliet
I GET UP IN THE MORNING with what feels like a hangover. I bend down with my head between my knees, taking my hands to it, applying pressure to my temples. Pressure. Glimpses of wild sex with a masked prince come to my mind. I check my panties—sure enough, they’re gone. I touch myself down there, and discover the flesh is swollen and sensitive, my butt sore.
“What the—” I jump from the bed, gripping to the wooden post for support when I lose balance. “He fucked me. He actually fucked me.”
Sore everywhere, I move around robotically, looking for clothes, determined to get to him and demand explanations for what happened last night. But I find myself stopping to consider what to wear. It’s imperative that my appearance demands respect. In the end, he’s known me in the most intimate way you can know a woman—something I’ve been avoiding for a very long time, specifically to spare myself this damned feeling of vulnerability, of powerlessness, of being stripped of all value in the eyes of a man. Now Radek has all the power.
Fuck. The more I think about it as I wriggle into a comfortable but still business-like blue dress, the more my brain wakes up. This is an outrageously beautiful prince who can have any woman he wants. No—who sure as hell has had dozens, and I’m just one of the countless pussies that he’s pounded with his dildos for his special kind of pleasure. If he doesn’t have a girlfriend by now it surely isn’t because he couldn’t get one, but because he didn’t want one. Why would he? What normal man would settle for one woman when he can have not only the bodies but also the love of so many. Love, like beauty, must be a commodity he has too much of, so why should he value it?
Well, one thing remains in my power—I can refuse him my love. Even if I were falling head over heels for him like a harebrained schoolgirl, to him, that’s a not-so-rare thing, right? If he doesn’t value it, why should I?
No, I won’t give him satisfaction, I determine as I throw the door open and follow the arrows that showed me to the inner courtyard yesterday. But, to my surprise, they don’t lead there today. They lead to a bright breakfast room in a tower, the windows open to reveal a nice September day, the long table filled with fruit juice and many kinds of food. At the end of the table, a sour-looking Miss Victoria is arranging dishes.
I stop in the doorway and greet. She only glances at me at first, but then she measures me from head to toe.
“Miss Jochs,” she says, her voice gritting. Her mouth crooks to one side in a contemptuous grin. “I hope you enjoyed your night.”
Hell, she knows. And if I didn’t know better, I’d say she’s jealous.
“Eggs, fruit, cheese,” she says, motioning with her hand dismissively over the table, then makes to leave.
“Wait.”
She stops, looking at me over her shoulder. Her hair is pinned so tightly up in a bun that it seems to stretch the skin on her nape to the point of snapping.
“Will Prince Radek be joining me?”
She scoffs, turning briskly. Seems my words offended her so badly that blood has boiled its way to her cheeks.
“If you think you’re getting special treatment because you slept with him,” she says in an even but pointed tone, “you’re dead wrong. You still have to get up very early if you want to get to him, before he heads to other business.”
Understanding what’s happening, I make an effort to smile at her. I gage her stiff figure up and down. She’s as thin as I am, but without protruding boobs and butt. Her face is emaciated, as if emotional worries have been eating at her heart for a long time. Square-shouldered and strong-chinned, she seems a symbol of proper behavior and discipline, but there’s more to her. Something like a suppressed fire inside, or rather...suppressed rage, hatred.
She tries to leave again.
“On a second thought,” I stop her, taking a seat. “For the job that I’m here to do, I don’t even need to see Prince Radek all the time. You seem to have been working with him for a long time. You must know more about him than anyone else.”
She raises her chin, and pulls the chair that Radek should be sitting in.
My grin widens. “You know how to make a point.”
Pouring herself tea, she says, “You’re right, Miss Jochs. I’ve been working for him for many years. And I know him better than anyone else. That’s something that you probably should learn to respect.”
“Would you say that you’re like a mother to him?”
Her eyes shoot up at me over the pot. “You know how to make a point, too. But I’m afraid I’m not as old as you’d like me to be.”
“If you don’t love him as a mother, you must love him as a mistress.”
“Smart girl.”
“Then let me be straight forward with you all the way, Miss Victoria.” I slice through butter, and smear it on my toast. “You didn’t like me much from the start, and you obviously resent me even more since I slept with Prince Radek.” I’m not looking at her, but I perceive her dark grey form stiffening in her chair.
“You’re in a position of power here,” I continue, gracefully applying butter to my toast. “And you’re making sure that I, the new woman, know I’m here only as a meaningless distraction.”
My eyes find hers. “I’m not going to mince matters. I understand that you#re in love with the prince. But know this—” I straighten my back to mirror her own stance, jutting out my chin. “I’m not here to be used for sex and then treated like garbage. But I’m not here to take your place in his heart either—if you have one. Still, if you’ve been forced to fight for his love so far, you’ll have to fight for it from now on, too. Things won’t change. If he’s broken your heart all these years, he’s gonna keep breaking it, because that’s what you let him get used to.”
“Is giving me lessons among your purposes here?” She retorts. “Because if so, let me remind you that I have more years in the prince’s service than you. I think I know what to expect well enough. I don’t need some snotty American-German girl to teach me about love.”
The way she holds my gaze warns me to back off, which makes me want to attack harder, of course. I nod theatrically.
“You’re right. I’m sorry. I was just making sure you don’t feel threatened, because there’s no need. But you know better than me, which is why you’re feeling how you’re feeling, right?”
She holds my gaze harder.
“Don’t fool yourself, Miss Jochs, you’re nothing special to the prince. You’re not the first woman he’s brought here to use, and you won’t be the last. But let me tell you this—last night was merely the beginning; he’ll do things to you that would get other men locked up. Which is why he lures his women here, you know. And when he’ll have taken all there is to take from you....” Danger crosses her dark eyes.
Without finishing the sentence she places her hands on the table and gets up to her feet like a grey, vile shadow. It’s not hard to read her mind—she’s looking forward to all the things that will happen to me in the end. It makes me shudder, but I do everything I can to hold my ground and not show it.
Half an hour later I’m still alone in the tower, biting my nails and watching the door and the clock above the mantelpiece, still hoping to see another human. I head to the window and lean over to look down into the courtyard and scan it for Lazarus, intending to call out at him, but I get dizzy from the height and have to pull myself back in. This tower seems much taller than seen from the bottom.
Up in the sky clouds darken, and thunder rips through them. I instinctively close the window, puzzled and scared at this brusque change of weather—another eerie thing specific to the Carpathians.
I hurry out of the tower back the way I came towards my chamber, determined to put on paper everything I got until now on the prince and gather my thoughts, draw conclusions, helping myself to think this out further.
Dear Isolde, the story begins on the pink slip of paper she gave me. I keep it brief and simple for the sake of space. Strange things are happening. Twisted corridors and hallways lead to different places at different times. A beautiful prince lures women from the Western world to his castle, then drugs them and fucks them wearing a vampire’s mask. I’m his latest capture. His housekeeper, a witch in love with him, appears to support his practices. In a fit of jealousy she admitted that, when he’s done with me, I’ll be in a very bad state. There have been other women before, they might still be in danger now.
I place the slip of paper back into the secret pocket in my big bag, deciding to give it a few days for Isolde to read it. Then I’ll erase the writing with the special eraser at the other end of the pen, so that I can convey more information to her. I can’t stop praising her smarts for the idea; this way the prince won’t even imagine that his story is making it out into the world even while I’m still inside his keep. Satisfaction swells inside of me when I think that ingenuity can still override power and money.