One’s memories jumbled and tangled, a mesh of color and light and sound, emotion and feeling and need, blending until the singularities of three individuals split a part of themselves off to hold the memories of one.
The blood held and stretched, shared between the three, marking one as something separate, distinct. She was mine and his, I was his and hers, and Jason was forever hers and mine, and we were one.
How long one existed in that space, I’ll never know. Maybe we would’ve stayed like that forever, perfectly merged into a single being, if the part of me that was solely mine hadn’t blanched from a passing set of memories that were solely Gianna’s.
Selena, peering across a darkened courtyard. Selena, smiling brightly, her fangs flashing under the light of the full moon.
Selena’s face pressed against the glass of a window.
I jerked back, severing the communion of one. “Jesus, Gianna. Why didn’t you tell me?”
Jason pulled her wrist away from his mouth and met my gaze. “Who’s Selena?”
“One of Elizabet’s daughters, a vampire.” I eased out of Gianna’s ass as gently as I could. “She’s not supposed to be away from Elizabet’s home.”
I slipped into we and shared what I could with Jase, how Selena had tracked me and Gigi down and been punished for it, the torture I’d dealt to Zane for helping the semi-rogue vampire and stalking our woman.
His eyebrows furrowed into a vee over the harsh glow of his blue eyes. “Fuck that.”
I absolutely agreed.
Gianna drew back from Jason and elbowed me. I crawled away from her and helped her ease off of him into the strength of our mutual love.
“Don’t nag,” she said. “I was going to tell you.”
“You should’ve said something the first time you saw her, Gigi, not half a dozen times later.” Jason flipped her around none too gently and grasped her chin in his hand. “We can’t protect you if you hide things from us.”
She shook him off and glared at him. “I was doing ok on my own…”
“No.” I reared back and held her gaze with my own. “You know how dangerous Selena is. Don’t ever, ever hold back something like that again. Promise us.”
Her eyes darted between the two of us. The glow in them dimmed and her gaze dropped as she nodded.
I heaved a sigh of relief, a relief that echoed through my bond with Jason. I didn’t have to look at him to know what he was thinking, for we shared the thought. Make Selena pay. I scooted off the bed and snagged my cell while Jason hustled Gianna into the bathroom for a shower. Marco and Elizabet needed to know what Selena had been up to first. Later, Jason and I would hunker down to plan, united in our love and our determination to protect our growing family.
Nothing could be allowed to threaten that family, not now, not ever.
God help anyone who dared.
Episode 6
Broken
Chapter One
The strength of a man’s convictions is never fully realized until it’s tested. I stared impassively down at the mutilated body of the vampire Selena and examined mine. A man has a duty to protect his wife and family. Whatever means he must use to do so were right and justified, even if those means weren’t necessarily good.
Such were my convictions. I clung to them fiercely and bore down on Selena’s mind with a resolution born of belief, reaching into her to take what I wanted. Fear. Revulsion. Horror. An agony that bled into the mind and wouldn’t let go, even as the flesh remained unscathed. I punished from a distance, no longer bound by the need to touch another in order to exert my will, thanks to strength imbued by Marco’s blood and a ravenous desire to control myself, to learn and grow, to live.
I filtered through what we call memory to find the deepest, darkest recesses of Selena’s mind and exploit them to my own ends. A childhood fear of monsters lurking in the dark unknown, magnified tenfold and twisted until her mind screamed as she fled from it; a tightly enclosed space, dank and musty, damp clay overhead, roots underneath, and a thousand thousand miniscule legs carrying slithering creepy crawlies across and through and into her; and a relatively new phobia, the sun shining brightly onto unprotected flesh, scorching its way to the bone as her skin and muscles smoldered, flaking off in great globs of burnt tissue.
Newton’s Third Law of Motion floated into my head. For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction. That basic law of physics applied itself equally well to human behavior.
