by Aja James
Ramses let her struggle for a while before ending the embarrassing display.
“Modern vampires. No backbone,” he muttered beneath his breath before saying more loudly, “I am in a generous mood this night, you are in luck, Arria of the Great Plains Hive.”
The sudden hopeful look on the female’s face made Eveline bite the inside of her lip to keep from laughing. She was becoming such a naughty, awful person, taking pleasure in the discomfort of others. But she accepted this vindictive streak with the same equanimity that she accepted her other newly discovered streaks.
This was the new Eveline, after all. She embraced it.
“I will allow the conclusion of the Challenge to be recorded as forfeit in the history tomes,” Ramses said magnanimously.
“Instead of Anya’s life, I will demand her dominion instead. As her representative, you have the power to accept my rule by taking a knee before me now, or accept a swift execution on behalf of your queen. Decide, before I change my mind.”
With all due haste, Arria went down on one knee, bowing her head.
“The Great Plains Hive accepts your rule, Dark King Ramses, from this day hence. Our resources are ever at your disposal whenever you deign to call upon them.”
Ramses gave a brief nod and clipped, “Dismissed.”
The Great Plains contingent exited the throne room in orderly fashion, and Eveline imagined that she saw cowardly tails between their legs as they shuffled out.
A few beats after they had gone, one of the other Dark nobles spoke up. Eveline did not know who he was, but he seemed “older.” And by the way everyone around him hushed with respect, she knew that his words held sway over the other nobles.
“Dark King Ramses,” the male began, “that was an impressive display of power and forbearance. We are proud to serve such a strong, yet merciful, ruler.”
Ramses merely pinned him with a glinting stare, waiting for him to get to his point.
The male shifted his gaze, more curious than judgmental, toward Eveline.
“Does your largesse extend to the Pure Ones as well? Are we to understand that the New England Hive has officially entered into an alliance with our long-held enemies?”
Ramses rolled his shoulders in a nonchalant shrug, even while Eveline held her breath, half in anticipation, half in dread, of his answer.
“My…contract with this particular Pure One is of a personal nature,” he purred in that low, sinful voice, immediately conjuring “personal” images writhing lustfully in Eveline’s overactive imagination.
“If it connoted something more formal that impacted the hive, you’ll be the first to know, Jacob.”
“You are treating her as an equal,” the male called Jacob said, “by allowing her to sit beside you on the throne.”
“An accurate observation,” Ramses confirmed smoothly, unperturbed, “for Eveline is my equal in every way. Our…insatiable appetites, for one, are quite unparalleled. Isn’t that right, little sprite?”
Eveline gulped and slid her eyes sideways at the taunting male beside her, her cheeks heating in a telltale blush.
But she managed to say in a steady, sure voice, “Exactly so, honey bear. I can’t wait for this boring event to end so I can take you back to our chambers and chow down.”
Ramses’ lips parted slightly as if stunned.
Jacob’s face went slack even as his eyes rounded in astonishment at her bold declaration.
Did they think she was going to sit there meekly and take whatever Ramses and those arrogant Dark nobles dished out? Hadn’t these blustery, showy vamps learned that she was made of sterner stuff by now?
She slid one hand across the almost nonexistent divide between their seats to finger-walk up Ramses’ hard, muscular thigh. When she reached the place where his leg met his hipbone, she curled her fingers dangerously close to his groin and squeezed.
“Mmm,” she murmured low, for his ears only, and shot him a sizzling hot look from beneath her lashes.
“Hungry.”
To which he barked, keeping his glittering obsidian gaze fused with hers—
“Out! Court is adjourned.”
*** *** *** ***
Tap, tap, tap, tap.
That was the sound of Eveline’s shoes as she practically ran alongside Ramses’ lengthy strides as he pulled her by the hand down the short corridor behind the throne room to his chambers.
For days, she ignored him, acting as if everything they shared together in the lava cave hadn’t happened.
Ramses was both furious and…shaken.
After they safely returned to the Cove, he’d kissed her hard and thoroughly before convening a special meeting with his Chosen, leaving her to take her rest, exhausted as she’d been. He finished the debrief as soon as he could, hurrying back to his apartment, eager to rejoin his female. He’d expected to find her waiting for him in bed, probably still asleep. He imagined tucking her into his naked body as he got some much needed shut eye himself, before waking her up with a slow, worshipful loving.
But she hadn’t been there. She’d gone back to her own apartment and was passed out fully dressed on her own bed.
Something inside him had involuntarily clenched in pain. It was borne of a deeply buried fear that what they’d shared when he was wounded was simply a fluke, a temporary thing. That, in the light of day, she decided she didn’t want him as much as he wanted her.
Needed her.
Dark Goddess! How he needed her.
Ramses’ newborn heart, with its stone-casing melted away, thumped naked and vulnerable in his chest, not knowing how he should interpret her behavior. He hated this vulnerability. Hated the dependency on another being. Hated knowing that even if he pretended to the world he didn’t care, it didn’t change the fact that he always would.
He cared.
