Three human lifetimes of work spent to solve that mystery, when that hateful bitch Uta had known the answer all along. He wanted to wring her gorgeous white neck for everything she’d done to him.
A bitter laugh rose up in his throat, burning its way out like a strong acid. “No, Lex, I’m not dying.” Although, he thought it would be nice if Uta were.
“Really? Promise?”
He nodded.
“Are you still searching for some kind of cure?”
A good bit of deductive reasoning, that, and it left him completely speechless.
“Are you having complications?”
Yes, one tall, red-headed, evil complication. “Nope. No symptoms, no complications, no need to worry about me.”
“Then I honestly don’t know why it bothers you. It’s cool to be the only known of something. It’s like having a vestigial tail.”
Thank God, a retort sprang to mind. “That’s your idea of cool? Lexi, my dear, you are much kinkier than I realized.”
“Don’t turn this into a joke.” Narrowing her eyes and pursing her lips, she leaned forward to scrutinize him. She really had him under her microscope now.
He squirmed. “I’ve made progress on that research. I now know my condition isn’t dangerous.”
She pointed a finger into his chest. “You avoided my question.”
“Technically, it wasn’t a question.” His voice was deceptively steady as he reached for a beaker and filled it with water from a tap.
“Fine, Alex Trebek. In the form of a question—why does it bother you so much to have a genetic anomaly?”
He gulped down the water, never taking his gaze off her. “It makes me feel lonely.”
Her eyes swept over his face as she processed his words. She must have decided he was serious. “Because you’re the only one?”
“Something like that.” But more.
He forced himself to recall the beginning of his obsession. Uta had been not only his godmother, but his best friend, until she had dropped eleven-year-old Bel like he was made of the sun itself. His uniqueness had turned into a bone-deep loneliness that nothing ever eased for long. It had compelled him to research vampire biology in hopes of explaining his own existence. Only now it turned out he’d really just missed his psychopath mate all along. He pinched the bridge of his nose.
“I can’t believe I used to think your tendency to sulk was sexy,” Lexi chided.
He flashed her a well-practiced grin. “Don’t beat yourself up over it. Women in their twenties always do, but by thirty, they see it for what it is: self-indulgence.”
She laughed without knowing in just how many decades of twenty- and thirty- somethings he’d observed the phenomenon.
“But since you’re all grown up now, I’ll try to be less moody.”
“I’m looking forward to seeing you try.” She sidestepped around him. “So what the hell is this, if it’s not human blood? Because my only working theories are you’re a zombie or a vampire, and you’ve never tried to bite me, so I don’t know which one.” Her tone was light, but when she took his hand, something in her touch promised acceptance.
The little boy inside him screamed for him to tell her everything. He trusted her with his life—she would never hurt him or his family. Still, he couldn’t manage the words. But he didn’t laugh at her suggestions, and that seemed to be enough.
Her nostrils flared. “No.” She shook her head, stepping back.
And that little boy began to panic. Please don’t leave me.
But she stopped after that single step, gripped by curiosity, like the cool-headed scientist she was. “Really?”
He nodded.
Then her eyes lost their focus as she retreated inside her thoughts. “Andre. I’ve never seen him outside. Kos either. But you. I’ve walked in the sunlight with you a thousand times. We’ve—”
Yes, they’d walked home from the lab together for lunch and made love in their bed in the afternoon sun every day for years. “I’m half vampire. My mother was human, never wanted Andre to turn her.”
Dear old mum had killed herself instead, and Bel had never forgiven her for it.
She took hold of his hand and examined the skin stretching over his tendons and knuckles. “And you want to be cured?”
Gently, he tugged his hand back. “No, doll, that can’t happen, but the vampires need my help. My father needs my help.” He waved at the rack of blood. “I need to get that protein into sick vampires, or they will die.”
“Vampires,” she murmured, raising her hand to his mouth.
