Eden abruptly stood up, faster than Callum could see her do it, which was why his face was flat on the glass desk before he even realized she wasn’t sitting anymore.
“You see that right in front of you? The still-beating heart of a virgin. Do you know how hard it is to find one of these outside of their original container?” Eden asked. “It may look like a Halloween decoration to you, but it was a carefully harvested and magically preserved organ that cost me five hundred thousand dollars to the wizard who procured it for me, and I’ve set up an online auction that will likely net me three million. This little beauty is going to make us over two million dollars in profit, and it’s just one curiosity, stolen from just one murdered girl,” Eden said.
She released her lieutenant. He staggered back, sputtering, holding his face and trying to regain his dignity. If she thought he’d listen, she’d tell him he’d never had any to begin with, so there was no point trying to start now.
“Let me give you the long-term big picture here—I put my black market operation on the side burner to run the Court your way. Then my neighborhood, my streets, become overrun with drugs, prostitutes and automatic weapons. As they say, there goes the neighborhood,” Eden said.
“It’s not exactly the nicest neighborhood in town anyway,” Callum said snidely. “It still has those things.”
“Compare it to the streets where our business-minded compatriots deal their dull trifecta. We seem pristine for gritty urbania, don’t you think?” Eden replied.
She pulled one of her knives from her boot, a lovely little switchblade gifted to her by a supplier. The handle was carved sterling silver, the blade cold, etched steel. She flicked the blade out and vaulted over the desk. Her boots came within an inch of the bell jar holding the still-beating heart of a virgin, but she had no fear she would destroy it. Callum stumbled away, but not before her blade had nicked his neck. No worse than he would get shaving, but he shouted anyway.
Eden brought the stained tip of the knife near her mouth, closed her eyes, breathed his bouquet as though it were wine.
“So we bring drugs here. What do you think that does to the blood supply? Have you ever tasted the taint of heroin in a junkie’s veins? I have. And I’ve had to come down from a meth high or coke euphoria. Drugs make my supply sloppy and in turn makes me sloppy,” Eden said. She licked the steel, pressing the sharp tip against her tongue but not piercing through.
Callum watched her avidly, whether he wanted to or not.
“So we become a sex trafficking hub. We already have our share of prostitutes, but we’ve cleared out the pimps. So I start taking a cut and become the neighborhood’s madam general. The women in other neighborhoods like ours, they can’t go to the cops. The cops won’t come to places like this, and when they do, they’re no help. Women can come to me as we are now. But if I start selling women out of my back lot like counterfeit purses, you think they’d tell me when their husband stepped out of line and drew blood that belongs to me?” Eden asked. “You may not think that’s important, except a man who thinks he can beat his woman might think he doesn’t have to listen to me, just slap my lipsticked mouth and tell me to get on my knees like a good bitch.
“Add in guns, and we’ve got good blood spilling in our streets and flooding the drug-ridden gutters. And there goes the neighborhood. We’re not the nicest place in the city, but we’re cleaner than some suburbs, and I like it that way. It’s about control, Callum. And it’s about order.”
“Do you know what they say about us?” Callum asked, rubbing at his neck and checking to see whether the cut had healed. It hadn’t. “They laugh when we call ourselves an organization, a gang or a syndicate. They mock us by calling us criminal masterminds and supervillains. That’s how out of touch they think we are.”
“And I should care why?” Eden asked. She caressed his unshaven cheek with the serrated side of her knife.
Callum had to force himself to remain still.
“I have control. I have money. They can laugh all they want,” she continued. “They can’t have what I have.”
“When they get tired of mocking us for calling ourselves the Court, they call us a cult,” Callum said. “You talk long-term, but the real underground lasts, Eden. There’s a reason why people have been dealing these things since the dawn of time. Cults always die.”
“I know forever better than you,” Eden said, closing the knife with a sharp slide of metal that made Callum flinch. “Don’t you think I would know what lasts? Although the Court as a cult sounds…intriguing, I won’t deny. People fear cults, Callum.”
“Cults are about personality. What happens to this one if your star stops shining so bright, Your Majesty?” Callum said sarcastically.
“If you have such a lack of confidence in me after all I’ve shown you, you can always leave,” Eden said. She circled him, swaying her hips under her tight black leather pants.
