by Larissa Ione
Fucking humiliating. He shoved himself off her, averting his gaze so she wouldn’t see the color change in his eyes that signified arousal. She was too aware of his desire as it was, and he was an idiot for letting it go as far as it had.
With a curse, he grabbed up his ruined shirt. It was bloody, dirty, and torn to shit. It wasn’t wearable, but he put it to good use while he waited for his heart rate and breathing to return to pre-hump-the-enemy levels.
After splashing the shirt with the bottle of water, he wiped the dried blood from his chest. His wound had nearly healed. Another couple of days, and there wouldn’t even be a scar.
The scrape of Nicole’s chunky-heeled boots echoed through the cavern as she came to her feet. “Um . . .” She cleared her throat, because, yeah, this was all kinds of awkward. “Do you need blood? You know, to replenish what you lost?”
Yup, he did. He was operating at about half strength right now, but hell if he was going to tell her that.
“Don’t worry, Sunshine. I won’t sink my big, bad fangs into your pretty little throat.” He shrugged into his weapons harness. “Not until you get Neriya back, anyway.”
That particular threat was getting old, but right now, he needed to get his brain functional again, and that would require thinking about something other than sinking anything of his into anything of Nicole’s.
Her huff told him she was just as tired of the threat hanging over her head. “Why is she so important to you, anyway? Who is she?”
Riker didn’t owe her an explanation, but what the hell. They didn’t have anything else to do while they hung out in the cave except talk. Besides, maybe if she understood the importance of getting Neriya away from the humans, Nicole would be more willing to cooperate.
“I’m sure you’re aware that the vampire race suffers from a low birthrate, and when a female does get pregnant, the birth can be extremely complicated and dangerous.”
Nicole moved around in front of him. He wished she hadn’t. Even though she was dragging her fingers through her messy locks in an attempt to tame them, she still looked like she’d just gotten out of bed after a tumble with a man, and he definitely didn’t need to be picturing her on a mattress. Or with a man.
Or with him.
“One in four deliveries results in the death of either the mother or the child or both,” she said, sounding like she was reading straight from some Vampires for Dummies book. “I know.”
“Well, Sunshine Smartypants, all vampires develop special abilities at some point in their lives, depending on if they’re born or turned. One of the rarest abilities is also the most precious. We call it usdida.” Crouching, he gathered the first-aid supplies and tried to stuff them back into the box. They appeared to have multiplied. “Basically, people with this gift can ease labor and deliver babies safely. No one knows how it works, just that very rarely does a child or a mother die when a midwife with usdida is present.” What the hell—seriously, did bandages breed? Frustrated, he forced the kit lid closed. “Neriya is a midwife from another clan. We arranged to have her present for a birth, but on our way to return her, our team was attacked by hunters, and she was taken.”
“What makes you think my company has her?” Nicole asked.
He glanced up at her, a little surprised at the lack of defensiveness in the question. “Because a warrior who survived the attack reported hearing the hunters mention having a buyer at Daedalus lined up.”
There was a long pause, as if Nicole was gathering her thoughts. Finally, she shook her head. “That’s impossible. We don’t have people out gathering vampires for us. It’s illegal for anyone but federally sanctioned hunters to capture wild vampires.”
Wild vampires. As opposed to domesticated slave vampires, he supposed.
“So you’re saying my warrior is a liar.”
“I just think he’s mistaken,” she said, like a perfect little diplomat.
He ground his molars so hard his jaw ached. “Baddon doesn’t make mistakes.”
“I see.” Arctic air practically swirled around her. No doubt, she didn’t believe him and was sure her fabulous company was completely misunderstood. “In any case, I can understand why you’re desperate to get Neriya back.”
“You have no idea.” He shoved himself to his feet with a little more force than was necessary. “Her clan, ShadowSpawn, has given us until the new moon to return her. If we don’t, they’ll destroy us down to the last child.”
Nicole’s mouth fell open. Closed. Open again. Finally, she simply turned away. “There’s so much more to your people than anyone knows.”
