by Ana Calin
The gong hits our eardrums, and all heads turn. It’s time to enter the premiere.
Lazarus reserved one of the majestic loges for us, cherry curtains and cushions and all, but surprise—Radek reserved the same kind of loge, to our side but far enough that we can see each other better than we can see the stage. Crap.
The performance impresses, but I’m too aware of Radek and his eyes on our loge to focus on that. I sweat the entire time, kneading my hands in my lap but, luckily, he can’t see that. I keep my eyes on the stage, face cold and impassible. I’m no longer in the yoga state of mind, but I’ve learned to fake it well enough. When the show is over I’ll sure try to get out of here as quickly as possible.
I remind myself of the mantra—I’m detached from the outcome. Radek and I can never be together again.
As if he senses my thoughts, Lazarus bends over to my ear.
“Tell me the truth. Are you still in love with him? Are you still struggling with it?”
“Not struggling,” I reply in a peaceful voice. “I accept my love for him. But I also accept that we’ll never be together.”
CHAPTER IV
Radek
She actually smiled at me while the same woman I hurt her with years ago clung to my arm. Juliet Jochs doesn’t give a damn about me anymore.
And look at that vampire Lazarus sitting proud by her side, watching the opera as if I’m not even here. He must be feeling pretty damn sure of himself. I never really believed they’d be a couple because, even though they live together in the same villa, he was never there when I activated the mirrors to watch her. If they were lovers, they’d share the same bed, wouldn’t they? I activated a mirror earlier and saw him joining her, but even then I doubted they’re a couple. Right now I’m not so sure.
Dagger after dagger goes through my heart as tormenting thoughts spin inside my head.
What if she slept with other men, if not with Lazarus? She can’t have stayed chaste for five straight years. Things are different for me, I haven’t had sexual needs since she healed me of the midnight monster. Turned out that, by nature, I need emotional involvement in order to crave getting naked with a woman, and I haven’t gotten emotionally involved with anyone since Juliet.
Until now I could run away from the idea of Juliet in bed with other men, especially because whenever I activated the mirrors she was mostly at home. That entertained me in my fantasy that maybe she still clung to the memory of me. Of my body on hers. Of my lips on her folds. Of my cock inside of her.
Fuck, the memory alone is enough to give me an erection.
“Oh, what have we got here,” Irina notices, her hand snaking its way up my thigh to my cock.
“Don’t touch me, please.” I try to stay civil with her, but my eyes are still fixed on Juliet, and Irina sees it.
“You still desire her?”
“She did use to make me very horny.” I glance at her, to give her the impression I’m emotionally cold. In the end, she’s Vlad’s spy in my life. “No more than a fetish really. I like defiling women who seem virgin ice-queens.”
“I could pretend to be her tonight,” she insists sweetly, but all it accomplishes is to make me mad. In order to hide it I excuse myself, stand like a gentleman and walk out of the loge.
Radek
TONIGHT I’M RESTLESS. I can’t help but replay what happened this evening at the Opera House. I went with Irina in order to strike down the theory of Juliet and me having an affair, because this theory will hurt Juliet’s career in the long run. And to put Irina’s suspicions to rest before my still-existing soft spot for Juliet reaches my brother’s ears. But why did Juliet come with Lazarus? I didn’t expect them there.
Maybe she did it for the same reason as me—in order to give the press something else to chew. Maybe that’s why she raised her glass at me, too, to show them she didn’t care I brought someone else. If only she knew she might as well have broken the glass and cut me with it. I hoped the pain would dampen by now, but it doesn’t, and I’m considering using the corkscrew again.
I realize the unrequited love that I feel for her has given me a nasty case of mental issues. Lost in thought, I turn my head to the mirror. A big oval piece, hanging on the wall in my luxurious hotel room, a nicely carved wooden frame around it.
I walk slowly to it in the half-obscurity of my room, facing my own reflection in the mirror. I reach out to touch the image of my cheek, the smoothness of which I owe to the love Juliet Jochs once felt for me.
