by Isabel Wroth
Well, until they looked him in the eye and saw the complete lack of a soul.
Thomas… Thomas looked like a nineteen-year-old boy who should be tossing around a football with his friends, not the head of a security company.
He had the strong features of his Native American heritage: thick black hair cut short for business, sharp cheekbones, and a bladed nose. His skin was as fair as his English mother’s people; his eyes were a mix of brown and green, and he had freckles on his cheeks.
Sitting next to his vampire uncles, Thomas didn’t look physically imposing at all.
Though, Wallstreet wasn’t riddled with stories of the biggest, baddest, strongest man in the board room winning the day. It was the smartest man in the room with the most patience and the strongest ability to lie who won the game.
Thomas struck her as an extremely smart man. He looked directly at her when Maksim finished speaking, betraying in neither voice nor expression anything beyond concern and curiosity.
“After all this time, how did you find my father, Miss Gray?”
Father, eh? That was an odd choice to describe his relationship with Maksim. Most vampires would say ‘my sire’ or ‘my maker.’
It wasn’t a slip of the tongue. Maksim had appeared at the most vulnerable time in Thomas’s life, protected him from his brothers who wanted to use him as a juice box, fed him, clothed him, saved him. Of course, Thomas would think of Maks as his father, but it was still unsettling the way he said it.
Kerrigan met Thomas’s direct gaze. “I was looking for him.”
Thomas batted his long lashes at her in confusion. “You watched him wither and die. Why would you be looking for him?”
Now that was an interesting question. “Initially, it was his spirit I was determined to find. I had things I needed to say. Why weren’t you looking for your father?”
Thomas blinked at her return volley, taking a moment to glance at Maksim and back to her with a shrug.
“We were looking, but about seven years ago, I felt a sensation similar to what I imagine having one’s spine ripped out feels like. I was about to meet with Virico and Dhiraj when it happened, and when I regained consciousness, I described the sensation to them. They told me they experienced something similar when they felt their bond with Austmathr die. I assumed, believed, my sire was dead.”
Kerrigan accepted that with a nod, crossing her legs over the hand Maksim slid over her thigh, turning her attention to his brothers.
“And you three? You assumed Maks was dead as well?”
Dhiraj tilted his head to the side, regarding her in the same way a bird of prey might. Focused, waiting patiently to see which way she would scurry.
“The feeling of a severed sire bond is extremely painful. It is not uncommon for young vampires to die when their sire does or to violently seize or pass out. Elder vampires can withstand the excruciating pain to a point, bleeding from their ears or nose if they’re in proximity to their maker at the time of his death. We’ve experienced this first hand; why wouldn’t we believe our brother to be dead?”
Kerrigan shrugged, feeling an undeniable spurt of anger settle like a brand in her belly.
“I have sisters, and like you, I’m biologically unrelated to any of them. Granted, we’ve only been family for around twenty years, but if one of them went missing, I wouldn’t stop looking until I found a body.
“You’ve all been together for centuries, and you call Maksim your brother, but gave up on him after three years without any evidence except Thomas’s fainting spell. No offense, Thomas.”
Aubin gave a faint smile, less than a quirk of his lips, but it was the first movement of his facial muscles she’d seen since he’d walked into the library.
“You’re offended by our lack of loyalty.”
It wasn’t a question, so Kerrigan didn’t bother to reply.
“How charming,” Aubin murmured genuinely, staring at her like a damn serial killer, upping his creep factor by about ten points.
“Where is Isaiah? And Hector?” Maksim changed the subject, not commenting on his brother’s lack of loyalty or Thomas’s assumptions.
Virico spread his hands briefly. “Isaiah is recruiting in Argentina, and Hector is in theater on a rescue mission. Why did you use a false appointment to get in the door instead of contacting us directly?”
Maksim shrugged, wiggling his fingers higher up her thigh, his thumb stroking along the ribbon of her garter.
“Because I wasn’t sure of the reception I would receive. Who moved into my apartment?”
