"The attack was completely unsuccessful. Neither Don Rafael nor any of his men were injured, while all of the Eastern pros died in a helicopter crash."
"Amateurs," Madame Celeste growled and went on at considerable length in gutter French. Her hips began to move faster and faster, as she became more and more flushed. Beau smiled to himself; she always became aroused when she was angry.
His hand delved between her legs and worked her dripping folds. He rubbed her clit hard and she arched back against his shoulder, groaning incoherently. He pressed firmly and she stiffened, the shock-waves of orgasm pulsing through her.
Finally, she sighed and sank down against him bonelessly, her cream having thoroughly wet, and quite possibly ruined, his extremely expensive silk suit. He held her silently and waited, his cock still unrelieved. As was Devol's. As Madame Celeste certainly knew.
It was undoubtedly what she had enjoyed the most, the fact that she'd had her release but her two men had not. Power was her aphrodisiac, just as the scent of death aroused Devol.
A long, sharp fingernail teased his throat and he obediently slanted a look down at Madame. "Yes?"
"You must go to Texas and destroy Don Rafael for me."
"If you insist," he demurred, trying to sound reluctant.
"You'll leave tonight, after we dine together," she purred and leaned up to plant a crimson kiss on his mouth. "Devol is going to Texas, too, and can back you up, if you need help."
Help from Devol? The man could be very useful and he could be very deadly. Beau would have to wait and see.
Madame Celeste smiled into Beau's eyes, very sure of herself. He smiled back at her, well pleased to be finally free to destroy Rafael.
Madame Celeste rubbed herself over Beau's chest, her eyes slitting with pleasure like a cat's. "What are you doing over there, Devol? Strip and get your ass down here."
"Oui, madame," Devol responded immediately and peeled his T-shirt off.
Beau smiled and turned his attention to enjoying himself.
* * *
Chapter Five
Rodrigo flexed his fingers, fighting to reach the cuffs that clamped him to the rack. His arms and shoulders screamed with pain at even that slight movement, forcing him to desist. He'd fought so long and hard on previous occasions that this time, the servants had wound the rack so tightly he could barely breathe before they fled. He knew, without needing to look, that Fearghus was in similar straits beside him, here in The Syrian's mountain sanctuary on the far side of the Mediterranean from Castile.
Two months since they'd last been strapped into the racks. Two months of healing their bodies, while praying for the poor devils who took their places in it. And who they'd been forced to clean up after, scrubbing every inch of this hellhole thoroughly—and puking their guts out over what they found.
He'd been gone so long from Toledo, his beloved wife must have given birth months ago. The new baby—surely a daughter—must be walking by now, under the protection of her older brother and sister.
"Lassies with eyes as blue as the North Sea," Fearghus announced loudly. A loud groan of straining machinery announced the Scotsman's struggle against the other rack. "That's another sight worth living for. Especially when their hair is as red as a fire's heart and their skin as smooth and fair as cream."
"Can such a paragon exist?" Rafael queried, wondering if the North Sea was the same color as the ocean near his birthplace in Galicia.
"Of course. We have only to find her," Fearghus answered simply. Suddenly he sucked in his breath, the familiar sound of someone ripped by an incautious move. "Your turn to name something new."
Rodrigo ignored the iron collar scraping his chin raw and holding his head immobile. The trickle of blood down his throat and over his chest meant The Syrian and Diego, who'd eagerly embraced the promise of eternal life as a vampiro, would soon come to drink his and Fearghus's blood. The Syrian preferred to do so after torturing his victims. The first time, he'd whipped Rodrigo and Fearghus into near unconsciousness before he'd bitten them. He'd shown other tricks after that but had always been careful that Rodrigo and Fearghus could heal.
"A white owl flying silently across the snow, under a brilliant moon, free and fast," Rodrigo answered, playing his part in the game they'd devised to lift their spirits, always fighting not to succumb to hatred and despair.
