by Joey W. Hill
When he returned to his lady, she was sitting by the fire. She’d changed out of what she called her training uniform, and now wore slacks and a blouse. Her hair was down, but she’d pulled it back into a loose tail to do paperwork at her desk. Her head lifted as he entered. He’d shown her Nina’s state in his mind, but added to it now.
“She’ll sleep. Until they wake her and continue her training regimen.”
“Tell them to spread the word to the rest,” The Mistress said. “Everyone is going to help with and reinforce her training. Keep her room warm so that she is not cold.”
“Mistress?”
“It was one of the three stipulations Lord Alistair had. First, that we not take her virginity, an entirely unwise decision on his part, but his right to require.” She shrugged. “Second, that no male brings her to climax. The third was that she not be cold.”
“Mmm.” Steele took off his coat. Removed the two knives, one stake and pistol he carried beneath and within it. Then he unbuttoned his shirt and shrugged out of it, unfastening the cuffs with the shirt gathered at his elbows, his shoulders and upper body bare. She paused to watch, her gaze becoming molten like the flames dancing in the fireplace. Heat licked over his flesh wherever she looked, as if he could already feel the taste of her mouth, the prick of her fangs.
When he was only in his slacks, his feet bare, he knelt at her side. She absently ran her fingers through his dark hair, returning her attention to what was on her desk. He glanced at the paperwork, showed her the error in his head. A light smile touched her face and she made the correction.
“I have no idea why I do this and don’t let you handle all the books. I hate maths.”
“Because you refuse to let anything defeat you, my lady. Even if the fight is already lost.”
That drew her attention. As she rotated her chair toward him, he sat back on his heels. She propped her foot against his shoulder. She wore short heels now, but they were the toothpick kind that could dig into a man’s shoulder joint, command his attention, if she went that route. Right now, though, she didn’t. They regarded one another silently.
“I advised Alistair that her brother would have been a better choice,” she said at last. “He need only make the request to Council. The circumstances would not reflect poorly on him, at least in this instance. He refused. He wants the nurse.”
Steele nodded. “She’s not a suicide risk.”
“No. She’s not. She’s a fighter. He needs a fighter.” The Mistress tapped her pen on the ledger. “Lord Alistair is the first made vampire to ascend to Region Master. We will do whatever is necessary to ensure his servant does not appear like a defective graduate, assigned to him as an insult by the Council members who oppose his ascension.”
It was important to her, he knew. She was a made vampire and knew well the political obstacles in their world, where born vampires had held all the power for centuries. It wasn’t entirely unmerited. Made vampires were often plagued by impulse control problems. Most didn’t come close to matching the talents and strengths that born vampires could achieve at the same ages.
But some did. Like the woman sitting before him. Yet she had been passed over for the overlordship in her own territory. It had been given to a born vampire who didn’t have half her intelligence. That vampire, recognizing her as his greatest rival, had maneuvered her into this position. The training of InhServs required vampire oversight, and the Council had awarded her the appointment.
The overlord had intended it to be a not-so-underhanded insult to her. Instead, she’d approached it the way she’d approached everything for the past couple centuries. Taken the challenge and excelled at it, such that she had the Council’s esteem and support.
Yet, ironically, now she might never be considered for an overlordship, because she was so damn good at this. Though he knew how she felt about many things, Steele didn’t know how she felt about that.
What he did know was vampires were patient.
She was following his thoughts, for her eyes glittered with a hard amusement, then her mouth softened in a curve as she leaned forward, cupped his jaw. He turned his face toward her palm, and she dropped her forehead to his, a brief affection, before she straightened and leaned back in her chair once more.
“She must learn,” she said. “Or whatever she experiences at our hands will seem kind in comparison. Lord Alistair will be tested by those in the born vampire world who think he has overstepped himself, which means his servant will be tested. She must be able to bear much. It’s a fine line for us to walk in her training, between being too harsh and too unclear. She must understand. Be able to use her mind for him, not against him. Compliant but not broken.”
“She’s close to breaking now.”
“No.” His Mistress opened her mind to him, replayed the image of Nina grabbing her wrist, right before she’d put the girl on her knees. He saw the rage in Nina’s eyes, the set of her mouth. The twist of it when she spat in The Mistress’s face. “As I said, she’s a fighter. She has seen how horrible the world is, and has been hit close to home, with the loss of her sister. Yet she responds not with tears or pleas, but with a fighting rage. That is not a spirit that breaks.”
She sobered. “But we will have to take her perilously close to destruction to help her understand. She has channeled her natural submission into professional service, and has not recognized it has a deeper, far more complicated side. During their brief meeting, Lord Alistair indicated she showed great promise, in terms of unlocking that potential. So, we will help with that process.”
“Did he discuss the details of that meeting? The circumstances that brought them together?”
“He said it was during the war, when he was in Singapore. He was unwilling to tell me more. He said it wasn’t necessary for me to have that information.” The Mistress lifted a shoulder, a brief sign of irritation that translated to sarcasm. “Because obviously, of the two of us, he would have a far better grasp of what is relevant to her training.”