“Or maybe you want to take me up on my offer,” she murmured, wrapping her arms around him from behind and tucking her mouth where his neck met his shoulder. She ran her hands over his chest and abdomen. “All these doubts? They’ll fly away like the verminous little bats that they are. The Js and Santoses of the world will suck your soul dry, Callum. I assure you that when I do it, it’s much more pleasant. Then you’ll see what we have here, what I made. Like all the others see.”
She slipped back around him, took his hand, and brought it to her barely covered breast. “Come on. I know you want to. You won’t have me the way you wish you could, the way all men seem to wish they could—where I do everything you want because you tell me to and I’m too helpless to do anything but obey. But what I have to offer is so much better. Pure pleasure and pure clarity. You’ll never get that from your pills, Callum,” Eden purred.
If she were any other woman running an organization like the Court, she’d have to put on a power suit and play up the ice queen image to get any respect from men. Even though weapons were great equalizers, a man was still usually more powerful than a woman just by virtue of size.
Eden was petite, most of her height given to her by the heels of her boots, but that hadn’t been a problem for her since she’d been young. She wore her stilettos, breast-baring corsets and skintight leather pants because she damn well could, because no man was her match, and any who thought he was learned better in the course of a night—with a bite on his neck that never truly went away, a mark of his happy defeat and his new loyalties.
Underground circles and law enforcement knew her as the Red Queen, named for her dark red lips, dark red hair, dark red corsets, dark red and black heart inked on her chest, and for the bloody swath she’d had cut to claw her way into her position.
But she was also whispered by some as the Queen of Hearts for her uncanny ability to win the hearts of men in a single night. Her marks were badges of honor within her organization, an acknowledgment of the courage to have taken on the Red Queen and lived. Rumor abounded about what Eden did to make them love and swear undying loyalty to her, but the real secrets stayed hidden in their stolen hearts.
After all, in the end, Eden was a thief.
Callum wore no such mark. Eden didn’t require it for a man to work in her organization, but Callum’s increasing grumblings made her wary. Dissatisfaction in the ranks was like the flu—it spread fast and might even infect those who were supposed to have immunity. She kept Callum because he was good with numbers, ruthless in following her orders and eminently business-minded. But she worried that, with dollar signs in his eyes, he’d lost sight of the art of what they did.
However, Eden also knew Callum wanted her, regardless of how he felt about her business choices. There wasn’t a straight man alive who didn’t.
“No, thank you, ma’am,” Callum said, although it seemed like a real effort to pull his hand away from her breast. “That’s not the Kool-Aid I want to be drinking.”
“Who said you’d be the one drinking it?” Eden asked. Relishing the glint of fear i
n his eyes, she allowed him to back away.
He’d known. Somehow he’d known what she was when he’d signed on. Perhaps someone in his family was a hunter and had taught him how to recognize the signs of someone who was genuinely a vampire and not just pale and prone to gothic dramatics. It wasn’t like she brought her teeth out in public, and in private she made her men forget most of the details of her feed, her brand on their necks a mystery that they never questioned.
Though Callum had no compunction for working for a vampire in return for a tidy income, he still wasn’t sold on being bitten by one.
“Miss Eden.” Paul, one of her techs at the computer hub, flagged her over.
“Another time, then,” Eden said quietly, but she didn’t allow him look away from her black eyes until she was ready to let him go. “Don’t you have work to do?”
Eden made her way over to Paul. The mark of her bite was lurid under his ear. Anything he’d call her over for had to be important, otherwise he would have sent a message to Koji first.
“We have an infection pattern on the west side,” Paul said. “Sometimes two teeth, sometimes multiple.”
“Targets?” Eden asked.
“Five women for the two, one man for the multiple, all over the course of two days. Infiltration or invasion, do you think?” Paul asked.
“Have Koji assemble the Jacks. Twelve men for each mark. Iron chains. Whatever their intentions, they won’t have them for long. Tell Koji to have them brought to my chambers immediately.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
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About the Author
Aurelia T. Evans is an erotic writer with a fondness for horror and the supernatural. In addition to writing, Aurelia enjoys baking, taking late night walks, and listening to almost every genre of music.
Email: [email protected]
Aurelia loves to hear from readers. You can find her contact information, website and author biography at http://www.totallybound.com.
Also by Aurelia T. Evans
Calling the Dragons Home
Red Queen
Sanctuary: Winter Howl
Sanctuary: Cry Wolf
Frost Bite: Gravedigger
Totally Bound Publishing
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