In a far corner of his mind, Rodrigo could almost understand The Syrian's hatred of Christians. If his wife and children had been slaughtered while on pilgrimage to a holy city, as The Syrian's family had been massacred on the road to Mecca by Renaud de Châtillon a century ago, he too might have sworn vengeance on all Christians. But The Syrian's enjoyment of torture? Diego's vast delight in his victim's terror, as if he'd finally found what he most loved? Those were evil deeds, that both the Quran and the Bible fulminated against.
Madre de Dios, how he continually prayed for deliverance for himself and Fearghus. Especially after Achmed had tried and failed to rescue them, at the beginning of their captivity back in Spain. The Syrian had triumphantly paraded his cousin's broken, bloody body before him and warned them not to look for help anywhere on this earth. Still, Achmed's family had evidently raised enough of a furor to force The Syrian to return to his own territory, hundreds of leagues from Castile.
"Hear anything?" Fearghus asked.
"No. Do you?"
"Nothing. I'd like to hear birdsong again one day, though. Living at night, as those demons do, is—" He fumbled for a word.
"Tedious?" Rodrigo asked wryly.
Fearghus chuckled at the black humor. "Of course. Very tedious. But at least, I'm closer now to Jerusalem than I ever hoped to be when I left Inverness and Scotland. I've given thanks to the Almighty for that."
"And I." Rodrigo fell silent, counting the other small things he'd said thanks for. That his wife and children were still alive, Dios mediante. Every day he was still alive. The glimpses of daylight. The chance for revenge one day.
He gritted his teeth and stared straight up at the stone ceiling, lost somewhere in the darkness overhead.
The vision smashed into him then, clear and completely real, just as if he was standing in front of it at that moment, but with a shimmer of light around the edges. It was exactly the way the vision of the great northern storm had come to him when he was ten, as his grandfather had taught him to recognize the family's gift.
He saw himself facing The Syrian in the blazing red-tinted light of sunset, with his sword in his hand, ready to kill. Every detail was as distinct and solid as if he could touch it.
The vision stamped itself into every fiber of his being, then vanished from his waking sight.
The dungeon's door closed with a loud bang. Silken robes whispered across the stone as the two vampiros approached.
"Yaa kaafir, are you finally ready to convert?" The Syrian asked Rodrigo genially, strolling into view by his head. He spat a stream of dark coffee onto the floor and tested the ropes' tension with a long, bloody fingernail.
"No," Rodrigo gritted, saving his curses for later.
The Syrian shook his head. "Pity. You could save yourself so much pain if you'd accept that you will never return to Toledo." He ambled over to the Scotsman, whose blond coloring always fascinated him.
Diego snickered as he leaned over Rodrigo. "How does it feel to be helpless, you who were once so big and important? No large family now to help you with all their connections. No royal family—no king or infante—to favor you and shower you with rich gifts, like fine armor or a magnificent sword. Are you finally ready to start begging for your life?"
He ran a finger down Rodrigo's throat, nail digging deep enough to draw a thread of blood.
"But I still have my honor and my faith, which is all that matters to a knight," Rodrigo snapped back. "I will never beg."
Diego flushed angrily and turned toward his master, probably for permission to begin the night's tortures. The perfumed beast was still examining the other knight's muscles.
>
"Very pretty, don't you think, yaa ibnii?"' The Syrian purred, pinching Fearghus's thigh.
"Damn you, keep your hands off me, you stinking great goat," the big Scotsman roared and was ignored.
Diego sneered. "The other is bigger, especially his male equipment. There's much more there to torture."
What were they planning now?
"True," The Syrian agreed, turning to consider Rodrigo, his beady eyes as intent as any rat's.
"He also speaks Arabic so you can curse him more easily, instead of having to use clumsy Castilian," Diego urged.
What was that devil leading up to now?
"Or I could loan the smaller one out as a slave to the vampiros in the mountains west of Constantinople," The Syrian countered, returning to Fearghus. "They have a liking for golden ones there. With two centuries before a young vampiro can tolerate even twilight, there'd be many long nights for him to glow like a pearl. This one would fetch us great sums of gold."
