by Mara Leigh
It has been more than a century since I have allowed such urges to intrude.
But until she knows the full truth—or at least everything I suspect—and until she is no longer under the lubricating effects of my blood, I will resist her, no matter how hard she tries to seduce me.
Ryker cries out in pain, and Ember throws herself against my body, trying to get past me to the door. In the attempt, she grazes my erection, and my breath expels raggedly.
“We need to help him!” she implores. “He’s in pain!” Her eyes are so full of anguish that I feel it too. It hurts that she feels so much for this pirate, but her feelings for him make me feel even more strongly that I was right to resist her.
“I will find him.” I hold her shoulders, keeping her firmly in place. “I will help him if I can, but it is not safe for you down here. No one else can—can know what you are.”
She frowns, beautiful no matter what her expression, her skin so radiant and…
I tip my head to the side.
“What?” she asks impatiently. “You just thought of something. What is it?”
”You look like,” I tell her, shaking my head, trying to talk myself out of telling her what I’m thinking. “I do not know how long it will last, but at this moment, you could be mistaken for a vampire.”
She takes a step back. “Did drinking your blood…did it change me?”
“Yes.”
Her eyes fill with fear. “Am I a vampire?”
“No.” I shake my head. “No. But at the moment, you might be able to fool others into thinking that you are.”
The horror fades from her expression.
“Holy fucking shitballs!” Ryker’s voice shatters the air. “Do that again, Ricky, and I’ll kill you!” He cries out in obvious pain, an agonizing wail too horrible to comprehend.
Ember winces. “We have to go find him,” she says. “Now.” The determination in her eyes is visceral, amplifying my admiration and desire for her, even though I would prefer if her concern was for me.
“Very well.” I take her hand. “But stay behind me. Follow my lead, and I will do all I can to assist your pirate. But my first priority remains keeping you safe.”
She nods, and we exit the room. Ryker cries out again, and her hand tenses inside mine.
“This way.” I lead her down the hallway. Ryker saying the name Ricky proves Diederik is with him.
Sensing movement behind us, I turn to see that the orgy participants are filing out of the room we passed. At least they’re heading the other direction. Likely Ryker’s screams disturbed their activities.
Following the sounds, I lead her through a labyrinth of tunnels and then, as I peer around a corner, I spot two burly guards standing in front of a door to our right. Another scream fills the air. Very close now.
“Wait here,” I tell her, but she shakes her head, telling me with her eyes that there’s no chance that she will let me leave her behind.
“Please,” I say. “Stay here. If you come, you will make it more dangerous for him, and for me.” Arguments about her own safety clearly have little effect.
Sighing, she presses her back against the stone wall. But the look in her eyes does not reassure me that she will stay put. Alas, I cannot do anything to control her.
I squeeze her hand, before I leave her. Turning the corner, I button my suit jacket before I stride up to the guards, keeping my shoulders back, my face firm in a display of authority. This is a DEFTA facility—or I assume that it is. I am a senior executive and these men are prison guards.
“Let me through.”
The guards widen their stances, fully blocking the door with their bodies. “No one gets in.”
I scowl. “I am DEFTA’s Senior Vice President of Research and Compliance.”
The guards look at each other and shrug, clearly unsure what to do.
I raise my voice. “I demand entrance. Tell Diederik, or whomever is in charge, that Zuben is here.”
The door opens behind the guards, revealing Diederik.
Not only is this confirmation that we are in some kind of DEFTA run secret prison, Diederik will know that Ember and I were incarcerated in error, and will release us.
I am about to beckon Ember to join me, but then Octavia steps up to join Diederik, and I pause. Better to err on the side of caution. Until I know what is going on, I do not want to expose Ember to Octavia, to anyone.
Alone in the hallway, the risk to Ember is high, but it would be many times higher if Octavia links her to my research. And I don’t know how Ryker will act if he sees her. The pirate fed from her… Does he already know what her blood can do?