Selena had hunted down Gianna, breaking a sacred law of the Vampyr, the one designed to protect a blood slave’s family. As punishment, Marco had striped Selena’s back with the braided rope of a bullwhip. The vibrantly raw wounds would heal as soon as Selena could feed again. A few days after, no more, and even the scars would be gone.
What I was doing would sear itself into her memory far longer and serve as a lesson to any other who dared to act upon my family.
Action. Reaction.
A hoarse moan, the stir of a limb, another smear of blood on the flat metal floor. I squatted in front of the cage and coldly eyed Selena’s broken form. She hadn’t bothered to fight, not when Marco had captured her and brought her back to Elizabet, not when Elizabet, her maker and Mother, had ordered Selena stripped and beaten, and not when I had first stood over the errant vampire and wielded my own brand of punishment.
The cold man chuckled from a dim corner of my mind, reveling in the horror spreading through Selena one neuron at a time. I ignored him. The day had passed when I feared losing control over that part of myself, the part of me that was pure vampire instinct. The cold man had threatened my unborn child and I had, at long last, found the means to keep him under my thumb instead of the other way around. Action, reaction, only in this case, the reaction was akin to banishment, or as close as I could come without excising the vampire within me entirely. I wasn’t fool enough to make it permanent. One day, I might need it.
Marco squatted beside me, his burly form balanced on the balls of his bare feet. “How long will you hold her there?”
“Until I’m satisfied she won’t go after Gianna again.”
I met Marco’s frigid blue gaze evenly, though I didn’t have to in order to know what was running through his mind. He was open to me by his own choice, had left himself that way since he’d pushed me into taking from him. Blood and strength. I had both now in plenty, thanks to Marco. Because of it, I had taken another step along the path to becoming a vampire, a vital step that allowed me to punish from a distance, cold, remote, dispassionate. His blood had been a tiny catalyst, as had the sheer hurricane of rage whirling through me when Gianna had confessed to seeing Selena where the vampire wasn’t supposed to be.
Marco wrapped a massive hand around one of the cage’s steel bars. “You’ll break her soon if you’re not careful and then she’ll be useless to us all.”
“I know you don’t want to have to put her down.” I stood, careful not to disrupt the mental connection with Selena. I’d tunneled my way into her mind with brute force, causing as much damage as I could. Wouldn’t mind doing it again. My anger was still pretty damn high, but I didn’t want Marco to have to kill her either. She hadn’t done anything to justify that. Yet. “I’ll pull back before she breaks.”
He rose to tower over me. “See that you do, little pet.”
“Seriously. Enough with the little cracks.”
His mouth curled into a wolfish smirk and his richly blue eyes went black as midnight. “A man who makes such demands should be strong enough to enforce them.”
I rolled my eyes. Honest to God, Marco was about as medieval as they came, and he hadn’t even been alive back then. “Yeah, yeah. One day…”
“That day will not come for a long while, little one.”
Marco snaked a hand out and fastened it around my nape, yanking me to him with an effortless curl of his bicep. The physical contact broke my carefully nurtured torture of Selena’s mind. I let it go with only a little regret. She wasn’t going anywh
ere, not until Elizabet lifted her punishment.
Marco buried his face in my throat and lapped at my pulse with his tongue. “Beg me to take you. Beg me to make you stronger and I will.”
I shuddered as his breath washed over my wet skin. Desire leapt into my gut, a living flame boiling through my blood. “Not in any hurry to vamp out, here,” I gritted out.
Marco released me slowly. “Then I’ll take your favorite. He was a good fuck. Rough. Passionate. Eager to please.”
I scowled and edged away. Damn him. Elizabet’s favorite knew exactly where to strike to effect the most damage. Jason was one of my few vulnerabilities. He was friend, favorite, and lover, all rolled into one gorgeous six-and-a-half feet tall package, and he was my husband, mine and Gianna’s, if one could call our threesome a marriage of any sort.