"But if you sent the bigger one to the eastern courts—" Diego gestured at Rodrigo, his tone implying far more than the simple words.
"They'd know exactly how to use him." The Syrian finished the sentence with a licentious smile at Rodrigo's naked body.
Rodrigo's skin crawled. "We are no slaves! We are knights—"
The Syrian slapped him, the blow's force nearly breaking Rodrigo's neck against the unyielding collar. Rodrigo's teeth cut his tongue.
"You are whatever I deem you to be," The Syrian said coldly. "At the moment, I wish a Christian vampiro to torture, prosaicos having proven far too fragile. So one of you will become a vampiro tonight and the other will become his first meal."
"And the first emotion you taste," Diego added, watching Rodrigo closely, "will be the emotion you hunger for throughout the rest of your miserable life. Horror. Terror. You shall become a demon, who your church will demand immediate death for."
"Never!" Rodrigo and Fearghus shouted in near unison.
"I will never yield to you," Rodrigo snarled, in Arabic. "This I swear by all that I hold holy."
Diego laughed at him. "You can't stop us."
Rodrigo's vision blazed before his eyes again, The Syrian at the point of his sword in daylight.
Utter certainty imbued his riposte. "If you force me to become this, then I will take such a revenge on you as the world will remember forever."
The Syrian and Diego fell uneasily silent for a moment before The Syrian raised an arrogant eyebrow. "Yaa ghabi, you have no power to stop me. Because you're being so foolish, you're the one who'll be a vampiro."
Casually, he leaned down and sliced open Rodrigo's neck. Blood spouted in a great fountain.
"Damn you to hell, take me instead," Fearghus roared and was ignored.
Too angry to be careful, Rodrigo shouted an Arabic curse that made even the elder vampiro hesitate for a moment.
"May I give him El Abrazo, yaa 'abi l-'aziiz?" Diego asked far too eagerly.
The Syrian's eyes flashed. "No," he snapped and bent to drink.
Rodrigo flinched when the fangs' sharp bite and The Syrian's loathsome smell sank into him. He cursed again, promising vengeance no matter how long it took. Vowed that The Syrian and Diego would be utterly destroyed.
But all the while, it seemed his throat and all of his blood was vanishing into the voracious whirlpool, the bottomless abyss of hell that was The Syrian's mouth.
The Syrian sucked harder and faster, ripping open Rodrigo's jugular until blood poured from him like wine out of a goatskin.
Dizziness crept into Rodrigo, then blackness at the edges of his vision. He was losing consciousness. Madre de Dios, give me strength to survive, he prayed.
His vision reappeared, more distant and haloed in light than before but still recognizable, of The Syrian at his sword's point.
"Drink," The Syrian ordered, holding his dripping wrist in front of Rodrigo's face.
He was so very weak. Still, he stubbornly locked his jaws.
"Drink!"
He shook his head.
For the first time, Rodrigo heard a vampiro's telepathic order. Yaa ghabi, drink!
The mental compulsion to obey was almost unbearably strong but somehow he found the strength to fight it. He shook his head again, his eyesight very gray now.
Diego screamed in frustrated rage. Fearghus was openly praying, his voice choked with tears.
A hammer smashed through the side of his face, sending his teeth flying. Holding Rodrigo's head in a grip of iron, The Syrian poured his tainted blood into Rodrigo's mouth.
Rodrigo tried to spit. But Diego grabbed his jaw and held it still, as The Syrian forced a torrent of bitter crimson down his throat.
Violated and befouled, forced into El Abrazo, Rodrigo fell into a well of nightmares, as the vampiro elixir began to remake his body.
Grania kept her head up and her pace steady, determinedly ignoring the men behind her. Four miles down, one mile left before she'd be home an hour after dawn. She'd run track in high school and college. She still liked to run fast, burning the road away with the tensions of her job. She sure as hell wasn't fleeing from her shadows—but she was testing those men's limits.
