This Time Tomorrow

by Tessa Bailey

  He dragged the head of his sex up and down, teasing her clit with it until she gave a closed-mouth scream. “If that’s how I took your virginity, Roksana…” His teeth grazed her neck. “How hard do you think I’m going to hit it the second time?”

  “Hard,” she whimpered.

  A vibration passed through his strong body. “I can’t help it, baby.”

  “I know. I…” Her fingers flexed in the bedding, the confession coming out in a choppy rush. “Sometimes I used to fantasize that we finally fought. You finally fought me and…I wondered what your strength would be like if you used it against me. I-I wanted to know.”

  Elias plowed his shaft into her, his growl echoing in the bedroom, though Roksana could barely hear anything over the ringing in her ears. Was aware of very little, save the rampant lust commandeering all five of her senses. “Christ,” he shouted, the word muffled by her shoulder. “Open your knees wider, mate. Make room for me.”

  Breathless, dangling over a hot bed of release, she did as she was told, gratified when Elias slid a final inch inside of her, his triumphant exhale puckering her nipples. “Like that?”

  “Yes, like that.” He pushed his face hard into her neck, fangs bared. “What you said to me before…God, Roksana, I’m trying to keep myself in check—”

  “Don’t. Don’t.” She squeezed her intimate muscles rhythmically, tempting him, desperate to make him lose control and show her his true nature. “I want it. I can take it. I hate that there’s anything I don’t know about you. Break me with it.”

  The visceral snap of his tether made her almost giddy.

  Relief and excitement and hunger gave her everything she needed to weather the sudden storm of Elias. This was him, nothing held back, stripped down to his basest form and she soaked in every nuance. The way his heart rapped against the center of her spine, his guttural grunts in her ear, the smack of muscle impacting softness, the way his hard length buried itself inside of her, over and over again, like he’d been called for decades to join them together, fuse their bodies so they couldn’t be told apart, and this was his only chance.

  “You want me to break you, Roksana?” Elias rasped into her neck, his hips slamming into her buttocks repeatedly, gloriously, his sex going so deep it hurt and aroused in equal measure. Perfect. Perfect. “You’re the expert, baby. Tell me how. You break me every time you go away. Every time you come back. Your eyes break me. Your breath. Your heart.”

  Chest in a permanent squeeze, her knees liquefied and she collapsed to the bed, but their lovemaking didn’t pause. It couldn’t. It was inevitable. Elias merely stuffed a pillow beneath her hips to angle them and fucked her all the harder, the sounds of her screams caught by the soft padding. “More,” she whispered, turning her head so she could see his face, her blood firing at the ownership and intensity she glimpsed there. “More.”

  Elias made a hoarse sound and caught both of Roksana’s wrists, bending her elbows so he could pinion them to the center of her back, his thrusts turning ferocious. “More? You have all of me. You’re the keeper of everything.” He stayed her wrists in his left hand, rearing back and punching a hole through the center of the headboard with his right, sending wood splinters in every direction. “Mine. You’ve always been mine.”

  Roksana’s body met with her heart, forming some perfect, terrifyingly fated constellation and pleasure cleaved into her like velvet teeth. Tears scalded the backs of her eyelids and her womanhood pulsed and seized around Elias’s tunneling erection, her thighs trembling out of control. With her arms held behind her back and Elias baring down on her with his full weight, she was at the mercy of pleasure and it took advantage, digging its claws in deep so she could do nothing but scream and work her hips, hoping to give Elias an ounce of the bliss he was bestowing on her.

  Declarations crowded in her throat, dying to be spoken out loud, but instead she chanted his name on repeat, hoping he would interpret her correctly. “Elias, Elias, Elias…”

  For long moments, there was only Elias and his slapping entries into her body, his animalistic snarls, and then his hand shot out, reaching through the center of the broken headboard, his grip turning white, his body shaking, shaking—

  “Ahhhh, fuck. Roksana. My mate, my life,” he gritted out, his hips trapping hers to the mattress for one long grind after the other, liquid heat pouring into her and satisfying something deep and elemental inside Roksana. Your mate is satisfied, purred a voice, intoxicating her, filling her with the ultimate satisfaction, whether her mind accepted it or not. “Roksana, baby, I feel you milking me. I feel it.” His hand left the headboard and without warning, he yanked Roksana back onto her knees to receive several hard thrusts, a rough spanking to her right butt cheek. “Now take back what you earned. Take it all.”

