Byzantine Heartbreak (Beloved Bloody Time)

by Tracy Cooper-Posey

  “Done,” Brenden said. “Security is aware.”

  “Thank you.” Ryan stood up. “I don’t have to remind anyone, I’m sure, that this meeting is one hundred percent sub-rosa.”

  Cáel looked up at the ceiling. It was an ordinary suspended tile ceiling, that had been popular for centuries. A pity, he thought. It would have been nice to have had a rose there, just to hammer the point home for the more impressionable among them.

  * * * * *

  Finally, her office began to empty of people. Nayara heaved a mental sigh of relief. Soon, she would be alone and able to think.

  But her optimism was premature, for Cáel made his way over to where Nia sat still curled up in the wing chair. He pulled up one of the abandoned chairs close to hers and sat on the edge of it.

  He looked tired, but he sat with a straight back, still alert. The knuckles on his hands were bruised and bloody, scabs forming on them and she wondered what he and Ryan had been doing before they arrived back at the station. But it was not a deep concern. Like all the issues that had seemed to scare everyone in the meeting, this, too, seemed shallow and distant to her.

  She just wanted to be alone.

  Ryan sat on the edge of Nia’s desk, his hands in his pockets. It was far enough away to show that he was removing himself from the conversation, but because he was staying in the room, he was declaring his concern.

  Subtle. But that was Ryan’s forte.

  Nia looked back to Cáel, waiting.

  “I have to apologize,” Cáel told her and paused, as if he expected her to be shocked or surprised.

  But she knew why he was apologizing. “You didn’t force me to that party, Cáel. None of what we have done, including this beloved book of yours, did we do because you forced us.” She gave a small smile. “We would be weak indeed if we were so influenced by a human.”

  “But you were influenced by a human,” Cáel told her.

  This time, she did feel surprise.

  “I’m not talking about me,” Cáel told her. “I’m talking about Salathiel.”

  Shock slithered through her. In all this long time, she had never looked at Salathiel in this way. But Cáel was right. “Yes,” she said softly. “We were, weren’t we? Even after he was turned, Salathiel remained essentially human. That was why he couldn’t cope with his vampirism. He was too human.”

  “And there is another human who had influenced you, lately,” Cáel added.

  She frowned, because she knew who he was referring to. “Gabriel,” she concluded. “He’s still technically human, at the core.”

  “We all are, at the core,” Ryan said, from his seat on her desk. “We all have DNA. We can all interbreed, in the right circumstances. We all began as human. For what Cáel means, Gabriel is human.”

  Nia pursed her lips together. “I’ve been giving him too much power over me. I let him inside, didn’t I? If we’re supposed to be so above influence, I’m making a poor showing of it. I’m sitting here like a pouting school girl, letting him camp inside my head.”

  Cáel smiled. “I wasn’t going to put it quite like that.” His eyes were warm with laughter.

  Nia’s desk chimed and Ryan twisted around and tapped the key. “What is it, Brenden?”

  “Sorry boss, I’m going to need you or Nayara in person.”

  Ryan stood up. “Coming.” He glanced at Cáel. “You know where your pillow is.”

  Cáel nodded.

  The little exchange bothered Nayara in ways she didn’t want to examine too closely.

  Ryan left.

  Cáel turned to her. “Lock the door, Nia,” he said. “Stop it from opening to anyone except those you personally unlock the door for.”

  There was an urgency and earnestness in his voice that appealed to her better sense. Nayara locked the door remotely. “All right, I’ve locked the door. Why do I feel like you were waiting for Ryan to leave?”

  “I was,” Cáel told her. “Well, not exactly, but now that he has, it’s an opportunity I’m going to use. There’s a third human who has been influencing you, Nia.”

  She raised an eyebrow. The locking of the door was a major clue. “You,” she said flatly.

  Cáel nodded. His black eyes were pinning her to the chair. “You’re a hard person to influence. You’re not wrong there. But I’ve been playing politics and persuading global leaders and businessmen for over fifty years now and I’m no slouch at it. You and Ryan were in another class altogether, though.”

  “Were?” she repeated, pouncing on the word.