Eveline Marceau owned him in ways no one, including the mistake of his Dark Mate, ever had and ever would.
So, instead of demanding her attention, he’d let her be. He watched her go about her days as she had before, spending all her waking hours in the Cove’s library, truly loving her job as the temporary Keeper. He knew that she visited her friends—Clara, Grace, and now Ava, from video surveillance.
But she never sought him out.
And when it was time to sleep, when she stumbled out of the library, yawning so hard he could hear her jaw crack even on video, barely able to keep her eyes open, she went back to her own apartment, crashing on her own bed. As if Ramses didn’t even exist. In the end, he couldn’t resist carrying her back to his chambers where she belonged. He’d taken her in his arms and held her tight against his naked body, hers still fully clothed.
He didn’t take her blood though, as much as he wanted to. As much as their ongoing Contract invited him to.
Fuck the Contract.
She had become so much more to him than that. She was everything to him.
But how did he get her to agree with him? How would he ensure that she stayed beyond the three months of the Contract? How did he make her commit to an eternity?
He pulled her rather forcefully into his apartment as the door automatically locked shut behind them.
Immediately, not giving her time to react, he caged her in against the nearest wall, his arms braced beside her head, his legs spread on either side of her thighs, knees slightly bent so that he could stare full-on into her eyes when he looked down at her, despite the difference of their heights.
“What do you want, Keeper?” he growled, close enough that his breath puffed against her face, fluttering the silky tendrils of hair beside her ears.
“E-excuse me?” she squeaked.
Though her voice had a thin, nervous edge to it, her eyes were perfectly bold. Daring. A fiery, rebellious little sprite.
His.
“You said you were hungry,” he rumbled, accidentally-purposely brushing his mouth against hers as he formed the words.
A shaky exhale deflated her chest at the brief contact.
“What do you need to satisfy that hunger?”
“Umm…”
He was painfully hard already, had been since the moment she entered the throne room in that tantalizing librarian attire, ready and willing to serve her needs. But he needed her to be certain. He needed her to choose him.
“Tell me,” he commanded, undulating his swollen, jutting sex into her notch through their clothes.
He wanted her to choose him, but he wasn’t above using a little inducement to help his cause.
“Uhn,” she grunted, her small hands going reflexively to cup his ass, her nails digging in.
“Which part of me do you want to possess the most?” he rasped into her ear, softly biting the tender lobe.
“Which part of me do you hunger for the most?”
Her busy little hands gave his buttocks a hard, thorough squeeze before curving around his hips to grasp his manhood through his trousers in one fist while the other took a firm hold of his balls.
He shuddered against her and ground into her grip, fucking her hand in short bursts until his pre-cum leaked profusely from the head, wetting her palm even through the confining fabric.
“This?”
He knew without a doubt that she craved his sex, but he still wanted to hear her say it.
“Yes,” she breathed, squeezing him tightly with both hands, making him see stars.
At the same time, he was afraid. Females the world over wanted him. It was the primal maleness of him, the elemental strength and power. Ashlu had wanted him for the same reason, and he’d used her sexual desire to bind her to him.
But with Eveline, he wanted her to want more from him. To want him the way he wanted her.
Loved her.
He bit back a helpless groan at the truth of it. He loved her completely. Utterly.
He loved the way she stood up to him, since the first moment they met. She always held her ground, not giving him an inch. He loved the way she focused on her work, how she truly enjoyed and was inspired by her role amongst the immortals.
He loved the way she became doggedly obsessed when she wanted something, how despite being an imminently logical, intellectual female, she also had a fiery, implacable temper, a possessive, jealous streak as wide as the Nile. He even loved the quirky nicknames she thought up to call him in retaliation for his calling her “little sprite.”
Most of all, he loved her passionate heart, her courage and loyalty, how she didn’t hesitate to go after him, and to try to help a complete stranger in the eagle king, even after he abducted her.
This depth of feeling obliterated everything he thought he knew. The closest he’d felt to this before was merely obsession.
This…
This was irrevocable, permanent possession.
His body stilled against her, though tremors of a different kind racked him. Doubt. Vulnerability. Surrender.
And undiluted, all-consuming love.
“Is this…all you want from me?” he whispered, his cheek pressed against hers, his lips by her ear, his eyes hidden from her piercing gaze.
Her hands released him below and traveled slowly up his torso, past the taut ridges of his stomach, his ribs, to his chest.
One hand continued its upward path to his shoulder, along the length of his corded neck, to smooth across his jaw and cup the side of his face that wasn’t tucked against hers.
The other hand went from his pec to his upper arm. Her fingers traced the raised vein that ran along the length of it to his hand. She entwined their fingers and brought his knuckles to her lips for a kiss.
“Will you give me anything and everything I ask for?” she said softly.
Without hesitation, his answer was an unequivocal:
“Yes.”
He was too raw in the moment to meet her eyes, so he kept his face hidden against her cheek and hair. But he felt her lips curl into a smile.
“What if I want unlimited access to your library for an indefinite period of time?”
“Granted.”