“Hector,” Dhiraj answered without inflection. “We thought you dead; why wouldn’t we welcome you with open arms upon learning otherwise?”
“Why, indeed?” Maksim replied evasively. “I assume all of my assets have been absorbed into the company?”
Thomas flushed slightly and was quick to assure his father that everything would be returned to him immediately.
“I’ll see to it personally. Would you like your old rooms back? I’m sure Hector won’t mind once he learns you’re here.”
Maksim snorted his amusement. “Hector will most certainly mind, and my former rooms are not adequate enough for two.”
“You think one of us betrayed you to those witches, don’t you?” Dhiraj asked, and though his tone was bland, it was clear he was insulted.
“Of course I do,” Maksim said with a cool smile, flicking his fingers out to include the rest of them. “We’ve all stabbed each other in the back at one point or another, some of us quite literally.”
Virico let out a bark of laughter and reached over Dhiraj to punch Aubin in the shoulder.
“Naples, 1654 with a dagger! Good times, eh?”
Aubin rolled his pale eyes. “Oh, yes, wonderful. The absolute best. So, Maksim, which one of us did this dastardly thing?”
“No idea,” Maksim admitted casually. “Rest assured, I’ll find out eventually. I didn’t come back to take over the company; Thomas has apparently done an exemplary job of running things, or one of you would have killed him already.”
Thomas sat up a little straighter and smoothed his hand down the length of his crimson tie.
“Thank you, Father.”
“Then why come back at all? In your shoes, surrounding myself with potential enemies would be the very last thing I’d do,” Dhiraj commented, scowling in earnest now as he had to lean back to avoid a slap from Aubin to Virico.
The flicker of rage returned to Maksim’s expression. “Perhaps I’ve gone a bit insane after my time in the Silver Wives’ dungeon and had too much time to think.”
Virico gave a bark of laughter and smiled with all the elegance of a shark.
“Now that, I find hard to believe, little brother. Dhiraj does have a point, though. Bringing your vulnerable female into our house, certain one of us has it out for you, that does smack of insanity. You’re a heavy sleeper during the day.”
To Kerrigan’s ears, Virico seemed to be making a statement rather than a threat, but he’d also given it away that he thought she was weak.
She tensed her thighs around Maksim’s hand, glad when he kept it together to answer. Sort of.
Maksim leaned forward with a toothy, wolfish, menacing smile of his own.
“Come after her while I sleep, Virico. I dare you.”
“Always so dramatic.” The curly-haired vampire gave a roll of his eyes. “I have no designs to murder your Bride, Maksim. Truth be told, I was quite put out when you vanished. I’m head of the internal security force; my team and I will gladly assist you in whatever way you require. You know how I feel about traitors.”
The hairs on Kerrigan’s arms that had been twerking with indecision stood at attention in response to the menace Virico fed into his final statement.
He dropped the charmingly playful mask to let her and Maksim both see the psycho lurking beneath the handsome facade.
The only one who seemed relatively sane was Thomas, but it was likely he simply hadn’t lived
long enough to go crazy
“It behooves me to take second place in declaring my loyalty to you and your Bride, Father. Please forgive me,” Thomas declared with a wince. “Whatever you need, you have only to ask.”
“You still didn’t answer my question,” Dhiraj pointed out with a stubborn narrowing of his dark eyes.
“Why come here, Maksim? Why bring your Bride here if you are so certain one of us betrayed you? Why, when we all have the finest weapons and mercenaries in the world at our disposal to pit against you?”
Maksim took a moment to answer, but he’d told her to follow her instincts, so Kerrigan took a stab at it.
“You’re mad at Maks for putting me at risk, aren’t you?”
Dhiraj cut his gaze to her. “That you even ask says you do not understand how rare and precious a gift you are. Were you mine, I would hide you away from the entire world and burn this place to the ground with all my brothers inside before risking your life.”
