She looked at him calmly, and for the first time since he’d met her last night, he glimpsed a flash of steel beneath what he’d thought was a pretty, but blank exterior. She reminded him, in that moment, startingly, of Katya. Of Trina. Brimming with possibilities.
“They’re dancing,” she said. And then, after a pause just long enough to be pointed, “I take it you don’t like that.”
He glanced toward the dance floor, and found them right away. They were the two most beautiful creatures there, magnetic and glittering.
Sasha had taken his hair down, a platinum halo flaring around his head, reflecting the purple, blue, white lights that panned back and forth overhead, slender as a knife in his fitted, dark clothes, hands pale and splayed overhead. He danced like someone who’d broken out of a harness; like someone leashed who’d finally cut the bonds that held him tethered. Wild, and free, and uninhibited. Young, and careless, and joyous, his mouth open, laughing, saying something as Val moved into his space, head thrown back, eyes shut as he smiled wide.
Nikita thought anyone could have looked at him then and known he was a wolf, or at least a wild thing, something animal and unknowable. Something that shifted with the tides and the rhythms of the earth, that belonged beneath a harvest moon, pawprints on fresh snow; the sighing of the wind through pine boughs.
And then there was Val. His hips rolled like a courtesan’s, like someone who knew how to inspire lust, and who’d exercised that power flagrantly. The line of his throat, the flash of hipbones above his waistband, the way his arms found the rhythm and the way his hair moved as if stirred by an invisible breeze, hair that was a lure, a weapon – every tiny movement was erotic. If Sasha looked like flying, then Val looked like fucking, and the worst part? They looked so beautiful together.
Val caught Sasha by the waist, lifted him, spun him – Sasha laughing, delighted, hands on Val’s shoulders – then set him down and reeled him out, like they were swing dancing. Where had Val even learned that? Maybe Sasha had taught him; Sasha had always loved dancing…
And Nikita didn’t, did he?
A flash of memory: dance hall, band playing, watered-down punch in cups. An uncomfortable suit, tight, shiny shoes, and enough pomade in his hair to make his head feel heavy. A woman beside him, pressing her breasts into his arm, saying something low and suggestive in his ear, wanting to dance again, to “feel his hands” on her.
Across the table, Sasha staring miserably down into his punch, both hands around the cup, his severely pomaded hair highlighting the sharp-boned fragility of his face. He looked up at Nikita through his lashes, a flash of blue that would always make Nikita think of winter in Siberia, of an untamable wilderness, and knew now what he’d, in truth, always known, but tried to label as something else out of self-preservation. Sasha had been jealous. Had wanted to be the one whispering into Nikita’s ear – or maybe being whispered to by him.
Nikita felt that same jealousy now. Was choked by it.
What if he hadn’t confessed to Sasha when he had? What if he’d suppressed everything some more – hadn’t kissed him, touched him, changed things irrevocably between them. What if Val hadn’t found Mia, and he’d shown up alone, and he and Sasha were free to–
“Nikita,” Mia said beside him, and he just barely refrained from jerking. When he turned to her, he found her studying him with something like pity, and he hated it. “I trust Val.” That was all she said, like he was supposed to find some sort of comfort in those three words. Like he was supposed to believe her.
He faced the dance floor again.
Val and Sasha had shifted closer. Face-to-face. Val slung an arm – easy, casual – around Sasha’s shoulders and reeled him in even closer, so that when he ducked his face, he brought their foreheads together. Blond and blonder. Beautiful and perfect. The light glinted off them, like the sun on new coins, over glittering fields of fresh snow. A dazzle of something precious and rare.
Nikita realized he’d bared his fangs, and he turned away. Stalked a few, blind steps breathing harshly through his mouth, skin prickling, heat pulsing through him in dizzying waves. He closed his eyes and could envision them in awful detail: what they would look like away from the club, in soft lamplight, without an audience.
He thought of Sasha’s grief after Virginia, his intense regret that they hadn’t been able to save Val. He helped me save your life, he’d said. But was that all? Was it just gratitude, or–
A hand touched his arm, turned him, and Val’s scent filled his nose on his next inhale.