“What if I require your undivided attention for unrestrained use of your body and blood?”
It was the role of a Blood Slave she described, except in reverse. That a Pure One should hold such power over a Dark One was unheard of, never mind a king.
Ramses clenched his jaw and gritted out, “Granted.”
Anything to make her stay.
Her thumb glossed across his bottom lip, pressing into the seam of his mouth.
Obediently, he opened for her, sucking her inside.
“What if I want to go back to the Shield? Will you let me go?”
No! He’d never let her go!
But… he’d never hold her against her will. It was a lesson hard learned, and Ramses would never repeat the same mistake.
Despite what it cost him, he rasped, “Yes.”
If it made her happy, no matter his pain, he would let her go.
“Okay then, I’d like to leave for an extended visit in a few days,” she said cheerfully, completely disorienting him.
He snapped his head up to look at her and saw that she was grinning beatifically back at him.
“Visit?” he breathed.
“Indeed. I’ll come back when I’ve caught up with my friends. I want to spend some time comparing notes in the Shield’s archives too. If I forget what day it is, just come fetch me.”
“Fetch you,” he echoed inanely.
“Well, yes,” she said slowly, batting her lashes at him as if he was a dim-witted Neanderthal who required extra coaxing.
“I do plan to return to the Cove, you know. Since you’re here.”
It was his turn to blink at her. Was she saying…?
“Because you’re my home, Alend,” she finished.
He simply stared at her, speechless.
“And you know what I want most of all, you big, beautiful, stubborn man?”
He tried to shake his head, but it was more of a muscle twitch, for her words had completely paralyzed him.
“This.”
She pressed their still entwined hands upon his chest, directly over his heart.
“This is what I want. You are what I need. I even have Pure female fangs to prove it.”
She put up a hand to stall him when his brows drew together.
“Before you attribute my need to something chemical or biological or pathological, let me be clear: I’m irrevocably, madly, eternally in love with you. I want to possess you totally, and be wholly possessed by you. I don’t know what this means for the alliance between our Kinds, or the impact it might have on your internal politics. We can figure all that out together. This is us. The rest is just ceremony.”
As she spoke her words, Ramses felt his heart throb with gladness and his soul take flight. He was forever transformed in this moment and for every moment hereafter.
“Now can I please have what I want?” she demanded with all the politeness she could muster, though her expression conveyed the grievousness of her impatience.
“I’m hungry. Feed me, sausage stud!”
“In the end of days, a leader will rise. A Queen of queens. A King of kings. A Sovereign of All Kinds, to defeat the Foe. Or be defeated, when the stars turn cold…”
—From the hidden sections of the Ecliptic Scrolls (recently destroyed in a flaming toss)
Chapter Nineteen
The tech master absently twirled his laser pen with the fingers of his right hand as he clicked and scrolled through a display of codes with his left.
In the periphery of his vision, he tracked the dozen or so monitors with various video feeds showing several, but not all, of the Mistress’s machinations in progress.
It was a demanding job that paid him excessively well. But he didn’t need the money.
With what he’d siphoned from the world’s top one percent of wealthy individuals and corporations as a teenager, just pennies here and there, but accumulating to an astronomical amount in aggregate, he’d never be able to spend al
l the money he had. Not even in perpetuity, because the compounding interest of his investments ensured that he always had more coming in than going out.
It was one of the nasty, age-old quirks of money—the rich got richer, and the poor got poorer.
No, he did this job for the challenge. (And the lesser known fact that Medusa had him by the balls.) Even now, with his left hand, he was writing codes to combat the cyber-attack the New England vampire hive’s tech master had launched on Medusa’s network.
Grace Darling was his nemesis’ name. And her sidekick, Devlin Sinclair.
She was good. Very good.
A corner of his mouth ticked up. But he was better.
He didn’t know what drew his attention, but he shifted his eyes to one of the far-right monitors. It showed the aerial view of Mount St. Helens on one side, and the ground view on the other. It had been days since the volcano eruption. The air was still somewhat hazy, but it had cleared enough to transmit high-resolution images of whatever activity was taking place on the mountaintop.
Which was nothing. Nothing happened during these days. Everything was burnt to a crisp and still as death.
And then he saw it.
A slight movement that looked like ashes shifting in the wind, nothing remarkable. But the tech master’s infallible instincts told him to zoom in on the image.
After a few more minutes of stillness, during which he thought he’d imagined it, the ashes shifted again. And kept on shifting until a lump that looked like the charred remains of a rock began to elongate and stretch into something else.
A man.
The tech master blinked and dug the heels of his hands into his eye sockets, rubbing his disbelieving eyes to be sure of what he was seeing.
Definitely a man. A colossus of one, by the looks of him. He was naked and covered in soot, his features hard to make out no matter how the tech master zoomed in and cleaned up the image. He took deep, bracing breaths, his stance wide, his face raised to the skies.
And then he roared.
The tech master almost fell off his seat at the thunderous sound.
An inhuman sound. For it transformed from the deep-throated cry of pain or triumph or fury into the shrill scream of a bird of prey.