“I’ve just decided you’re my favorite,” Kerrigan told him honestly, pleased to see Dhiraj’s lashes flutter, and his eyes widen in surprise.
“It’s precious of you to consider a world where I would let Maksim leave me again. There is nothing—not time, not space, no building made of stone or an army of mercenaries that will keep me from my mate. We live together, or we burn the place down together. End of story.”
Dhiraj looked at her, his fathomless brown eyes burning with longing and a deep-seated envy. Kerrigan pointed a finger gun at him and pulled the trigger.
“When you’re ready to sac up and get with the times, come see me. I’ll help you find your Bride.”
“What? You’ll just wave your magic wand and poof, she appears?” Aubin drawled sarcastically, his sneering doubt so thick Kerrigan could have cut it into bite-sized pieces for him to choke on. “That’s not how it works, little witch.”
“Suce mon gros orteil, toi crapaud.” The order to suck her big toe sounded so much more elegant in French. Her order and calling Aubin a toad earned a bark of laughter from Virico, and a blazing look of fury from Aubin.
“Only Maks gets to call me ‘little witch.’ And no, I will not be waving around any magic wands. I’ll use the spell witches have been using for centuries to find their perfect match. It’s literally the oldest trick in the book and has a 99.9% success rate.”
“If such a thing even existed, un-mated vampires would offer up every penny they had. Don’t waste your hope on such lies, Dhiraj.”
In a very French fashion, Aubin turned up his elegant nose and dismissed her with a wave of his hand.
Unaccustomed to being called a liar, Kerrigan stood up, planted her palms on the table, leaned forward to glare at the vampire with every ounce of ire she possessed, and enunciated clearly.
“Bet. Me.”
Aubin scoffed. “What?”
“You think I can’t do it? Bet me,” Kerrigan repeated, stabbing her finger at him insistently. “Swear you aren’t the one who betrayed Maksim, pledge yourself and whatever army you’ve got to finding out who did betray him, and swear you’ll spend the rest of your days not being a nasty bastard to your mate. Do all that, and I’ll walk your Bride through those doors on the next full moon.”
Aubin made that same throaty sound of disbelief again, apparently thrown for a loop by her aggressiveness.
“You’ll have me make such an oath but offer your services freely to Dhiraj?”
“Dhiraj is my favorite, and you’re a toady prick what called me a liar, so, yeah.”
Aubin’s jaw slackened at being called a prick, and Kerrigan offered her sweetest smile.
“Why the full moon? Why not tonight?” Virico asked, trying to conceal his interest behind a mocking grin.
Kerrigan straightened up and gave her hair a flip. “Because I’ve got other shit on my plate to deal with first. Namely, deciding whether or not my man is safe under his own roof.”
Aubin sent his chair rocking, peering at her through slitted eyes.
“And if I won’t swear such an oath, if I was the one to betray my brother, what army will you use to protect yourself from me? Maksim is formidable, of course, but I know all his little tricks, and you are so… breakable.”
Maksim stiffened beside her, but Kerrigan just kept on smiling as the shadows in the conference room lengthened, turning darker and darker, until everything except the table and its occupants was swallowed into an abyss of blackness.
The light from the chandeliers wasn’t strong enough to even make a dent. She opened the tiniest hole in the veil separating the living from the dead, no more than a pin-prick, allowing their voices to whisper through on a gust of icy wind.
Kerrigan gave a little hum of sound as she lifted her arm and let her hand drift through the breeze, feeling it slither through her fingers and ruffle the ends of her hair.
It was a bit of flashy showmanship to cover her cheating, but while the vampires at the table all thought she was simply playing with ghosts, that little hum sent out the tiniest thread of necromancy.
Like a spider reading the skeins of her web, Kerrigan touched on the energy surrounding the French vampire.
“You’re not wrong. I am breakable, but you’re really old, Aubin. Eight hundred and fifty-one years old, if I’m not mistaken, and what you hear right now is coming from a pin-prick in the veil between the dead and us.
