by E. M. Moore
I strode up to Stephan, and took his hand in mine. “What’s going on?” My heart raced, dread pooling in my stomach. What had been discomfort about discussing my romantic life with Nicolai had just changed due to Stephan’s reaction. If Stephan was mad at Nic, something different had to be going on. “What does ‘marked’ mean?” I moved my hair out of the way, remembering Christian’s reaction to the two puncture wounds on my neck. “Is that what this is?”
Stephan ground his teeth together, and looked over me to his brother. “You did this?”
Nicolai marched toward me and moved my shirt and hair away at the same time. He hissed when he saw it. “I didn’t realize they actually sunk in. I was just…caught up in what we were doing. You know how it is with her.”
Stephan turned away, his head lowering to look at the floor.
“What the hell is it?” I said, turning toward Nic. “Why is this such a big deal?”
Christian pushed past Nic and took my hands in his. “It’s a big deal because sinking your fangs into a human means you’ve marked them. It’s a way of staking a claim. He’s basically made it impossible for the rest of us to be with you.”
I staggered back, but Christian held on tight, a life preserver in the madness. “That’s why you couldn’t kiss me? But I could…” I stared down his body, remembering the way I made him feel not ten minutes ago. If it was true that Nicolai marked me as his, why could we still do that?
Christian’s throat worked. His gray-blue eyes were wide. Worry and anger warred in his depths. “Because that had nothing to do with you, Ariana. That was all about me. When I tried to kiss you, it just felt wrong. It felt like I shouldn’t be there, it felt like I shouldn’t take pleasure in it and now I know the reason why. Nicolai’s decided to do whatever the hell he wants, no matter the cost.”
“I didn’t decide,” Nic seethed.
“You have no self control,” Christian barked. “You marked her like a blood whore.”
I blinked, my hands clenching my middle as my stomach roiled at his words. Blood whore. I knew that was bad. That was definitely a title I didn’t want. A title that would ruin any respect I’d earned.
Nicolai pushed Christian. He went sailing into Stephan who held him up. “Don’t call her that.”
The door burst open and Connor came striding in. His easy grin melted from his face as he took all of us in. “What’s the yelling about?”
None of us said anything at first, but then Nic said, “I made a mistake.”
Connor laughed. “Well, what’s new?”
Christian stood tall and straightened his shirt around himself. “You won’t be laughing in a second, brother.”
Connor looked from me to Stephan before asking. “What happened?” At least I wasn’t the only one who knew Stephan would tell the truth no matter what and with the honesty we needed in situations like this.
“Nicolai bit Ariana.”
Connor turned, his blond hair whipping around his face. “No.”
Christian gestured toward me and Connor followed his lead. He walked right up to me, put his hand behind my head and lowered his lips to mine. Within seconds, I knew the difference. I didn’t feel anything from him. It still felt good to me. It still felt like it always did when I kissed one of them. I wanted more, but from them? Nothing.
He ripped his lips away from mine and growled. He launched himself at Nicolai, his fist piercing the air between them until he struck Nic’s cheek. My hand covered my mouth as shock rippled through me. “No!” I moved forward, yanking Connor off Nic and getting between them. “Stop fighting. I’m sure we can figure this out.”
Nic rubbed his jaw. To his credit, he hadn’t attempted to go after Connor in retaliation. If he had, I probably wouldn’t have been able to stop the fight and the way everyone was feeling right now, Christian or Stephan wouldn’t have intervened either.
“Maybe I can heal the wounds,” Stephan offered. “It’s a longshot, but I can try.”
“Wounds,” Nicolai scoffed.
Stephan’s jaw clenched. “If it was one of us, you’d be furious, Nicolai. You wouldn’t have stopped at one punch, and you wouldn’t be having a rational conversation right now. You’d be out for blood, so just…don’t even talk.”
