by TA Moore
“No one is going to believe I’m not fucking you,” Arkady said in a low, rough voice that was so thick with want that it made Cash’s mouth water. “And this crowd aren’t the sort of monsters that talk to the help.”
Cash swallowed. “That’s two problems.”
Arkady smirked at him—a flash of white teeth against the dusty gold of his stubble. “Oh, fucking you isn’t a problem,” he said. “It’ll be my pleasure… and yours.”
“Don’t be corny,” Cash said. “You’re Ellie’s uncle, not her dad.”
He twisted his fist in Arkady’s sweater, fine-knit fabric bunched between his fingers, and pulled him into a kiss. Rough stubble scraped over his mouth, and Arkady’s laugh tasted like blood and whiskey as it rolled over Cash’s tongue.
Goddammit, Cash thought with a flash of scratchy, distracted irritation. He wasn’t sixteen anymore; he shouldn’t still think with his cock. Or anything else that was dumb and horny enough to get him back here.
“Don’t,” Arkady said, the words chewed over Cash’s mouth.
“What?”
“Think.”
Fair enough.
They tumbled back into the bed, silk sheets tangled under them and the two of them tangled around each other. The camera jabbed a corner into Cash’s thigh, and he had just enough of his wits left to move it onto the bedside table. Cash groaned as Arkady palmed his cock through his jeans, the scrape of denim against tender skin almost unbearable. He slid his hands up under Arkady’s sweater, and the cashmere bunched around his wrists as he explored the almost familiar planes of muscle and bone underneath.
Thicker muscle layered over his back and shoulders now, tight under the stretch of smooth, tawny skin. The new scar on his back, ragged as a hook, was fresh enough to make Arkady twitch when Cash touched it.
“I’ll tell you if you ask,” Arkady tempted as he licked the bruise on Cash’s throat. “All the details.”
Cash snorted and moved his hands away from the scar. He reached down between their bodies and fumbled at Arkady’s trousers. It was just a button and zip. He knew how they worked, or he had five minutes ago. Arkady laughed against his neck and shifted his weight up onto his knees so he could reach down and unbutton.
“I don’t need to know that badly,” Cash said. He pushed Arkady over onto his back—all black and honey sprawled out on the sheets—and crawled on top of him. His cock ached, thick and tender under his jeans, but it deserved it for getting him into this. Cash pinned Arkady by the shoulders and leaned over him until he could feel the tickle of breath against his cheek. “And don’t creep into my fantasies again.”
Arkady looked amused. He stretched under Cash with a lazy flex of muscle just to make the point that he chose to stay where he was. For now. “You know I couldn’t unless you want me to.”
Yeah, Cash knew that. It just annoyed him more… because how come he never had before? He just glared at Arkady instead of asking that, and this time it was Arkady who kissed him—a quick hard brush of lips and teeth.
Cash shoved him back down, although he knew he couldn’t enforce it. He tightened his fingers on Arkady’s shoulders.
“This isn’t a thing. Once Ellie’s back—” Cash stopped himself and edited the statement. It was important to word things carefully in the Abascals’ employ. Cash had almost forgotten that. “After the wedding, things go back to normal. I’m not back, I’m not staff. Deal?”
That was the magic word. Arkady’s monster swam up and peeked through the stained glass of his eyes. Scarlet threads tipped with gold needles bled through the dense black of his aura as it flared out around them.
“Deal,” Arkady said, his voice rough as gravel as he caught Cash’s hips in his hands and pulled him down. The hard, insistent ridge of his cock pressed against Cash’s ass. “After my sister is married, we’ll go back to how it used to be.”
Cash swallowed hard. He knew there would be a sting in the tail. There was always a sting in the tail. The betrayal might help Cash stick to his word.
“This will end badly,” Cash said as he pressed a kiss into the hollow of Arkady’s collarbone. His mouth lingered for a second as he scraped his teeth gently along the sharp arch. The temptation to leave his own mark on Arkady, to chew a Cash-shaped bruise onto the tanned skin, itched in the hinges of his jaw. He didn’t. He never had. “You know that, right?”