The mirror turns liquid under my influence, its surface soon rippling like the folds of curtains in the wind. The image clears to Juliet’s chamber at the villa, as if the only thing separating our rooms were this mirror. It works like a window between us.
What I see almost knocks me off my feet. Juliet sits at the foot of her bed between the impressive wooden posts that hold the canopy. She’s wearing a silk camisole with cups that hold up her luxurious breasts, her white skin glowing like silk in the romantic light of candles. Her rich white-blond curls flow impressively, framing her delicate shoulders, her finely muscled legs crossed, a pair of silver high heels on her feet. God, I always found those delicate ankles of hers so sexy.
I realize—if she’s looking like that, she must be waiting for someone. Fuck. She must be waiting for Lazarus! The blood boils in my veins. Standing here with my shirt open, my chest exposed and my hair disheveled like a mad man’s, I feel vulnerable. Vulnerable, and so damn angry that I could whip a silver blade through the mirror the moment he walks in, striking him dead right before her eyes.
Damn it, I should just deactivate the mirror, turn my back the way I always did when I saw that she wasn’t alone, but I can’t. This is different. Back then she had clothes on, giving me good reason to hope that she wasn’t out fucking somebody. This time it’s crystal clear that’s exactly what she’s up to.
“I know you’re here,” she interrupts my spinning thoughts, a seductive look in her eyes. “I’ve been waiting for you.” Her blue irises spark with lust from behind the smoky makeup she’s still wearing.
My lips part as Juliet opens her legs, revealing her naked folds.
What the—?
Blood rushes to my cock. The only woman I ever truly desired, showing me her pussy.... My cock grows rock hard, straining against my trousers as her small hand trickles to her folds, pushing two fingers between them.
I grab my cock as she parts her folds for me, exposing her cleft, freshly shaved, as naked as it gets.
“I imagine the tip of your cock entering me,” she says, her smoky eyes hooded. I’m sure she can’t see me, but I’m also sure she feels my presence, just like she did before she left with Lazarus for the Opera House.
She leans back on her other hand as she teases her nub with her middle finger. I watch fascinated as her pleasure grows, her legs opening wider, her thighs flexing harder. Her face changes to that of dirty lust, her smokey gaze all fuck-me-hard, her white teeth sinking into her lower lip.
I whip out my cock and stroke as she sinks a finger inside herself, arching back and moving her hips as she’s riding her own hand, her juice all over it. I inhale sharply as she moves faster, more lascivious and even less aesthetic. She soon loses all her inhibitions, acting like a dirty whore and driving me crazy.
I masturbate furiously, holding with one hand to the wall beside the mirror. I can still see a slight reflection of myself against the image of Juliet. I seem a disheveled pervert with a heated face, jerking off, about to spit his sperm out at a beautiful woman offering him her soaked pussy.
“That’s it, you’re doing me,” she says.
“I’m making love to you.”
Her cheeks are now red with heat, too, a lustful expression having taken over her face completely. She stands up and turns around, at first offering me her back with those white-blond curls tumbling down her back to a pair of round butt cheeks. She bends down, beautifully muscled legs spread on top of her silver high heels, and I moan deeply, the
moan of a man getting brain fever with desire.
She’s offering me both her soaking wet pussy and her butt hole, her fingers trickling into the picture from between her legs and parting her folds open so that I can see the inside of her pussy. Her other hand slides in from behind and, dipping her middle finger in the slick wetness, she sinks it inside her butt.
I come, growling like a wild animal, my seed squirting on the mirror all over Juliet’s exposed crack and her butthole that she keeps pumping with her finger. I come for minutes, in a way that I never knew a man could climax. This never happened to me in six hundred years, except with her.
I’m still stroking my cock, worshipping this woman, as her thighs begin to quiver. She’s dipped her fingers inside her cleft as well, doing both her pussy and her ass at the same time, making me come again, holding with one hand to the wall, bucking like a dog, sweat dripping from my hair over my forehead.