“Shocking, isn’t it, how we have feelings and families and we even celebrate holidays.” He wished she’d turn around so he could gauge her reaction, but he’d have to settle for listening to the beat of her heart as it sped up or slowed down . . . or skipped a beat the way it had a moment ago. “But you know what ruins our families? Our holidays?” He let the answer fly like a right cross. “People like your family.”
Nicole wheeled around so suddenly he actually stepped back. “I’m not defending what humans have done to you,” she said fiercely. “But my family was good to our servants.”
“Servants? My mate wasn’t a servant. She was a slave. You can’t even say it, can you?” Loathing billowed up inside him, raw and hot, as two decades of festering wound tore open, spilling fresh pain. “Your family ripped her from our home and turned her into a damned nanny to a snot-nosed kid who grew up to hate vampires.”
“I loved Terese!” Nicole took an aggressive step toward him, her hands fisted at her sides. “She was like a sister to me. She cared about me.”
“I cared about her,” he shot back. “You took her away from me. From the people she loved.”
“Yes,” she said, her voice as caustic as the acid she’d nearly killed him with. “Your mate loved you so much that she tried to abort your baby. Twice.”
It had been a long time—decades, really—since Riker had been sucker-punched. Now it all came back to him . . . the moment of stunned confusion, the pain that left him reeling, the sudden absence of breath that made the lungs tighten into shriveled husks.
With a few words that came out of left field, Nicole had laid him out like no blow ever had. He couldn’t think. Couldn’t speak.
All he could do was walk, zombielike, out into the night.
NICOLE FELT LIKE a heinous bitch. She was starting to understand Riker’s bitterness toward her and her family and toward humans in general, but she was so protective of Terese, and he’d completely dismissed how Nicole had felt about the vampire.
And she still wasn’t sure what happened the night Terese died. All Nicole knew was that she’d heard his angry voice and had seen him holding a knife to Terese’s neck while she pleaded with him. The memory still cut deep, still had the power to reduce her to tears sometimes.
“Please, Riker. Don’t do this. Please.”
The male vampire had Terese pressed against the shed, his hand covering hers, and both of their hands were wrapped around the hilt of a dagger that was digging into Terese’s throat. Tears dripped down Terese’s cheeks as she pleaded with him. A single drop of blood welled on her skin where the knife blade rested.
Nicole searched her brain for a way to stop that vampire from hurting Terese, but Nicole was so little, and he was so . . . huge. She tried to scream, but only a squeak came out, and for a heart-stopping moment, Riker shifted his gaze in her direction. Terror froze her to the ground. Could he see her?
She couldn’t move. Couldn’t breathe. It wasn’t until he turned back to Terese that Nicole was able to scramble from her hiding place in the bushes and make a break for the stables. Legs pumping as fast as they would go, she burst into the horse barn, where Uncle Paul was saddling a polo pony for her cousin Ted.
“Help! Uncle Paul!” She paused to catch her breath. “A wild vampire. At the shed. He’s going to kill Terese. Help her!”
Uncle Paul hit an alarm on the wall. A siren s
creeched, and the horses went crazy. “Stay here,” he told her and Ted. He grabbed a pitchfork and raced out the door.
She never saw him alive again.
Hours later, her father found her and Ted crouched in the hayloft. Someone came to get Ted, but her father stayed with her, holding her against his chest as he broke the news that Uncle Paul had been killed, and so had Terese. The vampire who murdered them both had gotten away.
Nicole’s heart banged painfully against her ribs at the memory, and a dizzying wave of nausea made her sway. She’d wanted revenge on Riker for so long, and now that she had him in her grasp, she’d saved his life. And then she’d honed all her stored-up anger into a razor-sharp verbal blade and had sunk it into his heart as deep as she could get it.
The pain in his eyes when she told him about the attempted abortions had been raw and real, and with a clarity she couldn’t explain, she was sure that even if he had been responsible for Terese’s death, he was as haunted by it as Nicole was.