Arkady shrugged under him.
“I know,” he said. “But not yet.”
Fuck it. Every monster parent knew that when the kid was at camp, it was time to play. Cash got to play with all this.
He reached down and slid his hand into Arkady’s trousers and wrapped his fingers around his cock. Arkady arched his hips up into the touch, a low, hungry sound rough and raw in his chest as it clambered up into his throat.
“Casper,” he said raggedly. “Hell. You feel good.”
His cock was thick and heavy. The satin-fine skin creased under Cash’s fingers as he gripped the base and felt the pulse of it. It felt as stupid and inevitable as the first and the last times they’d crawled into bed together. Cash tightened his grip to drag a groan out of Arkady and shifted his weight back.
“I could—”
The bell rang. It had been a decade since Cash had heard it, but he’d spent nearly as long answering to it. He’d been a hungry kid with no other options—the Abascal Hotel didn’t have vending machines, and the chef would actually eat you if he caught you in his kitchen—and his reaction was still a Pavlovian compulsion to answer the summons.
He scrambled half off the bed before Arkady grabbed his arm and pulled him back down. A heavy, slightly too-hot arm draped over his back and pinned him in place. He sprawled out on top of Arkady with ill grace as his stomach rumbled, reminded that a packet of Funyuns and the dull misery of a cheap motel’s day residents weren’t much of a meal.
“Like you said,” Arkady said against his throat, lips curved in a smirk, “you’re not staff now, Casper. You’re a guest, and that means you enjoy mother’s full hospitality with the rest of us. Jeans and a T-shirt that smells like me aren’t going to cut it.”
No. Belladonna had never been impressed when Cash turned up anywhere with Arkady’s scent on him.
“If you want me to get changed,” Cash said, “you better let me up. Your mother does hate to be kept waiting.”
This time Arkady let him scramble off the bed.
Chapter Six
CASH SHRUGGED his jacket on and raked his fingers through his hair to pull it back from his face. It was only long enough for a stubby ponytail, but it would have to do. Donna hated long hair on men. Or women. She considered anything more than half an inch a temptation for lice.
The adjoining door opened, and Arkady let himself in. He looked lean and dangerous in black, with a dull-red leather waistcoat that exaggerated his lean waist buttoned over a fine linen shirt. A few subtle bits of gold glittered on the waistcoat and around his wrist—enough to satisfy Donna’s idea of what wealth looked like.
He looked Cash up and down and frowned. “You look like a banker,” he said. “Change.”
Cash scowled at him.
“And you look like a funeral pimp,” he said. “It’s fine. Donna knows what I am.”
Arkady snorted and walked over. He pinched the lapel of the jacket between his thumb and forefinger and looked down at Cash.
“Half of the monsters on the East Coast will be here, the ones that Belladonna cares about, anyhow. If we’re going to pass you off as my boyfriend, you need to look the part.”
“I never let you dress me when you were my boyfriend,” Cash said.
“At sixteen you’re meant to look human.”
Cash looked down at himself. It wasn’t a cheap suit. It wasn’t expensive either, but it was what he’d bought it to be—sheep’s clothing, camouflage. But around here it made him look like prey, soft in a shell of a manmade fabric.
“I didn’t bring anything else,” he said as he pulled the jacket off
. The shirt underneath would do. Plain black silk was a bit aggressive, but he didn’t need anyone to like him. Just not eat him. “Donna can just deal with having to look at my wrists.”
“Wait.”
Cash tossed the jacket onto the bed as Arkady walked past him. “I’m not wearing one of yours,” he said. “You’re an inch taller than me.”
“Two,” Arkady corrected. He glanced over his shoulder. “And sure, otherwise it would fit like a glove.”
He opened the wardrobe and reached inside. Hangers rattled, and there was the distinct sound that expensive fabrics make when they rustle against each other.
“Here.” Arkady pulled out a light gray brocade jacket with blue-green highlights and held it out to Cash. “You might as well get some use out of it.”