  “Yes, Elias,” she breathed, her body going limper by the second, but pride keeping her upright, loving the sense of being filled by proof of his satisfaction. “Mine.”

  “Yours,” he agreed gruffly, intensity ringing in his voice.

  Finally, Roksana lost her battle with fatigue and melted down onto the bed, barely able to keep her eyes open in the haze of such potent relief. The last thing she remembered was Elias pacing at the foot of the bed naked, fingers ripping at the ends of his dark hair, before he eventually dressed and left the room.

  Uncertainty over what the next day would bring normally made it impossible for Roksana to sleep, but the unknown seemed to take pity on the slayer just this once, yawning wide and swallowing her whole, the words you’ve always been mine echoing in her mind.

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  Elias stepped out of the bedroom and closed his eyes, restraining himself against the need to wheel back inside and have her again. Consume her again. Again. He would never get enough of the paradise she’d just given him. But with her delicious scent baptizing his skin, he was raw and reborn at the same time. Caught between heaven and hell. He was highly attuned to Roksana’s energy, and while she’d abandoned herself to the attraction between them in a way that his body would crave with desperation until his final hour, the inner conflict he sensed inside her made him restless.

  Using his heightened hearing, he tuned into the conversations happening throughout the vampire hold. Two floors down, some of the guards were making bets about which team would win the Premier League championship, layered over the sound of a broom scraping over stone. And there—Jonas and Tucker one floor above.

  He turned and laid a hand on the door, making sure Roksana’s breathing had turned deep and even, before flying to the staircase and upward, stopping in the doorway of an unfamiliar study. Jonas and Tucker were seated at a dimly lit table in front of a bookcase, a half-finished tumbler of blood in Tucker’s grasp, Jonas peering down at some paperwork.

  Without removing focus from his work, Jonas kicked out a chair for Elias.

  Elias shook his head and started to pace. “I’ll stand.”

  “Are you sure, buddy?” Tucker drawled, twisting the glass on the table. “You’ve had a pretty strenuous evening.”

  Goddamn vampires and their inconveniently heightened hearing. “Not another word about it,” Elias warned, hitting Tucker with a death glare. “Especially to her.”

  Jonas finally set down his papers. “Ginny tells me Roksana is your mate.”

  “Yeah. We’re all in shock,” Tucker deadpanned. “How is she handling it?”

  “I don’t know, but I’m not talking to you about it,” Elias snapped. But his concern was layered on top of more concerns and he could no longer keep them to himself. So a second later, he broke his own rule. “She was different tonight.”

  She looked at me like she’d forgotten to hate me.

  She…let me in. Let me deep.

  If Elias was being honest, he was still shaken from the permission she’d granted with her body. For a woman like Roksana, trust was a rarely bestowed gift, especially where he was concerned. Whatever had inspired the change in Roksana, he was damned grateful fo
r it, but the turmoil inside of her was still apparent—and his mate being anything but happy left him bashing up against the rocks.

  Jonas picked up a gold letter opener, holding it up so it caught the firelight. He struck Elias as being conflicted about something, but he knew Jonas wouldn’t share until he was good and ready. Such was the prerogative of a king.

  “We spoke before you boarded the flight in Moscow, to make sure Roksana would be protected if she went straight to Coney Island. Yet she came here instead.”

  “Roksana makes her own rules. I just try to keep up.” Elias finally dropped into the offered chair, stretching his legs out in front of him. “Did Tucker already fill you in on the poker game in Moscow?”

  “Three, potentially four murders and a burned down mansion?” Jonas pinned the paperwork with the tip of the letter opener. “Trust me, I heard about it long before you arrived. If the Russian High Order didn’t have an aversion to fae, there might have been consequences.”