“By all demons, how is this even possible?” I growl to myself, glaring through the mirror from under my eyebrows.
Juliet brings herself back up to a standing position with the moves of a cat, and turns to face me. I clench my teeth, feeling a violent need to be physically close to her. I want to crush her breasts against my chest.
I grab the wooden sides of the mirror as she walks close. Now face to face with me, she slides a finger over the pane and sticks it inside her mouth as if she sensed that my seed is trickling down all over it.
“I know this is what you wanted, Radek,” she says in a husky voice. Her eyes are unfocused, like a blind person’s, but then I remember it’s natural—she senses me perfectly, but she doesn’t actually see me the way I see her.
“You may be old, almost ancient, but you’re still a man,” she says. “I understand that. You wanted to know if sex with me would still feel the same, you were curious how I look down there, if anything changed. I suppose this satisfied your curiosity. Please, do not—” She brings her nose close to the pane, anger now replacing the just-fucked euphoria. “Do not ever look at me again the way you did tonight.”
“Why?” I whisper.
There’s a long pause, and for a moment I think she’s not going to say anything. In the end, she can’t have heard me. But then her lips part to speak, and the expression on her face changes, revealing what I always dared hope she feels—nostalgia.
“Because it’s making me remember how I felt about you,” she says quietly, her breath misting the pane.
I caress her face in the mirror, resolve swelling inside my naked chest. “I’m coming for you.”
Juliet
ELLIS THROWS HER TABLET on my desk, right under my nose. On the tablet, a picture made of two pictures separated by a white line. Radek in his loge in one picture, me in my loge in the other.
The camera caught me stealing a glance at him, so whoever took these pictures must have kept their eyes on Radek and me the entire evening, probably from somewhere in another loge. He’s watching me intently, his unreadable, dangerous eyes intense from under his eyebrows. He wasn’t even trying to mask his interest in me, which I know, because it made me so horny I had to masturbate for him last night. I could never resist this man, and last night my hormones were in a craze. I’m already ashamed because of it.
I take the tablet in my hands, looking at this picture.
“Good to see you’re as taken with him as the article below suggests,” Ellis says, a little angrily. It surprises me, she usually keeps her head down around me, so to say, knowing her place. I now find her with arms folded across her chest, tapping her foot on the floor. I arch an eyebrow.
“Are you reprimanding me, Ellis?”
“Well, as far as I remember, you and Lazarus went to the Opera together yesterday in order to bait the press away from the story between you and this Carpathian prince. But, instead of convincing anyone of your detachment, it seems you only gave them more reason to speculate.” She motions to the tablet still in my hands. “Just look at that. It’s clear as day from the way you look at each other, you have a past, Miss Jochs.”
“And how is that your problem?”
She pauses, looking hard into my eyes. “I want to be able to trust the people I work with. You had us all believe you never had anything going with the prince, but I have to say, I’m more convinced than ever the two of you had an affair.” She pauses again, narrowing her eyes like a suspicious cat. “Maybe you still do.”
I place the tablet on my desk, and get up slowly, walking around to where Ellis stands. In my high heels, I’m taller than her. I just measure her from head to toes, in a relaxed way, but enough to intimidate her, causing her to fidget from one foot to the other.
“I’m disappointed to learn that my personal life would have played a part in your decision to work for me. Maybe I should have taken your affair with Herald Gruff into consideration as well.”
As expected, Ellis stiffens, her eyes widening. I begin pacing around her, much in the way I learned from Radek. “Or the affair with a married man from college. Judging by that, your morals leave a lot to be desired. Still, I chose to believe in you.” I stop in front of her again. “I based my decision on criteria non-related to your personal life.”