“Join us,” Octavia says sharply. “Why did you take so long to respond to my summons?”
“Your summons?” The guards part, I step into the room, and the door is closed behind me.
Ryker is sitting in a chair about twenty feet away, bound with silver cuffs at his ankles, wrists and throat. Naked, he is breathing heavily, clearly recovering from whatever induced his last round of pain.
“You!” He glares at me. “This is your fucking doing? I’ll kill you!”
I do not want to point out that he has no chance of killing me while strapped to a chair in a dungeon. That truth is obvious and it seems cruel to state.
A guard, dressed fully in leather, including a face covering, steps up to Ryker and puts a gag in his mouth. The pirate struggles against it, but the guard pulls back on the silver around Ryker’s throat and the pirate stops moving as smoke rises from the burns on his neck.
I turn to find Octavia glaring at me.
“I did not receive a summons,” I tell her.
“Nonsense. I called for you as soon as we had Ryker in custody,” she snaps. “What took you so long to arrive?”
“I have been in custody too. I have been down here in…wherever we are.”
She blinks, and then turns toward Diederik. “Is this true?”
Diederik starts laughing, and although it has been a century since I have resorted to any form of violence, the urge to punch his smug face is overwhelming. Octavia glares at Diederik and he swallows his chuckles.
“I didn’t know Zuben was taken.” Diederik clasps his hands behind his back. “As you commanded, my team brought in any vampire found with Ryker.” He gestures toward me. “Guess he was with him. My guys were just following orders.”
Octavia shakes her head. “Well, you are here now, Zuben. Finally. But it seems you were wrong about Ryker.”
“No.” I step toward her. “I am not wrong. He is a pirate. A thief. If you will allow me to show you the evidence—”
She shoots me a look so fierce I can feel it, and her lovers gather closer around her, with their menacing presence. “You know that is not what I’m talking about.”
My jaw hardens. Has she told Diederik about my research into the Illuminant? Octavia swore me to secrecy, assuring me that she would do the same, and her obvious greed in wanting the Illuminant for herself, made me believe that she’d never tell anyone. Certainly not someone like Diederik.
But if Diederik knows, I have put Ember in far more danger than I realized, and getting her released along with me has become even more delicate and complicated.
What have I done?
My intentions when I arranged to have Ryker arrested were to get him away from Ember, to keep him from discovering the truth about her, but now…
“I ordered six different vampires to feed from Ryker.” Octavia flicks her wrist toward him. “None of them…reacted as you claimed they would.” She steps closer to me.
“Have you told—”
“I’m not an idiot,” she interrupts me. “I only just summoned Diederik. He insisted he could soften Ryker up to tell me what he knows. But so far, nothing.”
Clearly Diederik’s interrogation techniques include torture. I am not certain that Ryker knows what I suspect Ember’s blood can do, but if he does know, he has not revealed it. If he had, Octavia would have her goons
searching the dungeons for her.
“Now you’re here,” Octavia says. “You can ask the right questions.”
My heart rate accelerates, but I reach inside myself to calm down. I am better than this, no longer driven by anger, cruelty and other base instincts. I will not let my emotions show. Revealing them will put Ember in more danger.
“Remove his gag,” Octavia says, and the guard in protective clothing does as she asks.
“Fuck you, Octavia!” Ryker shouts as soon as his mouth is free and he starts to heal from the silver gag’s burns. “Fuck you all.”
Octavia flicks her wrist and Ryker is immediately flooded by sunlight that pours down through a hole in the ceiling, high above. He screams in agony, writhing in the chair, and the silver burns are now insignificant compared to his crisping skin.
She flicks her wrist again, and the aperture closes.
Ryker slumps forward, as much as he can slump within his constraints, and the acrid smell of burnt hair and flesh fills the room. If Ember’s blood gave Ryker the ability to walk in the sunlight, even for a time, that time has passed.
Or am I wrong about Ember?