“Good to see he’s already cultivating a Region Master’s sense of superiority. That’s half the job description, at least.”
He made her chuckle, as he’d hoped. She rocked her foot against his shoulder, digging in the heel enough to have him bracing against her, his gaze lifting to her in glittering challenge. Her lips curved.
“He doesn’t need a title for that. A vampire male, born or made, bleeds pure arrogance. Yet truthfully, he spoke with great seriousness. I believe he would have given me anything he thought would have helped with her training. It is regrettable that we only have a month, but it was the only extension the Council would grant for her delivery to him, since he prolonged bringing her sister into his household for so long. So we proceed with what we have.
“But now, it’s getting close to dawn. Time to put away the work for another day.” She lowered her foot and rose, stepping away from her desk. As she did, she beckoned to him to rise. He had difficulty not closing the distance between them, but he stepped around the desk and waited on her. She liked tormenting him, unbuttoning her blouse, a mirror of how he’d taken off his own shirt, letting the silk fall from her shoulders as she undid the cuffs. She let it flutter to the floor and pivoted, her back to him as she untied her hair so it tumbled against bare flesh, the slim straps of her bra. She shot him a teasing look over her shoulder as she pivoted toward him slowly, straightening her arms out to her sides.
“It is much easier for me,” she said, “because I have no weapons to discard.”
“Your weapons are not the kind you remove, Mistress. They’re far more lethal than anything I could ever carry.”
She said nothing to that, but he felt how she responded to his sincerity, to the need rising fast in him for her. The emotions woven into the bond between them had grown over the decades, ever since a nearly-drowned pirate had washed up on an island on a moonlit night and looked up to see a bare-footed woman standing over him. One with a gaze that pierced him to the soul to this
day, and made him willing to do anything for her.
She closed the distance between them at last, sliding her hands up his arms, his chest, over his shoulders to curve her fingertips at his nape, scrape his flesh. She lifted onto her toes, slow, so slow. He knew what she demanded and stayed still, his heart thundering and cock getting even harder as she leaned into him, denied him the right to touch her, to initiate the kiss, even as her lips hovered so close to his. He stared into her eyes. She wouldn’t let him detach. During those first few decades she’d taught him that distraction wasn’t permitted. He must steep himself in her, let himself think of everything he wanted to do to her, and yet stay so still. Every atom of his being responded to her, even as he was forbidden to be responsive.
Her “casual” attire had only made it worse. He loved her corsets and provocative clothes, but when she wore her blouses and slacks, things any woman of taste might wear in her home, or when she went out into the world to do mundane things, he desired her even more.
Both faces were hers. But this was the one that was more likely to accept the gift of his heart he always freely offered, in open hands and in his willing surrender to her ownership.
He bit back a groan as she palmed him through his slacks, her lips parting. Wet. “My servant loves watching me play with the girls. You’re still hard. And even more impressive than usual.”
The Mistress finally brought their mouths together, her hand tightening on his nape and his cock. He restrained his own passion as she’d trained him to do, but she’d know just how powerfully the beast inside him was straining against its leash. With one word, he would have her down on her back, and would rut between her legs like the untamed stallion he could be…at her command.
The power of it was always intoxicating, especially when she felt his impatience, and gave him a reward anyway. “Put your hands on my hips.”
He did, sliding over the curves, fingers constricting on soft flesh, thumbs pressed into her hip bones.
“Our little morsel has given me an overwhelming need,” she murmured. “I will ride you hard until dawn, Steele. Show you no mercy. You will need to live up to your name.”
“I would never do less for you, my lady.”
“I know. And it makes my dreams all the sweeter, with every sunrise.”
Chapter Eight
The past month had been the most intense non-wartime experience of Nina’s life. Which alternately dismayed and terrified her. Because all of her roommates had been in InhServ training for at least a decade. Sher had been in it for just over twenty. Which meant that Nina’s month didn’t even qualify as the basics.
She was as prepared to be an InhServ as a six-year-old was to be a nurse, merely because she pretended to be one with her dolls. Not that Nina was supposed to care about being prepared.
Throughout the past few weeks, she’d fought, she’d pleaded. She’d made logical arguments, over and over. Her lack of suitability would not be pleasing to her vampire “master.” She’d made herself say the words without invective, mostly.
It wasn’t enough, as one of her three roommates told her. “When you say ‘Master,’ it’s said with a capital M,” Melanie said. “You don’t say it that way.”
How the bloody fucking hell did you “say” something in capital letters? Though Nina knew what she meant. Melanie gave her a look that said she knew she knew it too, then proceeded on with another lesson full of things Nina didn’t want to know, things she didn’t want to hear.
Bloody fucking hell.
She’d had one blessing. No nightmares. For one thing, she was too exhausted. For another, about the time she’d fall into the type of sleep that would bring the shadows, she’d instead have a dream about Alistair, his mouth between her legs, his strong hands curling around her wrists. She would wake to find it was the mouth of one of her roommates, or another trainee.
