Table of Contents
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Flesh and Delirium
Under the Skin Serial Part Six
K.B. Ladnier
Copyright © 2017 by K.B. Ladnier
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law.
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Contents
Connect With K.B. Ladnier
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Other Books by K.B. Ladnier
About the Author
Connect With K.B. Ladnier
Find the Author Here
kbladnierauthor.com
Facebook.com/kbladnier
Twitter: @kb_ladnier
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To my besties. Cause you guys yelled at me to keep going when I got stuck. Literally, you yelled at me…
But, I love you guys for it.
Chapter One
Claudia
“Did I get all the blood?” I asked Lucy as we sat and waited for Brahm to come get me.
Her eyes flicked over my face and she nodded. “I think so, but you have some in your hair,” she grabbed a chunk of it and showed me.
I plopped my elbow on the table and rested my cheek on my palm. “Ugh. Brahm is never letting me out of his sight again. I’m going to have to take up knitting and get a bunch of cats to keep me company,” I groused.
“Not true. Brahm will take away the knitting needles, so you won’t stab yourself out of boredom,” Lucy added matter-of-factly.
I groaned louder and covered my face. “You couldn’t even let me have knitting, could you?” I mumbled through my fingers.
“At least you get the cats,” Randi added with a drunken smile from Lucy’s other side.
“Cats are awful,” Sawyer snarked from next to me.
I would’ve liked to have said it was the slight migraine I was getting that had me responding to her, but that’d be a lie. I was just really tired of her bullshit. My tolerance for it went out the window for the evening.
“That’s because you’re a dog.”
Lucy and Randi gasped simultaneously, before I felt Sawyer’s heated stare on the side of my head.
“What the fuck did you just call me?” Sawyer asked, a warning growl reverberating in her voice.
I slowly pulled my hands away from my face and gave her a blank stare. “Sawyer, you’ve been mean this whole damn night. I think the nicest thing you did was help me to my feet. The nicest possible thing I could say to you right now is what I just said.”
Had I mentioned my head was killing me, and I was tired of bullshit?
Sawyer stood so fast, her chair went crashing to the floor with a loud bang! Her eyes gave off that gold, ethereal glow that showed off her wolf beneath the surface.
“One more fucking word out of your mouth demeaning what I am, and I will turn your skinny, stripper ass into a fucking chew toy, Glitter Barbie!”
Before I could voice a comeback, Lucy’s hand slapped down across my mouth.
“That’ll be enough you two,” she said calmly. “Claude, honey, I know you don’t feel well, but let’s not make the werewolf mad.” Her eyes flicked to Sawyer. “I must kindly ask you to never say those words again, because I’m trying really hard to keep my shit together when you say something your brother says to me on the daily. Like, seriously? What is it with you two wanting to use asses as chew toys? It’s just getting weird now.”
Sawyer stared at me with loathing for another few seconds, before the glow in her eyes faded and she walked away towards the bar without another word.
Lucy sat back down in her seat. “That was the funniest shit I’ve heard all night,” she whispered with a giggle. “It was so hard not to laugh while defusing this situation. Omigod.”
I snorted. There was the Lucy I knew.
A commotion towards the entrance had the three of us shifting in our seats.
“Oh, look, the cavalry has arrived.” Lucy said with a smirk.
“Oh. My. God. How is it possible you two attract the hottest men?” Randi asked as she sipped on some water, staring with wide eyes at Brahm and Diego as they waltzed into the club with rapid pace.
“What is Diego doing here?” I asked.
“No clue, but he looks pretty worried,” Lucy replied, then she turned to me with a mischievous smile. “You sure you didn’t sleep with him? That man looks like he’s on a mission to get to you.”
“No! I’d tell you if I did,” I responded defensively. I looked back at the two vampires stomping towards us, both with masks of worry clouding their faces.
I had barely enough time to stand before Brahm slammed into me. He wrapped his arms around me tightly and lifted me off the ground in a suffocating embrace. Diego came to a stop right next to him.
“You had me worried sick,” Brahm whispered into my hair, before abruptly pulling back with a wrinkled nose. “You still have blood on you.” He set me down on my feet.
“Where?” Diego asked. He pushed past Brahm to take my face in his hands, then turned it side to side. He slid his hands back through my hair, then drew them away. Blood coated his fingertips. “Shit. How much did you bleed?” He asked before wiping the blood off them with the hem of his shirt.
“More than I’d say is normal, you know, considering people don’t normally bleed from their eyes,” I told him with a shrug.
He stood there and watched me, his eyes going back and forth between mine. I wasn’t sure what was going through his mind. His stare was weighted.
Brahm cleared his throat. “That’s enough of that.” He placed his hand on my elbow and pulled me away from Diego, staring him down as he did. “I know we agreed on making sure she was safe together, but my patience only goes so far when it comes to someone else touching her.”