  “Hand to God, it was craziest fucking night of my life,” Tucker said, slapping a palm over his heart. “And I’ve been to WrestleMania three times.” He raised an eyebrow at Elias. “You tell Jonas you’ve got fire powers yet? Fire powers, bro. You’re like a goddamn X-Man.”

  Jonas inclined his head. “Jesus. A lot happened in Russia.”

  “The fae gave us this concoction—”

  “Let’s not talk about that,” Elias cut in.

  “No, I think I’d really like to hear this,” Jonas said, settling back in his wingback chair. “What kind of concoction?”

  Tucker elevated the tone of his voice several octaves and put on a French accent. “Once drunk, the concoction determines what you desire most in life and amplifies it to make you compete harder.” His voice went back to normal. “Basically, we were there to entertain this crazy French fairy chick and her weird boyfriend. And then a bunch of people got shot or burned alive.”

  “Good thing none of it happened on my turf.” Jonas’s expression was incredulous. “You drank this mixture, Elias? I can see Tucker tossing back just about anything—no offense—”

  “None taken,” Tucker said, good-naturedly.

  “But you?”

  Elias drummed his fingers on the arm of the chair. “The concoction presented an unknown and I don’t take chances with her. I wanted to make sure Roksana didn’t drink any, so I downed both.” A moving image of Roksana straining and moaning beneath him on the floor of the mansion had him gripping the wooden arm of the chair. “It had an effect.”

  Understanding dawned in Jonas’s eyes. “Because she is what you desire most.”

  “You know that’s always been the case,” Elias rasped, unable to meet the king’s gaze. “The concoction stripped my ability to hide my…devotion, so now she knows it, too. Perhaps that knowledge makes it harder for her to hate me.”

  Tucker chuckled, but his brow was wrinkled. “You say that like it’s a bad thing.”

  “She needs her vengeance against me. If she loses me as her target…”

  “She’ll start searching for the correct one,” Jonas concluded, his face inscrutable. “I don’t understand. Why is that a bad thing?”

  Finding out what led to the massacre in Vegas could get her killed. Inessa had vowed to lop her head off in Red Square if Elias spilled the secret and that venomous promise still rang in his ears. The mere thought of Roksana taking a final breath boiled his gut in acid. He couldn’t even voice that fear out loud. Nothing would endanger her. Nothing.

  Not as long as he walked the earth.

  There was more to his silence where Inessa was concerned, too. Years ago he’d made the vow to himself that he wouldn’t take away the final thing Roksana loved. Her mother. Exposing Inessa would do that, right enough. He would protect his mate from her evil mother, but he wouldn’t be the one who trashed the one who’d given her hope. Purpose.

  Hope and purpose he’d been instrumental in her losing in the first place.

  “What happened when you drank the concoction?” Elias asked Tucker, desperate to change the subject. “Were you surprised by what you desired most?”

  Tucker almost never lost his grin, but it faltered now. “It doesn’t matter.”

  Elias frowned. “Tell us.”

  His friend seemed almost embarrassed, picking up his glass of blood and taking a quick sip. “Home. All right? I saw…home.”

  “The home you grew up in?” Jonas asked.

  “Uh-uh.” Tucker shook his head, his gaze fixed on something invisible in the distance. “A different one. A place I’ve never been before, but I knew it was home.” He barked an unnatural laugh. “Talk about unfair. I saw a white picket fence and Elias gets fire powers. Why is no one losing their shit about him being a human torch?”

  Jonas’s lips jumped at one end. “It is pretty badass. Can you control it?”

  “Not when Roksana is in danger.”

  “So, basically never,” the king drawled, shifting in his chair. “Excellent.”

  Elias studied the glossy surface of the table, but he was really seeing fire engulfing the ceiling of the mansion in Moscow. Feeling the undiluted rage taking him over, stretching his muscles, making them pop. A gun pointed at Roksana. His mate.

  Jonas’s paperwork burst into flames.

  “Son of a—” The king whipped off his coat and patted out the fire. “All right. We’ve got a problem here.”

  Tucker was laughing so hard, he almost fell out of his chair.