  Cáel gave a tiny shrug. “I’m not playing this game anymore. Not after tonight. Not after I saw what Gabriel did to you. You can deny it all you want, but my people were directly responsible for giving Gabriel access to you. I have to live with that and I don’t like it one little bit.” His square jaw flexed and rippled. Was he angry? What emotion was running through him now?

  And it occurred to Nayara that Cáel was a highly emotional man. She had not always understood that. When she had first met him, she had considered him to be a cold, ruthless and calculating politician, with nerves of steel and no heart. When had he let down the shield and allowed her to see inside?

  Or had she just got better at seeing the real Cáel?

  “I’m stopping the game, Nia,” he said and his normally smooth, deep voice was touched with some rough quality. Tiredness? Something else? “It’s the only way I can think of to make up for this.” His gaze turned back to her face again. “I’ve waited longer for you than I have for any woman, because I knew you had to off-load Salathiel first. But the time for waiting is over. And the time for honesty between us is now.”

  Nia wrapped her arms around her legs as her heart seemed to slam against the inside of her chest. It wasn’t a game Cáel was playing at all. He just called it a game, but the stakes were far higher than a simple crap table payout.

  Her mind turned, as it so often did, to the moment when she had stumbled into Ryan’s quarters and found the pair of them, naked on Ryan’s bed. The image was burned into her brain. Just recalling it had the power to make her pulse skyrocket and her body tighten with an arousal more powerful than anything she had experienced since she had been with Salathiel and Ryan. And that was from a simple glimpse. It was impossible to wonder how much stronger her arousal would be if it was not just a matter of seeing. What if she were, say, involved...?

  And it was here that she had chopped off her mental meanderings, refusing to let herself consider such possibilities.

  But clearly, Cáel had forgotten something, if he was looking at her now as a potential partner. “Ryan—” she began.

  “He isn’t a part of this,” Cáel said sharply.

  Now, what did that mean? Had Ryan and Cáel separated? Had it been only a temporary thing? Heaven’s knew, Ryan went through sexual partners like some people went through novels, but from the fury on his face when they had argued...just the fact that he had brought Cáel into his quarters on the station, an unprecedented event, had made Nayara think that for Ryan, Cáel was not one of his usual quick indulgences. That Cáel was something altogether different.

  She tried again, to explain it. “But...”

  “This is about you and me,” Cáel told her. “Nia, you’ve known this moment was going to happen since the day we met.”

  Nayara tried to pretend she didn’t know what he meant, but she couldn’t. The memory was still vivid. She caught his gaze. “You joked about asking for my comm link.”

  “You do remember.” He seemed pleased. “It wasn’t a joke, Nia. I was measuring your reaction. Ryan laughed, but you didn’t. You looked startled. At first. Then you looked thoughtful and I knew then that I would work for years if necessary to find a way past all the barriers and objections you would raise and make you really see me as something other than human and beyond redemption.”

  “But you are human,” Nayara told him. “How can I ignore that?”

  Cáel frowned. “Ignore it? I don’t want you to.
But I did want you to stop holding it against me. You have been fighting human prejudice against vampires for two hundred years, but you’re carrying quite a load of prejudice, yourself. You disparage humans, call them weak and say we will never understand you, but I understand you just fine, Nia. I’ve been watching you for weeks and I know you so well, I feel like I’ve known you forever.”

  “I don’t hate you,” Nayara said.

  “Oh, I know that.” His tone was so odd—a mixture of amusement and warmth and utter certainty.

  “How do you know?” she asked.

  Cáel leaned forward, his forearms on his knees. “Do you remember, a few weeks ago, we had a meeting...hell, I can’t even remember what the meeting was about. Ursella Shun was there, so it was strictly business. Boring business, most likely. Ursella drains the fun out of any occasion.”

  Nayara couldn’t help her grin and Cáel smiled, too. There was a devilish gleam in his eyes.

  “At the end of the meeting, you picked up the reading board Ursella had been using, to jack it back into your desk,” Cáel said.

  “You bumped into me,” Nayara replied. That moment was stamped into her mind not just because of her perfect memory, but because she had played it over and over again, puzzling over it. Analysing it. And simply because she couldn’t leave it alone.