When Nikita opened his eyes, the prince was studying him with something like sympathy, hair glued to his temples and throat with sweat, chest heaving slightly as he breathed. His voice was calm, though. “Oh, darling,” he murmured. “Where can we go to talk? Just you and me.”
Yes, alone would be good. That way Sasha wouldn’t have to watch when Nikita gutted his would-be lover. He wasn’t even sure such a thing was possible – delicate though he looked, Val was Dracula’s brother; he had to possess some of that freakish strength, those vicious instincts.
Still, as he led the way out the back door of the club – pointedly not looking toward Sasha, though he could feel the weight of his gaze, and sense his surge of distress – he imagined all sorts of violence. Throttling Val; biting his throat, tasting the hot iron of blood, watching it spill down all the skin he was flashing, staining his clothes, his face losing color until he dropped. He thought of throwing his fists, kicking, grappling on the ground like animals.
By the time they got to the roof, he was shaking, and only then thought he’d led Val up here for the petty satisfaction of kicking him off it 300 style. He stalked across the flat, graveled surface, wanting to put distance between them, but Val’s footfalls followed him. He finally stopped, and whirled, the wind tugging at his clothes, sending a chill skittering down his back.
Val was only an arm span away, hair waving like a pennant over his shoulder. He smelled like Sasha.
It took an effort to form words, and to not just snarl. “You’re here for him,” he said, and knew it the moment he said it, the bottom dropping out of his stomach, a dread worse than anything he’d ever known in war. “That’s why you came here: to get Sasha.”
Val tipped his head to the side, brows knitting, expression unexpectedly sober. “Do you think that I could?”
Yes. He didn’t say it – couldn’t. Ground his jaw, and tightened his hands into fists until his knuckles cracked, hating the blue of Val’s eyes, and the lean, sculpted torso his tank top flaunted so unselfconsciously. Hating how Val was all the things that Nikita wasn’t.
Val let out a slow breath. “You poor fool.”
He bristled. “What?”
“Sasha is lovely. He is sweet, and kind-hearted. He is precious, and he is beautiful.”
Nikita growled like he hadn’t inside; a low, threatening rumble.
“And he’s completely in love with you,” Val continued, unperturbed.
He knew that. Of course he did. Sasha had told him so – with words, lately, but with hundreds of little gestures across all the time they’d known one another, too. Every time he’d wanted to lie bundled together; the warm press of his face in Nik’s neck; every gentle, forceful moment he’d insisted that Nikita feed from him, or eat a sandwich, or get some sleep.
He knew Sasha loved him, but it sent a little shiver down his back to hear someone else say it aloud. Say it like a simple fact.
It was chased by a different kind of shiver, though, and that momentary soaring sensation in Nikita’s belly dropped and went sour.
He swallowed, and his throat ached. “I’m not like you.” He’d meant it as an insult, but it came out desperate, full of longing. I wish I was like you, so I could be what he needs. So I could make him happy.
Val smiled. A sharp, wicked smile, his chin tucked, and his eyes sparking. One brow lifted. “Really? You don’t think so?”
Nikita looked him up and down, from the shining crown of his
head, to his frankly indecent tank top, to the obnoxious number of buckles on his boots. (A small, pushed-down inward voice acutely aware of his own usual wardrobe laughed uproariously at the hypocrisy.) He sneered. He attempted to, at least, but whatever his face did only made Val chuckle, and stalk toward him slowly: smooth, prowling steps, his eyes glowing.
“My dear captain,” he said, and for an awful moment, Nikita was in front of Rasputin again; but then Val came closer, and it was impossible to mistake his beauty for the grizzled, wine-soaked starets. No, Val was a whole other kind of devious – and doubtless more dangerous. “I don’t take you for a stupid man – so that leaves” – he drew up right in front of Nik, just that much taller that Nikita had to tip his head back a fraction to keep glaring at him – “stubborn.”
They stood close – too close. Just a few scant inches between them. Close enough that when the wind toyed with Val’s hair, Nik felt the tickle of it against his bare neck. Close enough to feel the heat rolling off his skin; vampires ran warmer than humans – all the blood, Nikita had always thought – and Val had been dancing besides. Dancing with Sasha – close, too close, touching.