Nic’s eyes rounded. I looked at the faces of the men I loved and recognized all the hurt and pain. “I’d like to try that, Stephan. Could you please?” I’d liked being bitten by Nic, but I still wanted the connection with the other guys too. What if I couldn’t get that back? What if it was gone?
Stephan left immediately. I turned to Connor and tried to keep my emotions in check. “You’re sure you can’t kiss me?”
His shoulders slumped. “I can kiss you, Princess. It just feels so wrong. Marking someone when you’re a vampire is like staking your claim on them. We think it evolved due to food sources. If you mark a human, they’re your food source. No one else can touch them.”
“So, what’s this about blood whore then?”
Connor growled again, his hard stare focusing on Nic who’d turned away. “Feeding can be a sensual experience. It heightens emotions, especially if the participants are already turned on, the vampire feels it ten times over. The same can go for the human involved. It’s kind of…erotic.”
I nodded, silently agreeing with him. It had felt good. Really good. “I think Nic did just get carried away. He would never—”
“Just? He just got carried away? We all feel the same things for you, Princess. You didn’t see one of us sinking our fangs into you, did you? No. Because we wouldn’t do that to the rest of us.”
“He didn’t mean to.”
“Just stop, Ri,” Nic finally said. “They’re right. I’m selfish and self-centered and think about nothing but my own pleasure. I bit you because I liked it. I bit you because I enjoyed the hell out of it, and—and—”
“Enough,” Christian said, his voice surprisingly calm. Stephan, who’d come back in during Nic’s short tirade made his way over to me and opened the tin of his miracle salve. In this case, I hoped it worked.
It wasn’t about being tied to Nic, it was about wanting to be tied to all of them, too. Stephan’s fingers worked into my skin. I shifted my head to the side so he’d have ample room to work with. When he was done, he tipped my chin and touched his lips to mine. He pulled away slowly, a small, tentative smile on his face. “I just had to see for myself.”
“Do I feel…wrong?”
“You feel exactly like you used to, Ariana. You’re perfect.”
“So you can—”
He shook his head. “It’s us who’ve changed now. Our reaction to you, I mean.”
I turned to Nic, noticing the bend in his shoulders, the way he carried all the weight he’d been holding on to lately. “I need a few minutes alone with Nic.”
Feet shuffled toward the door, but then Christian’s voice spoke up. “Now that you’re marked, Ariana, it will be hard to resist Nicolai. I ask that you try to do that for the rest of us until we can figure things out.”
I nodded, understanding Christian’s sentiment. When the door closed behind him, I walked up to Nic and put my arms around him. He stiffened. “Shouldn’t you hate me about now?”
“Hate you? It’s way too late for that.”
“So, we’re already into despise territory?”
“Would I hug someone I despised?”
“Maybe if you were going to choke the life out of them.”
I smiled. “Look at me, Nic.” He turned in my arms. I looked at him straight, the smudges under his eyes more prevalent than just an hour or two ago. “I’m only going to ask once. Did you mean to mark me?”
His head fell. “No. I guessed I knew I was toying around with something I shouldn’t, but I never meant to go that far. I’ve teased you with my fangs before and you seemed to like it so I did that. Next thing I knew, I was putting just that much more pressure because of the way you reacted to it.” He shook his head. “I just…wanted you to rememb
er our first time.”
I chuckled darkly. “Well, you’ve succeeded in that. Now everyone will remember our first time, too.”
He ran his hands through his hair and clasped his fingers behind his neck. “I fucked up. I’m so sorry. I don’t even know what to say or do to make this better. I didn’t mean to do that to them, but I have been acting like a dick lately, Ri. I can’t talk to any one of them without getting pissed off. I can’t even get along with my own father. Earlier when he told Connor he could help out, but yet, I’m still here, sidelined, sitting with my thumb up my ass, I was impossibly angry. I can’t stop the anger. It’s consuming me, and maybe this was an outlet. Just a way to let everything go and experience the two of us. I just…don’t know what happened. You have to believe me.”