Diego leered at him. “Coming from the guy who can’t even touch her without setting off a bloody seizure.”
Wait. What? What does him touching me have to do with my seizures? Did Diego tell him he told me about what he possibly did?
I only got to ponder it for a moment, before Brahm pushed me behind him and got in Diego’s face. Lucy swiftly jumped in between them, a hand on each of their chests.
“Look, as fun as it is watching you two fight over my best friend, this is my damn Bachelorette party! This is the second fight I’ve had to stop before it happened, and I’m not doing it anymore.” She gently shoved them apart.
“Second fight? What was the first?” Brahm asked her with an air of command, completely ignoring everything else Lucy said.
“You’re being a dick, so I’m not telling. Take my girl home and for your sake, be nice to her,” she leveled him with a pointed look.
He nodded to her command, but his stare was firmly planted on me. “Let’s go. We need to talk more about what happened in a more private setting anyways.” He turned to look at Diego. “I guess you need a lift back home?”
Agitation c
oated his tongue as he asked him this.
“I got him,” Lucy responded instead. “You two go.”
I reached over and hugged her and Randi. “Sorry, Luce. I’ll call you tomorrow,” I said to my bestie, totally afraid of the conversation I was about to have with Abraham.
“You better. Love you.”
I glanced at Diego and he gave me a small smile and a nod, letting me know we were cool. I smiled back and let Brahm lead me outside.
The moment he started driving, I let the frustration I’d felt the last two days flow from me like an avalanche.
“What does you touching me have to do with my seizures? Why am I seeing things that I’m positive have never happened to me, but feel so real? Why do random things around me keep triggering these things? What. Did. You. Do?”
I breathed in an out rapidly; the bloody tears once again threatened to fall. After what Diego told me, I knew what Brahm had done to me. But, I needed to hear him tell me what it was and why. I needed to hear him say the words that I knew would cut deeper into the open wound he’d left in me. I trusted him, but everything felt like a lie between us now.
He white knuckled the steering wheel and kept his eyes planted straight ahead. I waited in the deafening silence for him to say something. Anything.
He swallowed thickly. “I have no excuse for what I did to you, Claudia. Only reasons I believed were enough to do it without your consent…” he answered quietly, still not looking in my direction.
“Nothing should ever be done to me without my consent, Abraham. Nothing,” I stated coldly as the first tear trekked down my cheek. I shook with anger and hurt. “Now. Tell me what the hell you did to me. And don’t lie,” I warned. “Because, I already have an inkling of what you’ve done.”
That made him look at me, only he didn’t seem surprised that I knew something. It only proved that I’d been right. Diego had told him what he told me.
“You’re right,” he replied gently. “It wasn’t my choice, but I panicked.” He paused for a moment, seemingly collecting his thoughts. “I put a heavy block on your memories. I pushed every bad thing that happened to you between when we first met, and before you were turned, into the back of your mind, then sealed it away. It was one of the most powerful blocks I’ve ever done in my entire existence. But you, Claudia, you are a wonder,” he turned and gave me a prideful smile.
I huffed and looked away, not wanting to fall for any of his charms. Not when there was more I needed to know.
“Your mind is a thousand times stronger than most new vampires,” he continued. “I’d like to think it’s because my blood changed you, but I can’t take all the credit. You were a remarkable human, and you’re an even more remarkable vampire. You may have struggled with your thirst in the beginning, but you’ve had total control of that since after the first month of being turned. Yes, you slip up when you stress, but that is because you want to slip up. If you didn’t want to, you wouldn’t. That’s how strong you are. It took me at least four years after my change to control my thirst the way you did.”
I glanced at him out of the corner of my eye, surprised by all his praise. Yeah, he complimented me from time to time, but never with so much awe.
“The thing is, Claudia, what happened to you after we met would break vampires my age almost instantly. It took quite a few months before you snapped. And when you snapped, you weren’t you anymore. You were a haunted shell of who you used to be; who you are now.”
This snapped me out of my attempt to ignore him. Months?
“Months…how many months, Abraham?” I asked, dreading his answer.
He turned guilty eyes back to the road. “You were in that ring for almost two years…” His voice cracked a fraction when he said this.
I felt my world freeze around me. My body ran cold at having lost so much time and not even knowing it. Two years I’d been there.
Two years…
Blood rushed up to my face and my vision tunneled, before everything went black.
Chapter Two
The razor wire was pulled tighter around my body, constricting and cutting into me like a hot knife through butter.