But his expression was nothing like the open, tender joy he’d worn when he was with Sasha. No, this was raw and honest as a wound, hungry, pained, desperate, terrifying. Every time Nikita had encountered the prince, he’d had the sense Val was playacting; projecting exactly what he wanted people to see, a composed, snippy, weaponized sort of charm. His pupils were dilated; he looked frightened, lost…and his fangs were long, glinting in the moonlight and the ambient glow of the neon on the street.
Nikita wasn’t being compelled, he knew he wasn’t, but he couldn’t move, rooted to the spot, shaking and lightheaded like he might faint.
“I think,” Val said, his voice a soft purr at odds with the awful, frantic look on his face. “That you’re just like me. Always hungry. Always ashamed of what you’ve done – even when you had no choice. The difference, though…” He trailed his fingertips down the side of Nikita’s face, and Nik was shocked and ashamed that he didn’t pull back – yes, ashamed. He always was, wasn’t he? Maybe that was why he didn’t flinch. Maybe that was why, when Val cupped his chin, and tipped it up, and trailed his other hand down Nik’s chest, he let it happen. “Unlike you, I don’t feel even the slightest bit guilty about pleasure.”
His grip tightened on Nik’s chin, almost cruel, and he kissed him.
Nikita registered the press of lips, and the insistent, hot thrust of a tongue between them, the scrape of fangs.
Then he felt a shove between his brows, and the kiss, and the rooftop, and everything faded away in a cascade of black spots and wheeling pinpricks of light like stars. Just like the night his mind had merged with Trina’s, and he’d shown her his past.
No, he thought, furious, trying to shield his thoughts. But this wasn’t an invasion; this time, he was the one seeing.
He saw a child, a little golden-haired nymph of a boy – Val, he realized with a start – being cuffed on the back of the head and slung across the pommel of a saddle. A soldier in gleaming chainmail, with a red cloak, and a high, white hat studded with jewels. Chaos all around, riderless horses rearing and screaming, swords glinting in the sunlight, men fighting, shouting. A dark-haired boy in the dirt, spitting and hissing, fighting off attackers much larger than himself. Vlad, he knew, on instinct. Fighting to get to his little brother.
The scene wheeled away to star-studded darkness again, and he was in a gilded room lit by candles and the glow of a brazier. Val again, a little older, pale as a china doll and dressed in blue silk, covered in delicate gold chains that dripped pearls and sapphires, a circlet on his head, and his hair braided elaborately. He couldn’t have been much older than ten, but Nikita knew instantly what the mark on his neck was: a love bite. A mark of passion. A young man stepped into view, rings flashing on his fingers, silk kaftan weighted down with jewels and embroidery. His Majesty the Sultan, Val’s voice whispered in the back of his mind.
He wasn’t here, not truly, and so he couldn’t shut his eyes against what Val showed him next, could only watch, revolted.
More stars, and Val was a young man, lithe and lovely, muscled like a jungle cat. Bare save the necklaces he wore, some long pendants, and one a tight circle that looked more like a collar. Bells chimed in his hair, and stones clicked on the bracelets that circled his wrists, and candlelight glowed off his sweat-sheened skin. No longer the frightened child, but a skilled and experienced lover, one who was enjoying himself.
The scenes shifted, faster and faster. A war, armor, screaming. A head rolling across a trunk, and Val making awful, animal sound of anguish.
Then there were chains, bars, cells. Captivity. Women in gowns eyeing him from the other side of his cage with interest. Men mocking him – and then pushing him down to his knees.
Nikita knew the sensation of falling, of tumbling, in turns sick to his stomach, and then embarrassingly aroused. And then–
It was still. And the scene was white – was snow. Falling in silent drifts, the faint crack of overloaded branches somewhere deeper in the forest.
“Are you a prince?” a small voice asked in Russian, and there was Sasha.
He wasn’t corporeal here, but Nikita felt as if his heart stopped, and his breath caught. Sasha was just a little thing, all bundled up in warm Siberian furs, the flaps of his hat pulled down over his ears, and tied under his chin. But a few stray wisps of platinum hair peeked out, and his face – tiny, and round, and cherubic – was unmistakable, soft, and innocent, and not yet touched by war, or magic, or Nik’s own treacherous hands.