I took his hands in mine. “I do believe you. You’re not selfish, Nic. I think you’re the exact opposite, actually. You just said you were trying to make me feel better. That’s not selfishness, is it?”
“I know what the consequences are. I took the chance and it backfired. I’d never done that before to anyone. God, it was just so…perfect. You and me, finally together for the first time and all my clear, level-headed thoughts went right out the window.”
“Level-headed? You still are Nicolai Ravana, aren’t you? You haven’t been abducted by aliens or anything, right?”
He bit down on a smile. “Aliens don’t exist.”
“Yeah, like vampires don’t exist.”
His stare hardened. “Will you take this seriously? I just screwed up your other relationships. I messed everything up.”
“I am taking it seriously. We still have this relationship, don’t we?” I asked, motioning between the two of us. “There’s still a Nic and Ri, and I’m not going to sabotage this because of a mistake. We just need to figure out how to fix the others. Do you think Stephan’s cream will work?”
Nic shook his head. “No. My venom went into your bloodstream. The cream won’t do anything for that. If Stephan was thinking more clearly, he would’ve realized that. He probably was thinking clearly, actually. He was just trying to think of something to calm everyone down because that’s what he does.”
“Can you maybe suck the venom out?”
“I doubt piercing your skin again will do any good. It’ll just piss them off even more.”
“Then, will the affects wear off? Maybe after a while the feeling will just go away?”
He shrugged. “I honestly don’t know. Blood letting is forbidden in our world. It’s not really discussed in polite, everyday conversation. We’re only taught the reasons why we shouldn’t do it.”
I sat down on his bed and fell backward, my hands coming out to my sides in defeat. I breathed out a heavy sigh. As if we didn’t have enough to worry about, now we were facing the first major relationship hiccup, and it wasn’t something small either. It was huge. “You have to talk to your brothers and apologize. Make them see that you really didn’t mean to do it. They’ll come around.”
“I don’t know. Stephan was right. I wouldn’t be accepting any apology if they’d done this to me—to us. I’ve basically intercepted all their relationships with you and frayed them for one instant of pleasure.”
My stomach flipped, remembering the rush of emotions, the pleasure-pain of his fangs sinking into me. “Is there someone you can trust to ask about this, Nic? Isabelle, maybe? I mean, she knows about us so that won’t be a shock and it’s not as if she’s going to turn you in to The Council for it.”
Nic leaned over me. He pressed his lips to my forehead. “I’m so sorry, Ri.” He pulled away and stared down. “I’ll talk to her right now.”
Before I could answer him, he breezed out of the room, the door slamming behind him. I let out a breath and curled up, taking Nic’s pillow and shoving it under my head. As if being with four vampires wasn’t logistically extraordinary enough, now we had to add another element into the mix.
Well, at least while Nic did that, I could talk to the others. I pushed myself off the bed and walked into the hall. Since Connor had the most explosive reaction, I’d talk to him first.
I knocked on his door and rocked back onto my heels. His voice sounded from the other side. “Come in…unless you’re Nic, then fuck off.”
I rolled my eyes and waltzed in. It wasn’t that I didn’t understand his anger. I totally did. I was mad about it, too, but holding it over Nic wasn’t the answer. He sat up when he saw it was me. “Sorry. I thought you might’ve been Christian or Stephan.” I walked up to him and sat next to him on the bed. I didn’t say anything at first, not knowing where to start. “I’m not mad at you, you know.”
“No, you’re just mad at your brother.”
His throat worked. “And you don’t think I should be.”
“No, I understand it. Completely. I just—I’m sorry. I didn’t know.”
“I wouldn’t expect you to know, but Nic did.”
“We’ll figure a way out of this.” I grabbed his hand and squeezed.
He squeezed me back and turned toward me. “We better find a way out of it because I’ll be lost if I can’t kiss you anymore, if we can’t express our feelings for one another, Princess.”
I swallowed, understanding the truth to his words. Out of all the princes, Connor was always the most open about his feelings for me, dropping kisses on my cheeks, holding me as often as he could. I wrapped my hands around his neck and hugged him tight to me. “Is this okay?”