We were trying to make that work, though we’d only had a few days of practice.
My better thirds reached out to me through one. I soothed them quietly. We were all so new to the bond that we hadn’t yet learned how to differentiate between a simple thought and a mental call. “I won’t tell you to leave Jase alone.”
“Wouldn’t stop me.”
I eased back another inch or two and stuffed my hands into the pockets of my slacks. “He can take care of himself.”
Marco grunted. “When’s basketball finished?”
“Tech’s qualified for the first round of the NCAA tournaments. After that, it’s anybody’s guess what’ll happen. Another few weeks should do it, though.”
“He’ll come with you next month, then.”
“He will.” To learn, to take Elizabet and Marco’s blood again, to become stronger. Already, Jase was nearly as strong as me, more so physically. I figured he always would be, though it didn’t bother me. My strengths as a vampire-in-training were all mental. Strategy, manipulation. Still had a lot of work to do, a lot of growing, but I was getting there. “He’s looking forward to it, actually.”
Marco’s grin was sly, but underneath, I caught a hint of hunger, a thirst for blood and sex, or what I irreverently called a Suck and Fuck, the method all vampires used to control their base nature. Sex and blood. Intertwined, both could be controlled and used to sate those hungers. Alone, they were deadly. I’d learned that the hard way.
Jason reached out to me again. He and Gianna were supposed to be studying while I made my monthly visit to Elizabet’s, though I figured they’d veer into other things with me gone for the night.
It’s not the same without you.
Jason sent the thought/feeling along our bond and immediately after projected an image of him and Gianna and me as we’d been the night before, making love as we communed through one.
I shuddered as the memories washed over me, struggled against the need to lose myself in one until there was nothing left of me. It was so tempting to give in, so beautiful what the three of us had. Jason’s pleasure stroked my mind, followed by a swift brush of my sweet Gianna, and then they were gone, leaving me alone in a dank basement with a man I both feared and respected, and a vampire I was coming to despise.
I shook away the fog left in the wake of Jason and Gianna’s departure. God, I missed them, but there were things here I needed to focus on, things that were important to my fledgling family’s survival. “I guess you’ll horn in on me and Dev tonight, too, huh.”
Marco thin lips curled into a smile. “What do you think, little pet?”
What I thought was immaterial. It’s not like he paid attention to what I wanted. I suspected he’d been playing his own game since the first moment I’d entered Elizabet’s mansion. It wasn’t a huge stretch to understand the outcome he was betting on, either. His ultimate goal was and had ever been Elizabet’s well-being.
I wasn’t the only man under her care who believed the end justified the means.
I glanced at my watch. “I’m going on up. You coming?”
“I’ll gather Elizabet first, escort her up.” His gaze slid to Selena. “You finished with her?”
“For now.” A good rest might do wonders for the vampire’s ability to find her way to my point of view. “I’ll stop by in the morning, check on her progress.”
He and I walked up the narrow stairs together, leaving Selena safely secured in her cage, the horror of her punishment rippling through her fragile mind.
Chapter Two
Dev was waiting for me in the Red Room, fully dressed. He stood at one of the windows, one hand lifting the curtains aside as he stared out into the late winter night. His shoulders were slumped ever so slightly. I reached out a testing sliver of my mind and found weariness and something foreign wrapped like a tightly closed fist around his psyche, something that wasn’t supposed to be there. I prodded deeper, stroking, searching for a way in, and bounced off.
What the hell.
Dev had never been able to keep me out before, never wanted to.
I let go of the door. It swung shut with a quiet snick as I stood there gaping at my lover, the man who’d befriended me and introduced me to the world of the Vampyr, the man who had, only a week before, stood beside me as I married the woman I loved and bound my favorite to me.
He dropped the curtain and turned toward me. The soft glow that normally filled his eyes was gone, replaced by a flat, blank stare. “Eric.”
“What’s going on, Dev?”