Now she had to clean up this mess she’d just made. She was still a little dizzy as she exited the cave, and she welcomed the brisk, cool air when it hit her face. A fine mist fell from a low, featureless cloud layer that swallowed the tops of the trees, but Riker didn’t seem to notice the droplets of water clinging to his hair and skin. He was crouched on his heels, forearms draped across his knees, head bowed.
“Riker—”
“Was what you said true? Did Terese try to abort the baby?”
She closed her eyes, but doing so didn’t shut out the shame. “I don’t think—”
“Tell me.” His voice cracked like thunder, and she knew there would be no arguing with his command.
“Yes,” she said softly.
“How?”
“Does it matter?” she whispered, hating herself for bringing it up in the first place. “Why are you torturing yourself like this?”
“Maybe I like pain.” He spoke from between clenched teeth, his jaw muscles twitching furiously as he ground his molars hard. “How?”
The wind whipped her hair against her cold cheeks, but the sting was nothing compared with what Riker must be feeling.
“The first time, she drank a tea of tansy and pennyroyal oil. My father was furious.” Nicole had pleaded with him not to hurt Terese, but that hadn’t been his intention. He’d chained Terese to a bed until she swore to behave. And she had . . . for three weeks. “The second time, she threw herself down a flight of stairs.” Nicole had seen it happen, but she’d lied to her father, telling him it was an accident.
Riker raked his hands over his face before pressing the heels of his palms into his eyes and going utterly still.
“I’m so sorry,” she murmured. “It was cruel of me to bring it up. I shouldn’t have gone there.”
Very slowly, Riker’s head came up, but he didn’t look in her direction. His hollow gaze was focused on the distance. “Is this a joke?”
“Is what a joke?”
“Your apology. Humans don’t care about being cruel to vampires.”
Ouch. “I could say the same thing about vampires and cruelty to humans,” she said, resisting the urge to stroke her fingers over the scar on her neck, “but I know Terese cared about me. My apology is genuine, Riker. I don’t know what happened between you on the day Terese died, but I believe you loved her, and I’m sorry I said what I did.”
“Really.” His voice dripped with contempt. “And what makes you believe I loved Terese?”
Her cheeks heated at the memories. “I saw you,” she said quietly. “Sometimes when you’d sneak onto the property to be with her . . . I’d see you.”
Still crouching, he pivoted and leveled a probing stare at her. “What, exactly, did you see?”
Oh, God, talk about awkward. “Um . . . at the time . . . I mean, I was just a kid—”
“What?” he barked. “What. Did. You. See?”
Your mouth on hers. Your hands roving tenderly over her arms, her stomach, her breasts.
Those images had stayed with Nicole, becoming more meaningful as she matured. He’d been so very careful with Terese, which was why her death was such a shock, such a mystery.
“Just kissing. Touching,” she said, sounding stupidly girly and breathless. “Only once.” All the times after that when Nicole had seen them together, Terese had been pregnant, and the stolen moments with Riker had been tense.
Nicole chewed her lower lip, wanting to ask the question she’d held on to for twenty years, but now that she could, she wasn’t sure the answer would do anything besides devastate her. She spit it out before she could change her mind.
“How did she die, Riker? What happened that day?”
As if she’d just lit his fuse, he burst to his feet, fangs bared. “She was a fucking slave! That’s what happened! She was so damned miserable that she took her own life. Is that what you wanted to know? I went that day to break her out of there, but she wouldn’t go.”
Nicole stared blankly, unable to process what he’d just said. “I don’t understand,” she said, shaking her head. “If you were there to rescue her, why did she kill herself?”
“Because your family destroyed her, Nicole. All she wanted at the end was to die.”
“But why wouldn’t she have gone with you?” This was crazy. He was lying. “She could have been with you and the baby.”
Swallowing, the tendons in his neck standing out starkly under his skin, he turned away. “She hated the baby, and she didn’t see a future for us.”
“Why not?”