Octavia sashays toward Ryker. “You know I don’t enjoy this, lover. Answer Zuben’s questions so that we can put an end to all this…unpleasantness.” She leans toward his burnt body, slowly starting to heal. “End this, so we can get on to matters much more pleasant.”
She turns toward me. “Ask him your questions!”
I turn to Octavia. “I was wrong.” I bow my head slightly. “Your experiments have proven that this vampire does not hold the key to my research. He is not the one.” I already knew he wasn’t the Illuminant, and I certainly do not want to ask him questions about Ember in front of Octavia and Diederik.
Her eyes narrow. “Are you certain?”
“One hundred percent.” Nothing is ever one hundred percent certain, but I don’t want to confuse Octavia with the finer points of statistics.
“Release Ryker’s bindings,” she says, her voice tight. “Then someone feed him. Quickly. He has suffered enough.”
One of the guards removes his leather hood and leans over Ryker, exposing his throat, and the pirate’s fangs spring out. He plunges them into the other vampire’s vein.
Octavia moves to the side of the room as Ryker’s feeding progresses, and her mates surround her. As they caress her, she kisses them, one by one, and I turn away from the intimate family moment. Octavia and her five mates have something I will never have, something I don’t even want, but a strange longing opens inside me.
“What the fuck were you doing with Ryker when we picked him up?” Diederik asks me.
Ryker releases the vampire’s vein, and he moans as his skin heals more rapidly.
“I was following him,” I tell Diederik.
“Why the fuck would you do that?” he asks me. “You knew we had orders to pick him up.”
“I needed to be sure that he did not flee the city.”
Diederik crosses his arms over his chest and he shakes his head. “My team knows how to do their fucking jobs.”
“If that is the case, then why was I arrested?” I say, but immediately want to take my words back. There is no use in antagonizing this man, and bringing up the arrest might remind him his team also captured a female—if he knows.
“I don’t know why you were arrested.” Diederik’s eyes narrow. “Maybe because you can’t keep your fucking nose out of my business!” His head tips. “You just reminded me. My team picked up two other vampires with Ryker.”
Fuck.
He takes a step back from me. ”One of them was you.” He chuckles. “Clearly. But the other was female.” He steps toward Octavia.
I grab his arm. “Do not bother her with this.”
Diederik stares at my hand on his arm, and I release him. “It would be a waste of time,” I tell him. “I have seen this female vampire, and she is of no consequence—one of Ryker’s lovers in the wrong place at the wrong time.”
Calling Ember a vampire is an outright falsehood, and I hope the lie does not show on my face. A negative side effect of learning to control my anger and lust—and my more wicked urges—is that I became less adept at masking deceit.
“Why remind the CEO of your blunder?” I whisper to Diederik, and I glance at Octavia to make sure she’s still distracted by her lovers and not listening.
“Good point.” Diederik nods. “Not like we could release the prisoner anyway, now she’s been down here.”
A tremor goes through me at that thought. For this place to stay secret—even from me who is head of Compliance—Octavia must not ever release someone once they’re down here. But she must make some exceptions.
I glance over at Ryker. His skin is still red, blistered in places, but it is no longer blackened, and his features have become fully recognizable. Sunlight was used as a torture method for vampires in the past, but until today I believed that it had not been used for centuries, never mind by my own syndicate. Barbaric. So is this entire dungeon.
Octavia’s mates part to allow her to pass, and they follow protectively behind her as she approaches Ryker.
“Can you stand?” she asks him.
Instead of answering, he rises, and although I can tell he’s trying to hide it, his eyes reveal the pain caused by his motion.
“Get dressed,” she says. “We will continue our discussion in my office.”
“Are you letting Ryker go?” I ask, incredulous, but again wishing I had kept my mouth shut. My fear for Ember is making me reckless, shaking my usual calm and good judgment.
“That remains to be seen,” Octavia answers. “Come. Both of you.” She glares at me. “I would very much like to understand why you believed this vampire was the key to your research.”