Apparently nothing really had changed. The jacket had been a birthday present. Cash left it behind when he got out, along with most of his things. He’d been young and hurt. It had felt like he’d made a point.
“I didn’t know you kept that,” he said slowly as he tried to work out if it was creepy or not.
“I didn’t, but I didn’t make a point to throw it out either. I don’t live here anymore,” Arkady told him. He looked exasperated at Cash’s surprised look. “Did you really pay no attention to what I did for the last ten years? Did you think Donna and Madeline could share a roof?”
Cash shrugged.
He had in the beginning. When Ellie wouldn’t sleep during the night—her innate sense that she was meant to stalk the night at war with the expectations of the only day care he could afford—he’d sat up with her and pored over posts on monster.net. It was impossible, despite what the better-bred monsters thought, to live among humans without picking up their vices. Monsters had their own gossip columnists, although anonymity was important—if they crossed the wrong monster, they wouldn’t have to worry about being sued. Or alive.
Every time he picked the scab off, he’d been surprised it was still raw underneath. So he stopped. Maybe it wouldn’t have hurt after three years. Or six. Cash had never wanted to risk it. What was he going to do? Fight Madeline for his man? Arkady had married her, and she could have killed Cash without chipping her manicure. It was safer not to know what he wanted.
He pretended he didn’t care until he believed it. That was the same thing as it being real. Basically.
“I didn’t want you to be unhappy,” he said as he took the jacket and put it on. “That doesn’t mean I wanted to know you were happy.”
It felt expensive on his back. There was a weight to a well-made jacket as it settled over his shoulders and found its own shape around him. Cash had worn flak jackets on shoots, and they felt weirdly similar. The coat just had more style.
Arkady caught him by the arm on his way to the door and pulled him back.
“What now—?” Cash started to ask, irritated. Before he could get the rest of the question out, Arkady buried his fingers in Cash’s hair. The hair band snapped off as Cash’s curls made the break for freedom.
“Don’t tie it back.”
“Donna won’t like it.”
Arkady twisted his hand around the curls, his knuckles hard against Cash’s skull, and pulled his head back slightly. Just enough to make the point that he could. Blood left Cash’s head and puddled, hot and restless, in his already tender balls.
“But I do,” Arkady said. He bent down and kissed Cash’s forehead with a chaste, hot scorch of skin on skin. “And Donna isn’t going to fuck you later.”
Cash’s hard-on resigned the field on that one. Just the idea of it was better than a cold shower.
“Why the hell would you even bring that up?” he asked as he made his second attempt at the door.
Arkady grinned and slapped Cash on the ass on the way past. “Those trousers hide nothing.”
Cash blushed a hot scald of red as he stepped out into the hall with Arkady behind him. It would give the maid on her way by—her arms full of freshly laundered silk sheets—something to talk about later.
IN THE old days the Abascal Hotel and Spa would have been the creepy, run-down manor where the degenerate local gentry took the good-living youths they stole, tempted, or tricked out of their God-fearing ways. Every few generations, the cowed local priest would die and a firebrand young preacher would rock up to the pulpit. Or a bereaved parent would scrape together enough coin to hire a Hunter—mothers mostly, they had always made better plans.
Next thing you know the house was on fire, the local woodcutter had disemboweled the servants, and the surviving members of the family had legged it to the woods through escape tunnels, their pockets full of cursed gold to start again in another county, or country if they’d been particularly florid.
The Prodigium had put a stop to that. Monsters had to blend in—even the rich and even their houses.
It turned out that if a creepy old house was turned into a brutally exclusive luxury spa, beautiful youths would beat their own paths to the door. Not only that, they’d pay for the privilege of being on the menu.
The modern world had its problems, but it did make life simpler.
Arkady hooked his arm over Cash’s shoulders as they walked through the hotel, through the crowd of human guests in leisure wear and glitzy cocktail outfits. He slid his fingers inside Cash’s shirt, hot against his skin, and leaned down slightly so their temples touched.