“How, how do you—”
“Let me tell you something, Ellis.” I place a hand on her shoulder, squeezing just enough for her to feel there is strength behind the delicate approach I’m taking. “No matter who helps a woman in her career, whether she sleeps her way to the top or not, in order to stay at the top she needs to possess certain skills and qualities. One of the must-haves is information on every person you hire and invest with important tasks. You cannot afford to be uninformed. You see, for example, if I didn’t have this on you—among other things, the affairs were only an example—I might be worried you’ll go with insider information from the European Hellhound to the competition. You might even switch sides, joining Herald Gruff in his plans.” I glance curtly to the tablet still on my desk. “That’s Herald Gruff’s doing, isn’t it? He was the one who kept an eye on Prince Radek and me the entire evening in order to catch those moments? Not to mention he’s the only photographer that I know of who is fast enough to snap a picture of a glance when it happens.”
Ellis nods, looking down, ashamed.
“And how did he know that I would be there?”
She doesn’t answer, but she doesn’t need to. Her face down, I know she’s crying under the pressure.
“This might just cost you your job, Ellis.”
“Please don’t, Miss Jochs,” she manages, fighting the tears in her voice, still not looking at me. She just shakes her head, picking her nails. “I won’t, I can’t—”
“Find another job, let alone such a well-paid one?” I snort. “Of course not. You were hoping that Herald would make it big again with this story, and then take you along when he finally gets another position of power with the influential press, right?”
My mobile announces an incoming text just as I want to tell Ellis what I’ll have her do for me. A text isn’t usually a big deal, I wouldn’t have to see it immediately, but a strange feeling engulfs me. A feeling that it’s him.
I hurry over, pick up the mobile and, to my shock, indeed, the message is from Radek—Meet me tonight, private booth at Over the Top. If you don’t come, I’ll cause trouble until you agree to see me. TMM.
It’s the same number he used for text message communication five years ago, when I worked intensely on his public image in Europe, right after I came back from the Carpathians. TMM is code for The Midnight Monster. We never spoke directly to each other since the night we broke up, text message was the way he sent information, and his people called me for the ‘filling’. We only shook hands once after that, the day he bought the European Hellhound and the villa, and gave them to me.
I turn my attention to my secretary again. “Okay, Ellis, this is what I need you to do, if you want to keep your job.”
Juliet
OVER THE TOP IS BERLIN’S
best rooftop cocktail bar with closed-circuit club for Friday and Saturday nights. It has three levels: 20th floor for cocktail bar, 21st for private club, 22nd for private area. It costs a fortune to reserve the latter but, of course, that wasn’t a problem for Prince Radek Basarab.
A large man waits for me in front of the venue, offering me his hand when I step out of the limo Radek sent for me. I’m wearing an elegant hat with a dark net over half my face—an eccentric outfit, but this way no one will recognize me.
We take the all-glass outer elevator to the top, which offers a grand view over the Berlin skyline. Tidy and understated during the day, the Berlin skyline can be impressive at night with all the lights.
We emerge into the cocktail bar, the large man keeping a protective arm around me and making way through the crowd with the other. People move out of our path, but they do stare. I praise myself inwardly for the hat with net over my eyes, and try to still my drumming heart at the anticipation of seeing Radek, of being alone with him.
The man leads me up coiling spiral stairs to the club on the next floor, which is still empty, since it’s only nine o’clock, then up to the private area. My jaw drops as we step into the large open space, floor-to-ceiling glass windows without beams to separate them offering an all-around uninterrupted view over the city. I go dizzy and a little sick, leaning on the man’s forearm because I’m losing balance. It’s the fear of heights that’s doing that to me. My breath hitches, but I decide to concentrate on the interior in order to get a grip. I can’t afford to show weakness.
In the middle of the room with granite floor is a large bar with mirrors and colorful bottles like an altar of crystal. In front of it, close to the window, a table for two. Besides it stands my painfully beautiful Radek.
The sight of him, the sharp awareness that he’s here for real makes my blood pressure shoot up. He’s wearing black pants and a white shirt that fits his princely-athletic body.