by Hall, K R
“Beg me for it,” he growled.
“Take me and mark me again. Please,” Alana said.
“Mine,” he growled. He buried his face into her shoulder, licking the skin there, biting only when the tremors of her orgasm rippled along his cock. He sank his teeth into her soft skin and heard her scream his name, her climax suddenly tripling in intensity and launching his own bliss. One more claiming bite and they would be fully mated.
The taste of her blood hit his tongue and, suddenly, a deep hunger invaded him and he gulped hungrily at her essence. What seemed like a few seconds later, he felt Alana in his mind and it made him release her flesh. He saw the silly smile on her face. He’d do anything and become anything if it meant keeping Alana happy.
“I love you,” he uttered the words without thinking and her eyes widened in shock.
He told her he loved her before, but now that they were mated, she could feel it more intensely. He could feel her love for him through their mate bond. With the vivid bite mark on her neck, she belonged to him.
~ ~ ~
Victor was standing by the picture window, overlooking the pond below when he heard Alana approaching. He turned to see a stunning sight. There she remained, all smiles and radiating love. Her Grecian style dress was made of flowing red fabric and the Empire waist was adorned with chains of gold and silver. Her hair was pulled up and accentuated by the jeweled headbands worn by Greek aristocrats. The gown draped to the ground, her shoes impossible to see. She had a knack for putting outfits together.
“Victor, is this to your liking? I thought a long, flowing red gown might appeal to your senses,” Alana said in a happy, playful mood.
“I will admit that you are the most gorgeous Grecian woman I’ve ever had the pleasure of viewing,” Victor replied.
Her smile spread and she danced around in a circle to show off her attire. Her embrace of life was remarkable. Before she had been subdued; now everyone could witness a new vibrancy about her.
“I am looking forward to ringing in the New Year with you,” Alana said with excitement. “Dancing in the darkness under moon and stars, toasting in the New Year.”
~ ~ ~
The Monte Carlo black-tie speakeasy-themed bash ticket price was all-inclusive: access to the venue, dinner, liquor, beer and wine, and a champagne toast at midnight. The proceeds would benefit juvenile diabetes. It promised to be a fabulous evening of eating, drinking, and ringing in the new year in style. Starting with an exquisite, multi-course dinner, and dessert.
Victor and Alana danced the night away to the rock and soul sounds of a local band. As midnight approached, they were given colorful noisemakers and their glasses of champagne. They made their way to a nearby railing so they could see the fireworks that would be shot off at midnight.
A few minutes into the fireworks, Victor took Alana’s hand and leaned in close, whispering in her ear, “I love you.”
She turned to face him, her “I love you” stuck in her throat as he dropped to one knee. Tears welled in her eyes.
“Alana. You are my world, my life. Without you, my life was empty. Though we are mates, I ask, will you be my wife?” he asked.
“Oh, Victor,” her voice was barely audible through her joyful tears and over the fireworks. “Of course I will!”
Victor grabbed her and pulled her in for a kiss, the pair overwhelmed by the joy they felt coming from each other.
~ ~ ~
Victor and Alana had returned from the New Year’s celebration when he heard the cock of a gun, and his head snapped forward— eyes glowing red and his body on full alert. Without thinking, he grabbed Alana and rolled them both onto the floor as the glass shattered and a bullet hole struck the same spot that they had been in.
Victor crept toward the window, staying to the side so that he could peer behind the curtains. Using his strigoi’s sharper vision, Victor looked across the street and spotted the telltale scope of a gun on the rooftop of the Village Landing Marketplace across the street. He couldn’t tell who the shooter was because of the black mask. Whoever the killer was, he was preparing to shoot again.
There must be a way to get to the shooter, but his human form wasn’t fast enough to reach the assassin before he could fire again. I can’t allow him to hurt Alana. I need to keep her safe. Victor turned to tell Alana that he was going to shift and get the shooter into custody.
He gasped as he turned, Alana was looking at him with surprise, on her knees and a patch of red spreading over her left breast and down her chest. She fell forward, just as another bullet came flying by. If Alana hadn’t fallen, there was no mistake that she would have been shot between her eyes.
Victor couldn’t get help for Alana while they were still under fire. He brushed a kiss over her forehead and whispered that he would be back shortly and let his strigoi take over.
The strigoi saw the assassin leaping across the rooftop from building to building. The assassin must have had shifter powers to make the leaps as fast as he did. The strigoi was fast, but not fast enough to catch the killer. After sniffing the air, the strigoi receded and let Victor take over. There were dozens of perfume bottles scattered all around, masking the assassin’s scent. Victor called Nicolae to check on Alana and to get a cleanup crew to where the shooter had been holed up to investigate and clean as he walked back to the hotel.
He needed to get back to Alana. He didn’t want to think about the fact that Alana had been shot or even the possibility she would be dead before he got back to her. Bursting through the door, Victor found Alana no longer on the floor where he left her. There was a trail of blood that he followed to the sliding door to the balcony. There, he lost her scent. The assassin must have come back and taken Alana.