They left no part of her unexplored with tongue, fingers, objects that plugged into the wall and vibrated against her body, making her climax with shameless abandon. Multiple times during the daylight hours.
After those first couple days, the actual restraints were replaced by slim, decorative things she was capable of breaking, but if she did, the punishments, the torments that could be inflicted through pleasure, taught her obedience.
If the Master tied you up with a piece of thread, no matter what he did to you, you would not break the restraint, because it is his pleasure to bind you, his will alone that releases you.
But her roommates didn’t rely only on physical tactics. As they caressed, stroked and teased Nina, they looked at her adoringly, whispered praises as Nina became more and more aroused. In short, they never let it be only about the sex. That was the worst thing of all.
The trainees who brought her to climax were always female. Which left her hungering all the more for the contrasting male touch of the vampire she fantasized about.
At dusk, she would be unbound, taken to the shower and cleaned thoroughly for the upcoming night of training. That training sometimes left her bruised, her skin cut and throbbing, and not just for the reasons The Mistress had threatened. Or promised. The two ideas sometimes became interchangeable in Nina’s brain.
She was surprised she was taught how to fight. How to use a gun, a knife, her fists and feet. Any handy blunt object in the room. One of the highlights of this whole miserable thing was at least once a day she combat trained directly with The Mistress. When she did, she was encouraged to unleash all her rage, her helpless frustration. Getting a chance to land one blow on that dispassionate, perfect visage had become Nina’s number one wish in this hateful world.
She never did, but after those sessions, she’d expended enough emotional as well as physical energy that she could indulge the delusion, at least for a few minutes, that she’d regain enough personal control to handle the rest of the evening detached, unaffected by any of this. Then The Mistress would show her another thing she’d threatened. That there was no fortification Nina could build in her mind that she couldn’t tear down.
And she wasn’t even technically inside Nina’s head the way Alistair would be.
The breaking down of her sexual inhibitions was part of the process. Her body was tuned like a piano when it came to desire. The whisper of fingers along any expanse of skin produced a response. It seemed her nipples were always hard, her sex wet, her knees trembling.
Her body was taught to rouse instantly. She had been schooled extensively in how to take a man in her mouth, but not by direct experience. She’d been shown it by other students. Some male and female pairings, but also two men, something that startled her at first. She knew men who preferred men existed, but she’d never had a front row seat to how they would handle one another. One particularly eye-opening classroom session had been three men, one buggering the arse of the man in the middle, while the third man knelt and took the buggered one’s cock in his mouth to the hilt.
Under the skilled hands of too many sexual experts to count, with all sorts of enthusiastic visual stimuli like that, her body was completely out of her control. Which she supposed was part of the whole lesson being hammered in, again and again.
Everything is controlled by him.
Your Master.
You are his property.
Your will belongs to him.
Your cunt, your breasts, your arse, every inch of your skin, your heart, soul and mind. It is all his. Say it.
She would never say it. But she’d learned to be silent, because snarling defiance meant that they would prove the lesson to her in yet another creative way, some of them so humiliating she couldn’t bear to even think about them.
Because the damn thoughts would arouse her again.
When tears were running down her face, not because of the injustice of it, but because she refused to say the words, instead wanting to scream it was all a sham, brainwashing, not real, they didn’t push it past that point. Didn’t make her say the words.
Too many other lessons to le
arn, she supposed, but it niggled at her, because it was the only battleground where they allowed her victory. And since they easily laid siege and conquered her everywhere else, it left her doubting whether it was a victory at all. More like one of those situations where someone sat in the middle of a ring of fire in a dry wheat field and insisted they weren’t going to get burned.
On the more laughable side of things, The Mistress had been appalled to find out she didn’t know how to set a table service for twelve, do her makeup properly, or keep the seams of her stockings straight. She learned a lot about underwear. Flimsy little garters, barely-there bras and knickers. She was given a whole new wardrobe, and not a piece of it picked out herself. Even though it allowed her to wear clothes for a few seconds, all of it made her look like some kind of exotic, sexual creature she knew she wasn’t.
No matter how often they made her feel like she was.
It was too much, every day interminable, and yet, it was over far too soon. Tomorrow, she would be bundled into another car, taken to Alistair. To a terrifying and uncertain future where, no matter how they prettied it up, she would be a sex slave, a person who had lost control of not just her destiny, not merely her body, heart and soul. Her mind, too, the one thing that had always been hers to control and own, would belong to another.
She was at the end of her tether when it came to logic, or strategy or even self-preservation. She was an animal in a trap, and the madness could no longer be kept at bay.
During the day-to-day regimen, they’d been able to channel it, keep it tamped down, but the anxiety of it all coming to a head overwhelmed everything, making her feel she was about to explode. She almost feared for the safety of her young roommates.
For nearly thirty days, she’d seen The Mistress demonstrate an uncanny awareness of everything going on in the halls of her domain. Tonight was no exception. For just as Nina was on the cusp of that breaking point, a summons came. Not to The Mistress’s study.