He nodded into me, his hands coming around my middle. He fell back on the bed, bringing me with him. “This feels perfect.”
I closed my eyes, reveling in the fact that this hadn’t been taken away from us. And hopefully, as Connor and I cuddled, Nic was finding out answers from Isabelle that would smooth this whole mess over.
Nothing was about to come in between my princes and I. Not after we’d come this far and worked this hard.
Chapter Twenty
It’d been a week since the Council meeting and the Council chambers had turned into an FBI room. At least, what I imagined an FBI room to look like. There were big maps on every wall with little dots pinpointing an area of interest. The black dots were where Soren said Dumont had been before. The red dots meant Connor had found an uptick in disappearances and crime in that area. The blue dots were information that came through our call center.
Yep. Turned out when you rally people behind you, they do just that. A vampire clan out in Nebraska had an in with the local police, as in he was the chief of the local police. He was able to make a Wanted poster for Dumont and spread it all over the country with a hotline number on the bottom that came direct to this room. Guards and servants alike had volunteered to answer the lines and sift through the information. Every time someone called, they put a blue dot on the map. Sure, some of those blue dots were probably crazy people who thought they saw aliens on every street corner, but we were treating all the information as valuable.
The information was working. A few of the areas on the maps were starting to look a little crowded with dots of every color. The next step, according to Lex, was to send out a purely informational scouting team, a team that could fly under the radar at all costs. We wouldn’t want to tip Dumont off again and let him know we were close to finding him.
The most valuable dots on the maps, though, were the gold ones. These were tips from vampires themselves. Everything was anonymous and came through one special hotline that was separate from the human one. It turned out Dumont was also trying to get vampires on his side, and had been doing so for some time. Though the vampires weren’t anxious to have Dumont leading again, they were also too afraid to say anything to Gregor until now. Without fear of retribution, they were opening up again, letting Dumont’s secrets slip one-by-one.
In particular, there were two spots on the map that needed looking into as soon as possible. I stood in front of them now, tapping my finger against my lip. Lex had yet to decide if she wanted one team to investigate both or to split into
two teams. It was a tough call.
A hand fell on my arm, and I jumped. The hand squeezed my shoulder and that’s when I realized it was Christian. He leaned in and whispered, “My mother would like to talk to you.”
My stomach clenched. I knew this was coming. She hadn’t been much help with what Nicolai had done, only saying it was possible the reaction to being ‘marked’ would wear off. Her other idea was to have each of them bite me and see if that negated the pull to Nicolai. Perhaps then I’d feel the pull to all of them, or maybe just to the last one to bite me. No one really knew because no one had wanted to share someone before. We were really at a standstill with that, not knowing the best way to proceed. “Did you talk to her?” I asked.
Christian breathed out. “Yes.”
I’d asked him to. He’d been the one less likely to forgive Nicolai for what he’d done. They still weren’t on talking terms, which made me nervous, and jittery. I wanted all five of us together like we were before, not one piece of my heart refusing another piece of my heart. “What did she say?”
He sighed. “You know what she said. She said the same thing you’ve been trying to tell me about how Nic is reckless and does things without thinking and that I should just get over it because things are going to work out anyway. This is just a small blip in our long life together.”
I smiled. I really did like Isabelle. “But you’re going to ignore her, aren’t you?”
“For the time being.” He straightened, his shoulders pulling back to his leadership stature. “I’m my own person, Ariana…”
I turned toward him finally, the dots I’d been staring at for the past few hours momentarily camouflaging Christian’s face as if they were implanted on my eyes. “I know that.”
He put pressure on my shoulder to lead me away and I followed him. “She’s in the sitting room waiting. You need a break from all that stuff anyway. Has Lex made a decision?”
“No, but she will soon.”
“That’s probably why Isabelle wants to talk to you now. She’s afraid you’ll run off and— and…”