“Because the baby wasn’t mine.” His words, sharp and edged with hatred, cut like an icy blade. “It belonged to your father.”
YOU LYING BASTARD.” Her face stricken and pale as a corpse, Nicole backed away from Riker, her steps wobbly. “I don’t know what kind of game you’re playing, but I know damned well that humans and vampires can’t breed.”
Riker shoved his hand through his damp hair. “I didn’t mean that your father was the baby’s sire. I meant that it belonged to him. He created it. He wanted it for experiments or a breeding program or some shit. I don’t know.”
“Experiments. A breeding program.” Nicole’s voice was utterly flat. Steamrolled of all emotion except doubt. “You’re saying that Terese was impregnated in a lab?”
“Impregnated is the polite, clinical way to put it.”
Riker looked out at the forest, hoping there were no hunters around, but at this point, he was feeling reckless, maybe even a little hopeful that he could release some tension with a good fight. Terese had never been a strong person, and being sold into slavery had weakened her even more. Then she’d disappeared for eight months . . . eight months in which he’d gone crazy, trying to find out where she was, if she’d been sold to another family, if she’d been killed. No one knew.
And then, one day, she was back at the mansion, heavily pregnant. At first, he’d been thrilled, assuming it had happened during one of their rare trysts. A boy, she’d said. But the thrill soon faded as he discovered that the female who used to be Terese was gone. The new Terese had two settings: angry and emotionless.
But the good news was that the Martins had exchanged her lethal perimeter-control collar with one that would cause only a mild shock and unconsciousness if she crossed the invisible property barrier. Riker finally had a way of getting her out of there without killing her.
“I’m taking you home today. Myne, Baddon, and Katina are waiting behind the wall.”
“It’s too dangerous. I won’t let you do it.” Terese’s hands slipped under his jacket. “I won’t let you die for me.” She brought a dagger, lifted from his harness, to her throat.
The warrior in him, the male who despised weakness and never stopped fighting, got really fucking pissed. “Dammit, female, what are you doing?” He wrapped his fingers around her hand. “I’m not worried about the danger, and I don’t plan to die. I’m taking you, and that’s final.”
A single drop of blood formed where the
tip of the blade made a dimple in her pale skin. “Please, Riker. Don’t do this. Please.”
“We’ve got it figured out, Terese. We can do this. We have to. You’re due any day now, and I won’t let our son be born here.”
Terese stared blankly. “It’s not your baby, Rike.” There was no emotion in her words. It was as if she was reading lines from a book she didn’t even like.
It was Riker’s turn to stare, his brain having trouble processing what she’d just said. Finally, he managed to utter a few stunted, croaked words.
“Not mine? Whose?”
“I don’t know his name.”
Riker shook his head, still unable to think through the cobwebs. “You fucked someone else? Was that where you were this whole time? With him?”
“I was locked inside a Daedalus lab.” Her gaze went somewhere he couldn’t follow, and he wasn’t sure he wanted to. “There was a male in a cell. They put me in it with him.”
A slow burn started low in his belly. “And you . . .”
“I was restrained.”
Emotion consumed him . . . rage that Terese had been abused that way, self-loathing that he hadn’t been able to protect her, and sorrow that the child he’d been wanting so desperately wasn’t his.
But her confession explained so much, and as he looked down at her swollen belly, he knew that what she needed right now wasn’t an explosion of fury that would terrify her. She needed comfort and reassurance, and he needed her and the baby—his baby, dammit—to be okay.
“Listen to me, Terese. Everything will be all right. I promise you. We’ll raise the baby as mine. I will be his father, and no one has to know.”
“I can’t!” she cried. “Don’t you see that I can’t do this? I don’t want this monster inside me. I don’t want the memories in my head.” She gave him a small, sad smile that chilled him for a reason he couldn’t pin down. “I’ve never been strong, not like you. You deserve better than to be saddled with me. You always have.”
“That’s not true,” he croaked. “Our match wasn’t of our choosing, but I never regretted it.”