“I imagine you’ve forgotten the exact number of people you’ve killed in that time, but I could bring them all here, every single soul, and bind them to you. The volume would then be the equivalent of a category five hurricane rioting around inside your head non-stop.”
She closed the tiny hole she’d made in the veil, the light from the chandeliers brightened, and the shadows slid back down the walls to their proper place.
Kerrigan gave a happy little sigh to see the four vampires across the table, staring at her with a mix of shock and horror.
“I estimate two days of listening to them all shouting in your ear before you wind up drooling on the floor of your padded cell, catatonic and completely vulnerable. Maks could chop your head off then, and I wouldn’t even break a sweat.”
Done with her demonstration, Kerrigan pulled Maksim’s chair back from the table far enough to seat herself on his lap.
“So you see, I really don’t need an army to protect me, Aubin. I have access to an infinite number of souls at my beck and call—day or night.”
She’d meant to deliver her final salvo with dignity and danger but got distracted by Maksim’s response to her antics.
His arm slid around her waist, his lips brushed across her throat, and Kerrigan struggled to keep her smile cool and polite when Maksim pressed the thick, throbbing bulge of his erection against her butt.
She hoped Aubin missed the way her hands shook with arousal when she laced them together on the tabletop.
“Not to sound indelicate,” Thomas said, looking at her with surprising eagerness. “Is that particular talent of yours specific to vampires? Or can you bind the dead to any living person?”
When Kerrigan silently raised her brows at him, Thomas gave her a boyish look of glee filled excitement.
“Clients, who’ve come to us over the years to kill the person who murdered their loved ones, would pay an obscene amount of money for the opportunity to seek that particular kind of justice. Torture really only lasts so long, am I right? We could create an entire branch of the company dedicated to—”
“Thomas.” Maksim’s voice rang with enough warning to make Thomas throw his hands up in surrender.
“Of course, my apologies, Miss Gray. Wrong time. Completely inappropriate. Perhaps… later?” Thomas looked like a puppy begging for a treat.
Kerrigan’s lips wobbled with the effort it took not to laugh. “Sure. Later.”
Obviously thrilled but making an effort to be serious, Thomas cleared his throat and put his business face back on, leaning forward to scowl down the table at Aubin.
“Well? Wh
at’s it to be, then?”
Recovered from the shock, Aubin seemed to struggle with his decision. Finally, he gave an indignant huff and waved his hand in another one of those very French gestures.
“I give you my oath, Maksim. I played no part in betraying you to the Silver Wives. However, I still do not believe your woman can just summon me up a Bride. It is irrelevant, though, because I don’t want one.”
“You are a fool,” Dhiraj proclaimed in disgust.
Aubin gave him an icy look and a click of his tongue. “If having no desire to be led around by my cock makes me a fool, then I will gladly accept the title. You know better than I what becomes of us who possess a weakness to be exploited, and clearly, so does our brother as he foolishly ran off to rescue this woman without telling anyone and wound up chained in a dungeon for his trouble.”
Maksim’s dark laugh vibrated through her with enough force to make her nipples pebble and her breath hitch.
His fingertips made circles on her belly, and she clenched her butt cheeks together to keep from squirming.
“It was foolish of me, but I seem to recall hearing about a time when you were caught demonstrating a certain technique the French were famous for on the wrong man’s wife, Aubin, and found yourself tossed into an actual oubliette.”
Aubin shut his mouth with a mulish glare and didn’t say another word, but Kerrigan couldn’t resist.
“What technique?”
Maksim pressed his lips to the spot right behind her ear, each word a kiss that sent shivers up and down her spine.
“I’ll show you later.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
Maksim watched Kerrigan explore the large—sealed—closet of a room that held all his worldly possessions. As per tradition, after declaring him dead, Thomas was the one to inherit all of it. Instead of getting rid of what he didn’t want or re-purposing the jewels and accessories, Thomas put it all in one room and threw away the key.