He pressed his lips together to avoid her giving him an impromptu dental exam.
Thwarted, she tilted her head to look at the rack and smiled, rubbing her palms together in a familiar gesture. He used to tease she looked like a mad scientist when she did that, especially when she did it while wearing her lab coat.
“Can I help?”
Help? She may as well have sliced open his chest for a live dissection. The only woman he’d ever loved, who he’d kept at arm’s length with all his secrets until she’d finally given up on him. And now, without a goddamn blink, she was eager to help him cure vampires.
“Lexi, my experiment failed. There’s no sense in running the tests,” he said, even as that little boy screamed, Yes, stay, help!
“Then we figure out why it failed, and what we need to do to make this cure.”
She reached for a shelf overhead and grabbed a plastic cylinder. Her lean, gorgeous body stretched upward, and he sucked in a breath. So tempting, so familiar. But his cock could not even manage a twitch, hadn’t since he’d seen Uta last month—unless of course he thought of her.
Maybe he just needed to get closer to Lexi. He gripped her hips, pressing the flat front of his jeans against the firm curve of her arse. Still no reaction. All the muscles encasing his ribs tensed, trapping the breath in his lungs. No hard-on? Not even for Lexi? This was bad.
“Lobel Tiberius Maras, back off.” She enunciated each word with the calm, firm tone of an elementary teacher.
He forced out the air he’d been holding in with a hollow laugh. “Did I really tell you my middle name?”
“You were rather intoxicated.” Her lips pulled to one side before curving into a hesitant smile. “What the hell were you thinking?”
He shrugged. “Sorry, I had to try.”
Her anger faded with a giggle and a shake of her head. But not his.
His fury burned, bright and hot, at his mother, at Uta, and at the unjust rules of the universe that said she was the only female he could have anymore.
But Bel didn’t like rules, never had, and he would find a way to break this one. No way would he let Uta steal his freedom. Only he would choose who he loved.
“Let’s get to work.” Lexi pulled him out of his mental tirade. “Tell me everything.”
“I’ve isolated a protein that I believed had cured vampires of their wasting disease, but the version I engineered in the lab doesn’t have any effect on the ailing vampires.”
“Okay. What do you call it?”
“Hemoaurum.”
“As in gold? Cool. I love metalloproteins.”
Bel chuckled. Most women loved precious metals, not the proteins made of them.
“You’re certain it’s the cure? It could be a byproduct of some sort.”
“I’m sure. I first found it in my father’s wine…” He decided to leave off the part about the blood of his enemies. “It made Andre stronger —”
“Wine? Geez, Bel. This just keeps getting weirder.”
Yeah, and she didn’t know the half of it. He picked up a vial of the deficient vampire blood and held it up to the light. “I thought for sure I’d found it, Lex. A lot’s riding on this.”
“So there must be something else. A cofactor or a molecular chaperone of some sort that you haven’t found.” She rubbed her hands together again, grinning. “Feel like doing some biochemical sleuthing?”
All at once, h
ope flooded Bel. She’d always had a way of making him feel better. “Funny, I do.”
“Then show me this wine.”
He retrieved samples of Blood Vine and they began, working together with the easy companionability they’d had when they’d been lovers, but without any of the sparks.
The wine was complex, and it took a long time to isolate even a handful of the compounds and proteins, but after many hours, they had a dozen pure components. Tomorrow he would call the test subjects back and try again, administering each new sample to a different vampire in an infusion of hemoaurum.
“This has been fun.” Lexi rinsed her hands and dried them with a paper towel. “I’m spending the afternoon with a friend from college. But I’ll see you first thing tomorrow?”
“You don’t have to.”
“I want to. I can spare a few days away from home to help. It will be just like old times.” She glanced down at his chest, and his stomach lurched. It would and wouldn’t be like those times. She patted his arm and slung her purse over her shoulder. “We’ll figure it out, Bel. We’ll help your dad.”
And then she was gone.