“What do they want?” he asked as they passed a mirrored booth. It was full of beautiful women in toweling robes that looked soft as fur. They were all glossy pink smiles and rattly pink drinks as they giggled and clapped, but their auras drooped with the weight of foul gray infection that scabbed the edges.
“What the one in the middle has.” He paused as his eyes fell on the one in the middle. Bride-to-be and her hen party, he’d guess, but instead of being flared in excitement, her aura was pickled in close to her body. Like a rind. His skin itched as his monster reached out to taste her, and the voice he’d need to lure her to her death scratched at his throat. Cash swallowed it, like hooks, and looked away. “And she wants him dead.”
Arkady glanced over with interest. “Fiancé?”
“No,” Cash said. He wasn’t sure how he knew that, but… he did. “Someone else.”
“Huh.” Arkady made eye contact with the woman and smiled. She stared back at him for a second, a flush pink as it spread up her throat, until one of her friends pushed a drink into her hand. She stumbled through the toast, obviously flustered, and Arkady moved on. “Maybe later.”
Under Cash’s skin his monster sulked at having its prey stolen. It would get over it. Cash hadn’t planned to lurk around dimly lit corridors for a chance to lure her into a bad fall down the metal staircase in the Grand Ballroom anyhow.
Not seriously.
There were other monsters there, scattered among the crowd as they browsed the produce section for something that would hit the spot. Some of them were restrictive feeders, like Cash.
Despair was his meat and potatoes, densely filling and calorific, although he could also take a shot of lust like whiskey. The other emotions he could taste, but they were like cotton candy, gone on his tongue before they could hit his stomach.
Others were just picky, well-fed enough they could afford to play with their food. Like the kelpie at the bar, with dark, stupid-handsome features and all-black eyes as he charmed the middle-aged woman in an expensive gown onto his arm. One day she’d die in a car crash, but not tonight. The betrayal hurt more if the lie ran long.
“He’s from New York, near Rockaway,” Arkady said quietly. “A guest, but one to watch. I heard he made some incautious decisions, and now he works for the Hand.”
“Which one?” Cash asked.
“Always a good question,” Arkady said, but he didn’t answer it. “Come on. We don’t want to hold up dinner.”
He unhooked his arm from Cash’s neck and headed across the floor with the confidence of someone who knew people would get out of his way. Cash straighten
ed his collar and took another look around the bar as he trailed after Arkady. People did get in his way. A few monsters stepped pointedly in front of him, their backs turned, as if they couldn’t have known he was there. Humans who’d edged out of Arkady’s way drifted back into position in his wake.
Cash didn’t mind. It gave him an excuse to slow down and have a good look around as he ducked through bodies.
If someone wanted to expose the survival of monsters to the world, after all, where better to send his patsies than a wedding of the great and grotesque? It was the East Coast capital of the Prodigium, no matter whose ass or ass-adjacent body part held the seat, and this would be the biggest event of the year.
Blood would flow.
A sharp heel came down hard on his foot. The tall woman it belonged to gave him a sidelong smirk from behind a thick mane of silver-streaked black hair, just a hint of fang visible.
“Sorry, darling,” she drawled in her thickly accented contralto. “I didn’t see you there. I was looking for Madeline.”
The accent was fake. The Prodigium hadn’t allowed any foreign vampires in for nearly a century now. An ongoing familial dispute. Besides, they’d come to camp together. Natalie had granddaughtered in, so to speak, even though she’d been just a human on a promise then.
“Sorry too, you’re not her type,” Cash said. “I hear she likes her bedwarmers to be, well, warm. How’s your mother? Still in New Jersey?”
Her eyes narrowed. The flecks of gray glittered red for a second, like bits of glass. The man with her gave a nervous laugh in confusion. “Jersey, Natalia?”
She blinked twice, and the fangs were gone as she turned back to her companion. Her hand brushed his face, a thin smear of oil left where her fingers stroked over his cheekbone.
“My parents settled there,” she said, her voice thick and throaty as she overwrote his memories. “After they came here from the old country? Remember?”