  The king tossed aside his charred coat. “You risk discovery if you go out in public, Elias. How can I allow that?”

  “You’ll have to find a way, because I’m going with Roksana to Coney Island to trade the marriage decree for Tilda’s game piece.”

  The two vampires faced off over the table. Elias wouldn’t give an inch and Jonas gave nothing away. “You have chosen her side, then,” the king said, finally, his face unreadable. “You’ll openly allow her to give this advantage to her mother.”

  “Her mother will kill her if she doesn’t hand over the game piece.”

  “What if I told you thousands of vampires could die if she does turn it over to Inessa?” Elias reeled, but Jonas barely paused to let that statement sink in. “There is more happening in the vampire world than she realizes.” Jonas scrutinized Elias for long moment, as if judging how much he knew, but Elias forced his face to remain impassive. “Right after I became king, Inessa contacted me about a protection deal.”

  Several beats of silence passed. “The leader of the Russian slayers wanted protection from vampires?”

  “No.” Jonas stacked and shuffled the partially burned paperwork. “She offered us protection from the North American network of slayers. Said she was close enough to the American leader to make the deal happen with no issue. When I refused…the rise in slayings began. Most of the casualties are among the Freshly Silenced, of course. The helpless and weak.” Visibly troubled, he pushed a hand through his hair. “After studying the finances of my predecessors, it appears the High Order were paying off Inessa for a long time to keep slayers…ineffective in the States. I can only assume she has finagled a deal with the Russian High Order. There appears to be an unholy alliance between slayers and vampires. If they expect the same fealty from me, they can go fuck themselves.”

  Guilt bled into Elias’s chest. He’d known about the alliance between Inessa and the vampires since that night in Vegas. Fear for Roksana’s safety had kept the information locked inside of him, safer than any vault. His loyalty to her was absolute. But now Jonas was telling him his silence had visited death upon the very vampires he’d been helping Jonas nurture? Christ, no matter what path he chose there was a cost. Goddammit.

  “Unfortunately,” Jonas continued. “I’m not the only game in town. Not anymore. There are vampires who were loyal to the High Order we eliminated. They don’t like my efforts to integrate the Freshly Silenced into society. They think we risk being discovered if we forgive mistakes by the newbies
and take the time to teach them how to live effectively. They’re bloodthirsty and unforgiving and they loathe change. Not convenient when we have an entirely new High Order to elect here.”

  Tucker propped his elbows on the table, visibly processing everything Jonas said. “So…Inessa could make a deal with these old-school jerks instead of us. That’s what you’re saying.”

  Jonas let out a long breath. “They’re not enthusiastic about dealing with her, either. Slayers have always been the enemy.” He paused. “But that’s why Inessa’s eagerness to trade the marriage decree for the game piece at Enders is concerning. It could be a bargaining chip. A way to persuade the Elders to side with her—and if that happens…”

  “Overthrow,” Elias finished, knots tying in his stomach. “And Roksana has no idea about any of this, so she could unknowingly hand her mother a way to take you down.”

  The king said nothing.

  If Elias still had the ability to breathe, he would have been winded. “If Roksana doesn’t bring that bargaining chip to Inessa, her mother won’t stop until she’s dead.” His fangs started to vibrate, preparing to descend at the threat to his mate. “I could protect Roksana, but I know damn well she’ll seek out her own punishment.”

  “You could tell her the truth about Inessa,” Tucker suggested quietly.

  Elias shook his head. “No.”

  “I could tell her, too. But as much as I want to trust Roksana, there is no guarantee she’ll side with me and grant me the game piece instead,” Jonas said briskly, his Adam’s apple lifting and falling. “After all, this is the girl who has been threatening to slaughter us for the better part of two years.”

  “Don’t ask me to steal it from her and bring it to you, instead,” Elias said.

  “I wouldn’t waste my breath.”

  “She will do the right thing,” Elias rumbled, his fangs dropping, outrage on behalf of his mate tightening his skin like elastic. “Her heart is ten miles wide. She has more integrity in her little finger than I could ever hope to have.”