He wanted to help his dad, sure. Playing the hero would be damn satisfying. But this crisis was so much bigger than his family—it mattered to every vampire household his crew had ever rescued from Hunters, and all the ones that had burned alive because they’d waited too long to call for help, afraid of wasting away in exile.
Chapter 6
GWEN CHEWED HER FIRST BITE of pancake, the sweetness of the maple syrup suffusing her with comfort. She hadn’t made them from scratch, but they tasted good enough. Ethan hadn’t said so, but he forked two more onto his plate then scooted his chair closer to the kitchen table. On the television, CNN ran breaking coverage of three seemingly random episodes of violence around the world.
Actually, Gwen didn’t sit so much as hover over her chair—its caning irritated her spanked-raw ass. Balanced on her elbows and heels, her thighs burned with the effort of keeping her weight off her stinging skin. But Ethan wanted her to sit, wanted her to sting, so he wouldn’t permit her to eat standing up. She obeyed as much as she could tolerate, submitting in some small way every single moment with him, each one a dark bliss.
The last month had been one long, dark, domestic pleasure—playing house with a devil.
Ethan’s phone rang. “Bennett.” He listened for a moment. “I see. And he’s inside the laboratory now?” He looked at his watch. “Who is with you? Just Carmichael?” His mouth pinched in displeasure.
Gwen had sensed Ethan did not approve of that particular initiate.
“Call for reinforcements.”
An insistent but garbled voice made its way to Gwen’s ear.
“Fine. Move in now, but if you fumble this, you will put the Marasović household back on alert.” Ethan glared at his pancake as it were the hated vampire himself. “Do not fail.”
He cut a bite and speared it with his fork. “Bring the scientist to me, and I will teach you how to get information out of a prisoner. We must find a way through that infuriating shield.” He set his telephone down with precision and raised the fork to his mouth.
Gwen wobbled, and he turned quickly to look at her, noticing for the first time her bizarre posture.
“Sore?”
“Yes.”
“Show me.”
Gwen rose and turned, lowering her jeans and panties to just above her knees so Ethan could inspect his handiwork. She didn’t expect the slap, but when his palm made contact, she went wet between her legs. He gave her another whack for good measure, then pushed his hand against her cunt.
“Do you know what I love about you, Gwen?”
She did, but she said, “No.”
“I could do anything I want to you, and it would excite you.”
“Yes.” He had her number, and she depended on him entirely because of it.
“Bend over the table.”
She started to step out of her jeans.
“Leave them right there, around your thighs.”
She penguin-walked a few steps to the table and folded over. Bound by the fabric, she was unable to spread her legs. He slapped her again, this time an open-handed blow to the lips of her swollen sex.
She yelped. Once, she’d read there was a technique to spanking—the skillful delivery of a perfect ratio of pain and pleasure. Ethan did not practice this skill, but instead aimed for the blinding white-hot pain she craved.
“Where do you want me?” he asked. Giving her a choice was another one of his tricks. It created an expectation for him to break. As soon as she learned he would do the opposite of what she asked for, he disoriented her by occasionally heeding her request. Now the question just served to remind her that no matter what, he would do what he wanted and the only desires he permitted were his own. She’d taken the lesson to heart, so she didn’t answer.
Without warning, he slammed into her wetness, thrusting hard once, twice. God, she loved the way he used her. But he must have been just getting himself wet because he pulled out and pushed right into her ass. She’d learned how to relax and open up to him fast and without foreplay. He had hurt her once, and the next day when he’d seen she was in pain, he frowned, pulling her into an awkward hug. That stiff embrace had underscored that it was her job to remedy the problem, because his being more gentle would not suit either of them.
He shoved his entire length into her. Oh God, he knew how to fuck her. Words dissolved in her brain, and there were only the animal sounds of her own grunts and his.
He spoke, and she struggled to surface from the dark cloud of her ecstasy to make sense of the sounds. “What?”