My heart rate accelerates. I should be glad to be leaving this dungeon but that will leave Ember unprotected.
Octavia and her mates walk out the door. Diederik and most of his team follow behind, two of them waiting for Ryker and me to exit.
What am I going to do about Ember?
As we leave the room, I turn and look down the hall. Ember’s crouched, but rises as she sees us.
Ryker turns back to see what I am looking at, and then he grabs my lower arm, shooting me a look of dire warning. And as much as it repulses me to follow his lead, I know that he’s right.
As much danger as Ember faces down here, Octavia cannot know about Ember. And clearly Ryker already knows or suspects more than I want him to.
I wish there was a way to offer Ember comfort right now, to let her know that my leaving is my best chance to help her, and that I will rescue her from this place, even if it means giving up my own life.
Chapter Twenty-Five
Ember
Joy overpowers my terror when I see Ryker exit the room along with Zuben.
Ryker spots me and I want to call out, but the look he gives me says not to. Zuben glances back too, and his look also screams that I shouldn’t move, but it’s all I can do to hold myself back.
Ryker’s face is red, like it’s been sunburned and his hair seems less full, but I start to question that observation as it returns to its normal lush state before my eyes. Has Ryker been burned? Is that why he was screaming? Why?
Ryker and Zuben are quickly surrounded by about ten other people, one a petite female, the rest male and huge—presumably vampires—and so I heed the warning looks the men sent me. Ryker puts one hand behind his back, and gestures down with his palm, like the way one might tell a dog to stay. Then he gives me a thumbs up and an okay sign.
The gestures flash by quickly, and then the group disappears in the dimly lit hall, but their meaning was clear. Both men saw me. And if it was safe to come with them, they had an obvious chance to tell me.
They disappear, swallowed by darkness and turns in the tunnels, and I press myself back against the stone wall, cold at my back. I fold my arms over my chest. I have no idea what happened to my shoes—I haven’t
seen them since I undid their straps while Psycho threatened me—and this skimpy evening gown does nothing to hold back the damp chill in the air. I should get one of the blankets or furs from the room that Zuben and I were in. Better yet, I should hide under the furs there until he returns for me.
Because he will return. Neither Zuben or Ryker would leave me down here.
I head back in the direction we came, but almost there, I hear voices coming from around the corner. I freeze.
A group of vampires, male and female and in various states of undress, are filing into the room Zuben and I were in.
Waiting until they’re inside, I creep down the hall, moving past the closed doors, trying to listen from outside, hoping to find one that’s empty. But it’s too hard to be certain, and there is no chance I want to interrupt—or worse—get dragged into some kind of blood drinking sex orgy.
Thinking about sex, my insides tighten, reawakening my still unsatisfied urges, but as heightened as my sex drive remains, I won’t settle for just anyone—only Zuben or Ryker will do.
Reaching the end of a passage, I hit a three way junction, and fight to remember the limited amount of the dungeon’s layout I’ve seen. But Zuben was carrying me when we came this way before—assuming I have been this way before—and I have only my instincts to guide me.
Hearing faint voices from one direction, I follow my gut to choose between the other two, and then move quickly and quietly, stopping at each closed door, but too frightened to open any without knowing what’s inside.
Around another bend, light streams from an open archway. Warmth comes from the opening, and a faint smell—almost like a campfire.
Drawn toward the warmth and the light, I creep forward, hoping whomever is in there is friendly. Until Ryker and Zuben get me out of here, I need a safe place and allies to protect me.
As I draw nearer, the scent intensifies. It’s definitely wood smoke, mingling with the unmistakable smell of cooking meat. My stomach growls as my hunger wakens and I continue to creep forward. Vampires eat food, based on what Ryker told me, but they don’t have to. Vampires eat only for pleasure and to blend in with humans. Are there other humans down here? I hope they’ll protect me.