  She never had been able to figure out how the moment had occurred. Now she knew. Cáel had engineered it.

  She had come around the desk to pick up the reading board from the other table, because it was one of the older ones that couldn’t feed from the power grid without being physically plugged into a jack and she didn’t want to lose Shun’s notations.

  She had picked up the board and turned back to her desk and rammed into Cáel, who had been heading for the door, she guessed. The board dropped and he caught it in one hand. He had been so close that she leaned back to avoid hitting him in the upper body with her arms or head and nearly toppled over herself. Cáel had steadied her by grabbing her around the waist with his free arm.

  For a moment they had paused, their bodies locked together. Her heart had started up by itself, as she dealt with the surprise. And dealt with the heat of his body. That was the inane thought that skittered through her mind. How hot he was, underneath his clothing. Hot and hard. There was a well-worked body beneath the suit and very little fat.

  Up until that moment, ever since the stupid request for her comm link, Cáel had been utterly correct, distant and proper, to the point where she had begun to think the comm link thing had been a joke. Cáel Stelios worked too damned hard and was too obsessed with his job, his business concerns and the Worlds Assembly to ever worry about coaxing a comm link from a reluctant woman. He was the sort that would hire his companionship, discard it as soon as the deal was done and move on to the next task.

  But with his arm around her waist and his hard body up against hers, Nayara had paused to wonder if that was quite true. For his dark eyes had gazed into hers for one breath robbing moment that had seemed to last for eons. “Hey,” he said softly. She could feel his voice rumbling in his chest, up against her breasts. Her nipples had instantly hardened.

  Her highly accurate time sense told her that in reality, Cáel had held her for only a few seconds.

  But it had felt like an age before he let her go and stepped back. “Sorry. I didn’t realize you were heading straight back for your desk. That was entirely my fault.” He had handed her the reading board, stepped around her and continued on his way.

  Leaving Nayara with a pulsing, aching body and scrambled thoughts.

  She sat up. “You did do it deliberately. Ryan said that you had.”

  Cáel looked startled. “You told him about it?”

  Nayara bit her lip. “I lied. I told him it wasn’t you. I...didn’t want him to know. I don’t know why.”

  “You wanted to keep it to yourself, because of your reaction,” Cáel said. His voice was low. “I felt your response to me, Nayara. It was instantaneous. And it was strong.” Cáel licked his lips. “You would have dismissed it intellectually, but your body was telling a different story. I went home that night, reeling with the possibilities.”

  Nayara swallowed. “I did nothing about it...” she whispered.

  Cáel frowned. “Why was that? I would have laid money on even your intellectual curiosity forcing you to follow up. I planned on it.”

  “Ryan told me you would expect that. That you were a master strategist and I shouldn’t play into your hand. So I didn’t. He didn’t know it was you, though. I let him think it was anyone but you.” Nayara hugged herself. “When I saw you in his bed... Cáel...” She looked up at him, feeling the wrench of that moment again. “Why did you do it?”

  He touched her lips with his forefinger. “That’s for later,” he said. “Nothing I’ve done was with the intention to hurt you. Earlier tonight, I gave up Worlds Assembly secrets in order to keep you safe, because I can’t stand the idea of anyone ever hurting you again.”

  “Hurt me?” She was amazed. “Cáel, no one can hurt me. I am vampire. I thought you knew me?”

  He picked up her hand and lifted her to her feet with a surprising strength. “I’ve seen you weeping your heart out, Nia. You can lie to anyone else you like, but you can’t lie to me.” He was drawing her slowly closer to him, his dark eyed gaze drawing her focus, snagging her mind and her attention.

  “I’m not lying,” she breathed.

  “You have physical strength to move small trees,” he murmured. “Nothing damages you except a few mortal methods. But there is an enormous number of things that can hurt you. In all the time you have lived, Nayara, you have gathered experience and some wisdom and you have grown weary with the years. But you and Ryan and every other vampire in the agency have taken great care to remind me over and over that you do not change. Nothing about your physiology ever changes, because your symbiot will not allow it. Has it never occurred to you that it includes your emotional maturity?”