“Come.”
And she did, just like that, at his command. He yanked back her hair and forced her to look at the television. The camera panned across images of burned bodies in Chile—a pile of charred skeletons, too small to be adults.
Still, he pounded into her.
Gwen sobbed. Her climax lost its momentum. Ethan ejaculated inside her, pounding her into the table without realizing she no longer met his thrusts. He didn’t seem to notice her lack of response, which meant he was truly carried away by the success of his orchestrations—he’d provoked the vampires to attack his own people, to intensify the cycle of retaliation.
He pulled out and yanked her to standing by her hair. “You are my perfect whore, Gwen.” His kiss was altogether tender, and it was the most frightening thing he had ever done to her. “Go get cleaned up.” He spanked her again lightly. “Then we’ll go into the office.”
In the vanity mirror over the bathroom sink, Gwen washed her face and fixated on her own eyes, searching for something, anything she recognized. A vampire had made her this way, had made her crave pain, had killed her soul while her body writhed in pleasure under his bite. Now, Ethan was her dark prince, the only one who could satisfy her desires and help her avenge herself.
But he’d forced her to look at those burned-up babies, forced her to witness suffering in the throes of pleasure.
He was no prince. It was perfectly fine to hurt her—she was trash, defiled by a filthy animal. Hurting children, however, was unacceptable, even for the greater good. But if Ethan was no longer her prince, could she live without him?
Empty gray eyes stared back at her, devoid of answers.
He knocked on the door. “Come on, Gwen. I have a lot of work to do and I simply cannot wait for you to see what I have planned next.”
Bel rinsed the columns he and Lexi had used and set them upside down to dry. A movement flickered in the corner of his eye. The door seemed to swing open half an inch, as if Lexi had failed to latch it. Or maybe she’d forgotten something and was coming back for it.
But the door didn’t move again, and he instinctively reached back under his sweatshirt to pat the handgun tucked into his waistband. There was nowhere to hide in the narrow lab. He ducked and pulled a cabinet open to shield himself just as the door swung open, crashing into the cou
nter.
“Are you the mercenary Lobel Marasović?”
Hidden from view, Bel rolled his eyes.
“You didn’t think you could get away with it, did you?”
The door clicked closed again.
“With what?”
“Shut up, asshole. The attacks are all over the news.”
Bel hadn’t seen the news. “I haven’t attacked anyone. I’ve been in the lab all night and all day.”
“So it wasn’t you,” said a second voice. “But it sure as hell was vampires, and you are going to pay for it. First you, and soon every single motherfucking blood sucker we can find.”
Bel had heard this crap so often it bored him. If Bel shot the fool, he wouldn’t have to listen to it, but then he would never learn why they’d come after him.
“Stand up nice and slow. Hands in the air.”
Bel rose steady and straight, like the mercury on a thermometer. The yellow-eyed youngsters wore scrubs. Probably initiates. No one would think they were anything but medical students, apart from their guns.
“We hear you are only half vampire, and Mr. Bennett says he’s reasonably sure a gunshot will kill you. We can test that assumption, or you come with us. He would like to ask you some questions about that force field around your father’s house.”
Ah. So Bennett was looking for a way through the shield. All Bel needed to know.
“It’s true.” He assessed the slight tremor in the speaker’s gun hand. The barrel wobbled enough to reassure Bel. However the other man’s grip was relaxed and sure.
“What’s that?” the steady one asked.
“A gunshot would kill me, but you would have to beat me to it.” Bel drew his weapon with practiced speed and shot the steady one in the forehead. He crumpled to his knees before falling face first onto the linoleum floor.
The shaky one lowered his gun briefly, but lifted it again almost instantly. Bel shot him in the chest. Hunter blood began to pool around their bodies. Even with the silencer on, the shots would have been loud enough to draw attention. The one with the chest wound gurgled and twitched before his ribs fell with a final exhale.
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