A lot of people couldn't keep up with her, or had to work hard to do so. But these guys kept the same steady distance from her the entire time. They'd never tried to catch her, just watched her. It was almost as if she was in the middle of a bad spy novel, where the FBI waited to see who the double agent was working for, no matter where the double agent went or what he was doing.
Thankfully, her little house stood on the edge of what had once been a small agricultural village. Five houses remained, separated by pastures and peach orchards, none of them with a good view of her bungalow. The narrow roads, as they wound and dipped through the hills, were almost as private as the houses, giving her occasional opportunities to observe her followers.
One of her shadows resembled the hawk-like fellow who'd been guarding Rafael at the open house. Which meant Rafael still thought she might be part of an assassination threat. The paranoid asshole.
And if Rafael wasn't neurotic, then he lived in a world as violent and vicious as what she'd seen in Colombia.
Hell. Her shoulders and back remembered how easily his highly competent bodyguard had subdued her. She cursed again under her breath and kept running. She wasn't part of any conspiracy, as any investigation would prove.
Dammit, she was not going to put up with this.
The road made a sudden turn at this point, cutting close to an ancient, unused barn. Making an immediate decision, Grania stepped off the pavement and waited behind the barn.
Sure enough, not a minute later, her two shadows came past. They quickly pulled up when they saw the road ahead was empty.
"Looking for me, gentlemen?" Grania asked, stepping out into the morning sun.
They whirled to face her, hands instinctively reaching for guns.
She harrumphed silently; it figured they'd be armed. She waited, her own palms flagrantly empty.
They relaxed slowly, looking a little embarrassed. One of them was definitely the fellow who'd been with Rafael at the open house, identified by the same ageless, hawk-like look to his face. He tried out a charming smile on her. "Good morning, ma'am."
She lifted a quelling eyebrow. She'd had too many younger children in the orphanage try to charm her out of treats for her to be impressed by empty words. Later experiences with university students had only broadened her list of silly excuses to be ignored.
He, at least, had the wits to immediately drop his nonsense and adopt a businesslike mien. He straightened up and nodded to her, watching a bit more warily. Good.
"Your ID?"
"Ma'am, who carries ID on a morning jog?"
"Anyone who doesn't live locally and has to drive there."
"True." He considered her thoughtfully. The other man, slightly older and definitely more battered around the edges, shot a quick look at him.
Grania's voi
ce sharpened, as her temper shortened. "Don't push me, when you've been following me for four miles. The rancher who lives on this place is a deputy sheriff. You can either show me your ID or I start screaming."
"Wouldn't want that to happen, ma'am."
She gave him a very suspicious glare but his expression was entirely innocent. He reached into his back pocket and pulled out a small wallet, flipped it open and held it out to her. "Lieutenant junior grade Emilio Alvarez, US Navy," Grania read out loud. She thumbed through the rest of the wallet rapidly, considering the contents. "Coronado, California, is it?"
"Yes, ma'am." Alvarez was standing at parade rest, facing her. His companion was a few paces away, clearly ready to jump her if anything went wrong.
"A Navy SEAL?"
"Yes, ma'am, I'm with the Teams."
"Here on leave."
He nodded.
Grania turned over the implications in her mind. A Navy SEAL as bodyguard to an executive of the Santiago Trust? Whatever Rafael was, he was damn important—and the threat to him was huge.
Her stomach tried to turn itself inside out.
She handed Alvarez back his ID. "Are you going to follow me for the entire day?"
He shrugged. "Those are my orders, ma'am."
Wasn't this going to be fun? "Great. Well, let's get going again, guys."
She began to stretch, preparing herself to finish her morning jog.
Showered and fed an hour later, she sat down at her computer. After all, her real problem was how to cope with last night's events and her own reactions to them. She wasn't required to think about bodyguards; just how not to fall apart whenever she saw Rafael.
Her physiological reactions to him were extraordinary. To have an orgasm without any direct physical stimulation? And afterward, while taking a shower at home, she'd masturbated and climaxed so strongly she'd passed out. That was the first time she'd ever lost consciousness from an orgasm. And to do so from masturbating, while fantasizing about Rafael with another woman?
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