~ ~ ~
Victor began pacing, he and his strigoi wanted to shift and try to scent out a trail for Alana; they needed to find her and kill those that would dare take her from him. But he knew he couldn’t go off like that he needed to be calm and rational and have a well thought out plan. He threw his head back and let out an enraged scream that was more strigoi than man.
When he stopped, he looked at Nicolae’s wide, worried eyes.
“Call the police, Victor, tell them what happened. The longer we wait, the worse it’s going to get for her. I think they have been gone for something like twenty minutes as it is,” Nicolae pleaded.
“No, we can’t involve the humans,” Victor said as he stalked over to the phone. He called the one man who he knew could bring down a force unlike any other upon the ones that dared to take his mate from him.
“Ladinas, someone has taken Alana,” Victor said.
It would not take long for Ladinas to send shifters and paranormals of every kind to Plymouth so that Alana could be brought back home safely. Now, all he needed to do was to clean up and wait for reinforcements. He hung up after he told Ladinas everything he knew and a semblance of a plan and was in order.
“Ladinas is sending out a force of lions, bears, wolves, tigers, and fae soldiers to help me search for and get Alana back.”
“Good,” Nicolae said.
“Alana is my mate, the one person born to be my perfect match just as I was born to be hers. I made the second claiming mark this afternoon. I will not stop until I have her back,” Victor said with determination in his voice. “If only I had a chance to make the final claiming mark, I could track her through our bond.”
When there was a knock at the door, Victor left Nicolae’s side to let his brother Ladinas in.
“I have to get her back, Ladinas. I don’t know if I can survive without her,” Victor said.
“We will get her back, Victor, have no doubts about that,” Ladinas said, placing a comforting hand on Victor’s shoulder. With that said, Ladinas turned and left to join the others in the search.
Ladinas reported back to Victor every fifteen minutes to give him an update and to help Victor stay calm. So far, the hunters hadn’t found anything.
“We need to call your p
arents,” Nicolae said after a few minutes. “They need to know what’s going on. You know they won’t leave it alone. Hell, your mom would demand to know what was happening.”
“We also need to let Alana’s family know what has happened,” Victor said.
Chapter 18
The first thing Alana realized was that there was a musty smell around her. Secondly, she realized that her head was pounding, she was lying on a hard floor, and her back was twisted strangely. With a moan, she rolled over to lie flat on her back and cautiously opened her eyes. She was in a cage; it was a huge cage but still a cage.
Nonetheless, her breathing sped up as the events from earlier came rushing back to her. Someone was shooting at her and Victor. She had been shot in the chest. She looked down and saw the dried blood. Pulling the top of her dress down, she was surprised to see that the wound had healed. She must have gotten some of Victor’s healing powers, now that they’d completed two claiming marks.
“She’s waking up,” a man said.
“It’s about time. I was worried you used too much chloroform on her,” another man responded.
“Well, excuse me, I didn’t know how much of the damn shit to use. I was a cop before I fell into this.”
Alana slowly sat up, her instincts telling her not to be caught lying on her back with an enemy near. They were both watching her as if she was some zoo attraction. Surrounded by the iron bars, which she noticed with a heavy heart were cemented into the walls and floor, she almost felt like an animal.
“Did you kill Victor?” she asked in a steady voice, even though she was shaking all over.
“The strigoi? No, I don’t believe so,” one of the men answered her.
“As you can see, you’re trapped; you cannot get out of that cage. I know what you are and you know that I know. All I need from you is to see you change and you won’t see either of us again,” the other man said as he crossed his arms.
“What do you mean?” Alana couldn’t believe it, could it be possible that these men thought she was a shifter?
“Don’t play stupid,” the first man growled at her. “We know you are with Victor. He must’ve changed you.”
Alana looked up at the ceiling and noticed for the first time a camera that was focused on her cage. So that was their plan: to get her shifting on camera so they could prove to others that they had captured a strigoi. The problem was that Alana had not been changed. She was still just as human as she always had been. She sat there and hugged her legs to her chest. These men obviously did not know the only way to become a strigoi was to be born one.
“My fiancé will call the police, you know,” Alana said.
One of the men smiled at her, an evil-looking smile, while the other looked away from her. Alana closed her eyes and buried her face in her knees; she couldn’t let them see her fear.
“We will let you sit here and think about it for a while,” the first man said.
~ ~ ~
Irini and Adelaide arrived at the same time as Alana’s family. The women were inconsolable, everyone had tried to reassure them, but there was no use. They went from sadness to worry to anger to sadness again. Their feelings weren’t that much different than everyone else that had gathered at the Ardmore Inn. Victor needed to remain where Alana was last.
“I just don’t understand how they took her,” Irini said.
“Chloe has snuck up on her before, though,” Adelaide said sadly.
“How can you be so calm?” Grigore asked Victor who had only been half-listening to the conversation. “If that were my mate out there…” Grigore let the sentence hang in the air.
Victor looked at Grigore; the look didn’t put anyone in the room at ease. It was like the look that cats give mice before they pounce.
“Shifting to my strigoi and running wild in the city will not help me get Alana back. My strigoi agrees,” Victor said. He rose up from his seat and went to look out the window.