“Tonight’s our last night as roster mates.”
A suffocating blanket dropped over me. I struggled to breathe through it as my heart jumped into my throat. “What?”
He slid his hands into the pockets of his slacks. “You’re a full-blown pet, strong enough to feed Elizabet on your own. And you’ll have Jason to help you when he comes in next month.”
“That’s only temporary, just through the summer until basketball starts again.” My mind whirled through the implications one after another. Jason reached out through our bond, his presence a comforting weight in my mind. For the first time since we had formed, it didn’t help. I staggered to a chaise and dropped onto it before my legs gave out. “We were supposed to do that together, me and you and him.”
“You don’t need me.”
“The hell, Dev. Of course, I need you.” I raked a hand through my already unruly hair and stared at him, lost. “I love you.”
“Do you?”
He shrugged casually, as if it were of no concern to him, and a worm of something ugly came between us. It rose up around my heart, pushing away the hurt, expanding until it filled me and burst free to live on its own, a hot, seething mass of raw fury that swept me up into its embrace and carried me along as it grew and grew.
I’d felt like this before, felt the unnatural expansion of self into other. After the first time I’d taken Elizabet’s throat, I’d knelt over the toilet communing with the universe as her blood lifted me up into something new. I’d stretched again when I’d been strapped at the foot of the bed in this very room, enduring what should’ve been a brief punishment.
Those were different, the first one, at least, touched as it had been by awe and the sense that I’d stepped onto the road less travelled. This was something else, something cold that brushed against the line between light and darkness.
I reached out, searching for the bond Devin and I were supposed to share, and found the foreignness I’d sensed earlier.
“What have you done?” I said in a harsh growl.
Devin startled and stepped back. The first signs of fear bled into his otherwise impassive expression. “What are you doing, Eric?”
“Learning. Tell me what you did to break our bond.”
He looked away from me and that’s when I knew. He’d gone to someone else, someone stronger than me, someone who could lay down a claim on a pet without suffering Elizabet’s wrath.
I reached out again and tunneled through the wall Devin had erected. It was harder than it should’ve been, like pushing a single finger through a heavy sheet of plastic. I threw my entire will behind the effort, ramming all o
f my growing strength into a single, focused point until I broke through with an inaudible pop. Devin gasped and arched against the connection as I raced through his mind, grasping at memories until I found the one I wanted: Devin naked under the werewolf Darien, submitting while the Alpha claimed him, marked him, and broke the bond between me and Dev.
I let go and sagged against the chaise, panting out my hurt in the heavy breaths expelling themselves from my lungs. Devin crumpled to the floor and caught himself on his hands. His head hung down, the golden halo of his beautiful hair waving toward the ground, pulled by gravity.
The eternal force tugged at me as well, rooting me to my seat, bending me under its will. At that moment, I don’t think I could’ve moved even if I’d needed to. “Why, Dev? Why would you let him mark you like that?”
His shoulders heaved as he pushed himself into a wobbly stand. “Marco’s dying. Elizabet asked me to be her favorite, once he’s gone. I needed the strength.”
“Jesus, Dev. You could’ve gotten that from me.”
“Maybe I didn’t want to get it from you,” he said flatly. “Maybe it was something I needed to find on my own.”
“So you went to a fucking werewolf? Yeah, ‘cause that makes sense. Way to divide your loyalties.”
“Elizabet approved. In fact, she suggested it.”
“The hell.” Anger propelled me upward, out of gravity’s grasp. “Why would she do that when she knows what’s between us?”
“Because I wanted to break the bond, Eric. I wanted to be rid of you.”
I reared back, stunned. “I thought you loved me. We were supposed to be together.”
His eyes hardened into twin stones of amber. “If you wanted that so much, why did you get married?”
I gave a half laugh. “Because Gianna was pregnant and I love her enough to want her in my life. It would’ve happened sooner or later, Dev. You know that. You know how I feel about her.”
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