Sasha, he tried to say, but he had no voice. This wasn’t his memory, and he couldn’t exert any control over it. The edges of the vision dimmed and fizzled, black spots. Sasha, wait! He reached out with hands he didn’t have, and then the stars again.
And then it felt like he slammed back into his body, dizzy, sick, and acutely aware of every physical sensation. The wind on his face, the sweat gluing his clothes to his skin. Val’s tongue in his mouth. Val’s hand on his very hard cock, trapped behind his fly.
He reached up with shaking hands and shoved Val, hard, right in the chest.
Val didn’t stumble back, as he’d hoped, but drew back slowly, their lips parting with a soft sound, Val’s tongue making one last, leisurely swipe across Nik’s bottom lip. He pulled back just far enough for their gazes to meet, hand still splayed across the front of Nik’s jeans.
Even with swollen, wet lips, and his breathing compromised, Val managed to look smug.
Nikita sucked in an unsteady breath and attempted a growl. It came out pitiful, kitten-small. And when he said, “Don’t touch me,” it was a plea and not a command. The inside of his head felt like a shaken beer can, all his thoughts scattered and flying off one another like bubbles. Too slippery to take firm hold of.
Val leaned forward, damp lips ghosting along Nikita’s cheekbone, and whispered right in his ear. “Gods, the things I could teach you,” he whispered, and punctuated the words with an expert squeeze. “You haven’t begun to understand pleasure, my dear, all bottled-up, denying yourself everything. I could sit on your cock and own you. I’ve been fucked by sultans, and princes, pirates, and whores, and even uptight military captains, like you. I’m the perfect harlot. It would be glorious.”
And how much, Nikita wondered, had all his thoughts of tearing this creature to pieces been about wanting to attack him in a very different way?
Val chuckled, and, to Nik’s surprise, stepped back. Put a reasonable distance between them, and put both hands on Nikita’s shoulders, a not-at-all-sexual touch. The heavy-lidded, dazed, lusty look faded from his face, and instead he became grave. Tired, sad.
He sighed. “Nikita. Dear.” All the dripping intent was gone, his voice practical, if still melodious. Less flirtatious than Nik had ever heard him. “For just a second, crawl outside all your prejudices–”
Nikita finally managed a
full breath. “I’m not–”
“Oh, you most definitely are. Painfully so, and all because of your blasted year of birth, and your blasted career, and because of all the awful things you’ve told yourself your whole life.
“If the situation was different, I’d like nothing more than to show you all the fun you’ve been missing out on. And trust me” – here his voice went coy another moment – “you’d be begging me. But.” Serious again. “But listen to me. Right now. Not to whoever you think I am, but listen to the boy who learned to master cocksucking before he learned to master a sword. There are all sorts of things that people call love that aren’t: infatuation, guilt, lust. There are slaves who convince themselves they love their masters. There’s love that is only jealousy, or possessiveness, or the urge to own someone, to break them and remake them into something powerless that they can control. I’ve been alive long enough – been on my knees often enough – to recognize when love isn’t love, but something twisted.
“But love does exist.”
Nikita swallowed hard. “After what you showed me – how can you believe that?”
“Because I’ve seen it, darling. And I’ve felt it, like just now, when I showed you the Sasha that I first met, and I thought you might very well learn how to dream-walk in that instant so you could protect the little boy he once was.” He smiled, sideways and forlorn. His hands tightened on Nik’s shoulders. “Nothing about what you and Sasha have is wrong. It isn’t something you have to earn. There’s nothing for you to atone for.”
The old protests built in his throat, but when he opened his mouth to voice them, it was a low, anguished sound that broke out instead. His eyes burned, and he clamped them tightly shut. “I let – I let them put him – on that table–”
“Oh, darling, hush.” Strong arms closed around him and reeled him in close, a hug tight enough to be bracing, soothing. A hand cupped the back of his head and Val swayed gently side to side, as if he was shushing a crying baby. “What would have happened if he hadn’t been turned, hm? He would have died an old man in Siberia. Or maybe been drafted, and died in a snowy trench somewhere, with his legs blasted off.”
Golden Eagle (Sons of Rome Book 4) Page 38