“I am dying inside. I’m lost, I feel like everything is slipping through my fingers and, like sand, no matter how tightly I try to hold onto everything, it keeps slipping through my fingers. Do not mistake calm contemplation for uncaring.”
“No one thinks that,” Irini said from her seat. “We all know how much you love Alana. You were willing to die for her, that speaks a lot, Victor.”
“Your hunters haven’t found anything new, yet have they?” Victor asked Ladinas.
“No, I’m afraid not,” Ladinas replied.
~ ~ ~
“I need to use the bathroom,” Alana said after hours of not speaking. She’d been trying to communicate with Victor through the telepathic bond, but it wasn’t working. Maybe she was too far away since the mating bond wasn’t complete.
One of the men had made himself comfortable and was playing solitaire on his computer. The other man looked jumpy and nervous.
“Change and we’ll let you use the bathroom,” the man at the computer said as he leaned back in his chair.
“I told you, I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Alana insisted. “Please, I have to go.”
The other man moved from his seat and approached her cell.
“What the hell do you think you are doing?” the other man demanded.
“I’m not going to sit by and watch her pee herself; do you think that embarrassing her is going to help? You catch more flies with honey than you do with vinegar. Besides, do you want to clean up the mess in there when she can’t hold herself anymore,” the man said as he waited outside her cage door for the other man to make up his mind.
“All right. But if you try anything, you will die,” the computer man threatened before going back to his game.
Alana was careful to give the man a wide berth as she made her way to the bathroom. She could tell he was very close and she wondered for a moment if he was going to follow her into the bathroom, but he stayed on the other side of the door. Hope sprung inside her as she saw a window.
“Victor, where are you?” she whispered as tears threatened to fall down her face.
“You need to hurry up,” the man said from the other side of the door. “Don’t give him an excuse to hurt you.”
Alana made noises to make it sound like she was relieving herself. She walked over to the window, pleased that it was low enough for her to climb out.
“Please help me; I don’t belong here,” Alana said just before she climbed up to the window and tried to wiggle herself out.
“I know what you are. The sooner you change for the camera, the sooner we both can get through this phase,” the man answered in a soft voice on the other side of the door.
Alana didn’t reply because she was too far away to hear. She kept running, hoping she would run into somebody to help her.
~ ~ ~
If the humans had any idea what was lurking in the night, they would’ve shut themselves away. Wolves, tigers, lions, bears, and many more were prowling the streets, on the hunt. When they found their quarry, there would be death. The paranormal world hunted through the streets and alleyways, on the hunt for Alana. Anyone that got in the way would be dealt with.
Groups were swarming in and out through Victor’s room at the hotel. They got their orders and headed out to search for new locations. More orders were going out than there was news coming in, but they were doing their best to keep their hopes up. There wasn’t any other option; to let despair in was to admit that it might be too late to save Alana, and none of them could think of that.
Victor was getting ready to go out for the night himself, he had given everyone their orders and made sure that they had a large section of the city covered for the night and was itching to be on the hunt himself. He vowed that by the time dawn arrived, they would have Alana back. He grabbed his room key and a map of the area and headed out to join the search.
~ ~ ~
Hours had passed and there was no hint of Alana. Searchers interviewed the businesses owners and other people that were out and about on the stre
ets. It was as if she had disappeared off the face of the earth.
Victor turned his attention back to the map. He noted the markings, the areas they’d searched, and the others they had yet to explore. The city was huge, Alana could be anywhere. He felt so fucking helpless. His strigoi wanted so badly to kill something. Anything. His beast roared inside and he could feel his skin ripple in response. He called Nicolae for an update.
“Any news?” Victor asked when Nicolae answered the phone.
“We are working the search grid like we planned. No sign of Alana.”
“We have to find her, Nicolae. It’s been days. I can’t lose my mate.”
“We will find her. Don’t worry, Victor.”
“What direction are you headed?”
“South, the far edge of town, past the park.”
“Keep me posted,” Victor said as he ended the call.
In the dead of the night, the streets were eerily quiet. Fog had started to roll in. Victor could barely see a foot in front of his face. The fog would make it more difficult to find Alana.
~ ~ ~
Victor gasped when he saw Alana. Alana let out a scream of her own and all but flew into Victor’s arms. The two were reduced to nothing more than weeping massive tears and softly spoken words. All the stress of the past three days seemed to take hold of Alana at that moment. She collapsed, unable to hold herself upright one more minute.
Victor held onto her and tried to keep her from hitting the ground, scooping her up into his arms. He carried her back to the hotel. As he got closer, he saw Alana’s father, Walter.
“Let us help you get her into the room so that you can tend to your mate. She has kept strong in the face of great danger,” Walter said.
Victor nodded his head and allowed Walter to help him get Alana into their room. Victor knew Alana was traumatized. All he could do was try to comfort her and hope for the best in the end.
Victor was all business as he looked over Alana. He checked her from head to toe to make sure she was not injured when Walter went to his room to get Edith. He barely said two words to her, his guilt over what she had been through was almost killing him.