  His arm was around her waist and he was pressed up against her, just like he had been before and the sensations his hard body was producing in her were impossible to ignore. They swamped her senses for a moment, until she was almost giddy with it. Nayara pressed her hand against Cáel’s shoulder, for stability, as an anchor and to hold herself away from him a little until she could think through his profound statement.

  “Our emotions don’t change?” she repeated. “How can that be?”

  “Emotions are chemical reactions in the human body. They change us. Humans change and grow because of our human responses. You don’t, Nayara. You might be centuries old, but you’re still struggling to deal with life’s bumps and bruises just as you were when you were made. How old were you then?”

  She struggled to remember. “I don’t know,” she confessed. “Maybe twenty-five. Twenty-eight. No one kept calendars much then.”

  Cáel nodded. “You react like a twenty-five year old. One with a lot of experience. You can’t help it. When you jump back in time, you might gain a little maturity. Fahmido could confirm that. But I’m guessing not much. An inch at a time.” He caressed her face. “You’re an economy sized package of human emotions because that’s the way you were as a human and you haven’t lost that in all the time you’ve been a vampire. Thank god,” he added, his voice a low rumble.

  “So you’re not playing the game anymore...?” she prompted him.

  Cáel’s gaze focused on her face. It shifted to her lips and she caught her breath.

  “No,” he said. “I’m finished with waiting. And now I know that you were never going to come to me anyway. Ryan anticipated me, there.” His mouth quirked in a small grin. Then the grin faded. “You do have a choice, Nia. You can say no. But I don’t believe that’s truly what you feel. Not after Constantinople.”

  Nayara realized that the hand she had placed against his shoulder had slipped around his neck and now she was resting against his full length, her chin lifted as she looked at him. “If
that is what you believe, then why haven’t you tried to kiss me yet?” she asked curiously.

  Cáel brushed his thumb over her bottom lip. “I’m savouring this moment,” he murmured. “Do you know how long I’ve dreamed about it?”

  “It’s just that...I don’t think I can wait much longer,” she told him truthfully. Her body was throbbing with anticipation.

  “Ah...so you do want me, Nia, my sweet.”

  “You said you knew that,” she accused him.

  “I knew you didn’t hate me. The rest...was just hope, built on the sweetest kiss I’ve ever stolen.”

  She knew then that he was waiting for her to kiss him. He wanted a positive sign before he would touch her in any serious way. Despite the heat radiating between them like a furnace, the throbbing of her body which even Cáel must surely feel, the hard tips of her breasts pressed against him through the silk of her kimono shirt, he was still waiting for a genuine commitment from her. He would not force her in any way. Signs and signals weren’t good enough.

  And she realized why. Gabriel had read her mind. Cáel wouldn’t presume that much.

  Admiration filled her. The discipline and patience Cáel had shown! The tenacity...

  She wasn’t aware of her decision to kiss him, but she found herself reaching up to press her mouth against his. His lips were firm and full. And warm.

  Her action triggered Cáel. His hand thrust into her hair and held her head steady as he took over the kiss. With a deep groan, he thrust his tongue between her lips, sweeping her mouth. His lips traced hers, then her nose and eyes and ears. His tongue thrust into her ears, making her shiver with pleasure. Then he began to lick and bite his way along her jaw before kissing her again.

  By the time he reached her mouth, Nayara was breathless. She had never been kissed like this, with such overwhelming attention. She was responding to it far too quickly, when she wanted time to explore and appreciate this sudden turn of events.

  Cáel made kissing a feast of sensations. She could linger, exploring his mouth, for a long, long time. But her hands were telling her there were more interesting things to play with and she trailed her lips down his warm, soft flesh to the pulsing artery in his neck. She lingered over the pulse, sensing his blood, registering his scent and locking it away for future reference. “AB negative,” she murmured. “Rare.” She slid her tongue along the length of his neck and under his chin, while her hands fumbled with the fastenings of his shirt. She grew impatient and finally tore the shirt away from his shoulders with a small tug. The shirt disintegrated and she dropped the rags to the chair behind him.