I screamed in agony as the wire tore deeper. Terror unlike anything I’d ever known poured through me like acid. The vampires surrounded me. They licked the blood from my flesh. They caressed my exposed breasts, They ran their sharp nails along the inside of my thighs. All the while, he laughed. The man in the corner who tied me up in this hell. He laughed while I screamed.
Pain. Brutal, fucking pain encompassed every inch of me as they all laughed and fed on me. I wanted to die. I wanted to leave this fucked up world behind and find some semblance of peace. Anything was better than here.
I jolted awake with a blood curdling scream. Blood flowed from my eyes, nose, and even from my ears. My head throbbed and the images of what I’d seen kept flashing across my vision like a translucent film covering the real world. I could see my room, but I couldn’t focus on it. My skin tingled and shivered. I could almost feel the cold, sharp wire still wrapped around my body.
Had that really happened to me?
I broke down into tears, only adding to the blood covering my face.
I felt like I was losing what was real and what wasn’t every time these images crashed through my mind like a wave of choking, toxic gas. Then again, it was all real. Abraham said my memories were coming back with a vengeance. Memories that would be hard to handle and could possibly kill me if they came too fast. I was beginning to believe him now.
I wanted to be grateful that he took such memories away. After all, every single one I’ve had so far had been awful. Except, they hadn’t been…
I wiped my tears away and thought back. The night I got drunk and danced in Brahm’s lap, a flash of familiarity had struck me when he touched me back so intimately. Was that another memory? Had we been more before?
I looked around my room, realizing Brahm must have carried me in from the car after I blacked out. I glanced around the apartment, but he was nowhere in sight. The clock on the wall said it was six thirty at night, letting me know I’d overslept. Odds were he was at the club, getting it ready for another night of depravity and dancing. I needed to work. I needed my mind off these memories and to do something I normally did that wouldn’t set them off. But if I was just sleeping, how had they been set off?
A knock at the front door startled me. I hopped up from my coffin and wrapped a robe around me. I quickly opened the door and was surprised to find Diego standing there.
“Hey. What are you doing here?”
His slight smile faded when he caught sight of my face. “Claudia…” He whispered. His hands came up, palming each side of my jaw. He wiped some of the blood with his thumbs as his eyes raked over me in concern. He liked touching my face a lot, I’d recently noticed.
“The memories are getting worse?” He asked softly with his brows pinched together in concern.
I nodded and gently extracted my face from his hands. “Apparently just sleeping can make them happen now,” I said with a sigh. I turned and walked into the apartment.
When I didn’t hear him follow, I turned and saw him standing there, his posture unsure. “Come in. Brahm isn’t here.” I didn’t know why I added that last part. I didn’t care if Brahm was here or not, Diego was a good guy and I’d like to think we were friends.
He stepped in and closed the door behind him. “I was just coming to check and see how you were. I figured last night was probably pretty rough for you.”
“Yeah, you could say that. Coffee?” I asked as I walked into the kitchen and brewed some coffee. He shook his head no, so I grabbed just my mug from the cabinet and filled it with blood from the fridge. I popped it in the microwave to heat it up, then leaned my back against the counter.
Diego shrugged off his leather jacket and rested it on the back of one of the barstools at the counter. I didn’t even bother trying to hide my checking him out as he stood there.
He had on a dark red t-shirt with a V-neckline that showed off his muscular chest. The material hugged his frame so nicely, it was hard not to stare. His hair was wet and slicked back like he’d just showered, and his tattooed arms were on display.
He stared at me too for a moment, before shaking his head. “I can’t keep looking at you like this,” he said with a sigh, then walked around the counter and grabbed a rag hanging from the rack.
I was about to ask what he was doing, completely forgetting I probably still had blood on me, when he wet the rag under the sink and rung it out. He stepped right into my personal space without a word and began gently wiping away the blood. His thumb and index finger held my chin lightly as he turned it left and right to get it all off. His face was set into deep concentration, focusing on getting every streak. However, my eyes were set on his. I was acutely aware of his hips only an inch or so from touching mine. His chest almost brushed mine as it moved up and down as he breathed.
“There,” he said with a satisfied smile. “All clean.” He wiped his hands on the rag, then looked down at me. His smile drooped. “What?”
I shook my head slowly, still not letting my eyes stray from his. “Nothing… everything. You,” I whispered. My heart raced inside my chest so hard, I could practically feel it vibrating against my ribcage
I’d yet to quite grasp who Diego actually was. God knew, I wanted him the second I laid eyes on him again. But from what I heard from Hollis, he’d only ever been about the job. He never let emotions or anything mildly distractive get in the way of his work. He never spoke of relationships with anyone, and seemed to spend most of his free time alone. So, why was he showing up to rescue me last night? Why did he care if I was alright today? Why was he touching me softly like a lover would?
Flesh and Delirium_Under the Skin Serial Part Six Page 1