by L. D. Rose
Blaze made a grab for him, but Dax sprang away, grinning with delight. His brother threw a water bottle at him and Dax caught it, popping it open and taking a swig.
“Seriously, you want to hit the mats with me?” He tossed the water bottle back, jerking a thumb behind him. “Watch me prance around and make sure I don’t fall on my face? Maybe we can spar a little too? I’ve got to get my groove back.”
Blaze pushed off the bench, towering like a skyscraper as he rubbed a hand over his buzz-cut and smiled.
“Nothing else I’d rather do.”
~ ~ ~
If it weren’t for Dax, Cindel would’ve lost herself trying to find Rome’s suite.
The sprawling country-club-turned-barracks was magnificent, constructed in a Roman-era style with marble pillars, domes, and arches. Various works of art, sculptures, and flora adorned the expansive rooms and elaborate hallways, plush carpets spilling down the wide stairs and brightly colored drapes decorating the lofty windows. Ornate tapestries hung from the distant ceilings, occasionally staggered with chandeliers that sparkled like diamonds. Unlike the dungeon of the Metropolitan, the Senary compound was filled with warmth, sunlight, and the solace of a happily occupied home.
Now it was her home too.
When they arrived at the tall double doors, the mahogany studded and accented with iron, Dax raised a fist to knock, but they split open from the other side.
Rome stood there, barefoot, wearing a tight white T-shirt and loose-fitting khaki pants. While his skin was a few shades darker than Dax, they were the same height, with similar builds and tousled dark hair. Of course, Rome’s disarming golden eyes were far different, their horizontally-slit pupils dilating at the sight of them.
“Hey.” He smirked at Dax. “How did I guess you’d be here?”
“Because I’m predictable?” Dax quipped, tilting his head and offering an open hand.
Rome took it and pulled him in for a hug as they clapped each other’s backs. “Don’t trust me, huh?”
“If I didn’t trust you, I’d be dead.”
Rome smiled and drew away, giving Dax a onceover. “You look good. I like the blank canvas thing.”
Considering Rome didn’t appear to have a drop of ink on him, it was no surprise.
Dax scowled playfully. “It’s boring. Like you.”
Rome laughed. “We’ll see about that.” His eerie gaze slid to Cindel and he inclined his head in greeting. “Cindy.” Her nickname sounded foreign on his tongue. “Come on in.”
They both entered the spacious apartment done in earthy tones—golds, reds, and browns blending with a Middle Eastern flare. The air was laced with a spicy fragrance that instantly calmed her. Rich leather, hints of clove, and tobacco, maybe? She didn’t know, but his living quarters held a warm and soothing quality she couldn’t explain.
A woman sang a melancholy song from the speakers scattered all over the suite, echoed by a piano and a rhythmic bass that inexplicably tugged at Cindel’s heartstrings. The singer’s sepulchral voice begged someone to save her, for she was drowning and couldn’t keep her head above the tide. Rome called out a command and the music stopped, the ensuing silence almost shocking in its intensity.
He turned toward them, indicating the living room with a smile that didn’t reach his eyes. “I figured here would be more comfortable. Or we could do the breakfast nook.”
“Here is perfect.” Cindel tentatively sat down on the chocolate brown leather sectional. Dax parked beside her, his skin still flushed and gleaming from his workout with Blaze. He brushed her arm and she nearly jumped to her feet.
“Hey.” His hand stroked the small of her back, his features etched with concern. “You okay?”
She couldn’t deny the nervous tension humming through her, thankful now more than ever that he’d joined her. “I’m okay.” She nodded a little too eagerly, managing a smile. “I’m just . . . not sure what to expect.”
Every time Alek had entered her mind in the past, it felt more like rape than a union—the bonding vicious, painful, and debilitating.
She prayed it wouldn’t feel that way with Rome.
“We’re not doing this in one sitting, okay?” Rome assured her, standing with his arms folded over his chest. His eyes remained locked on hers, reading, cataloguing, absorbing her every reaction. “Little bits at a time. If at any point you want to stop, just say so. I won’t hurt you, I promise.”
Dax set his jaw, regarding his brother with apprehension. “Are you sure this is a good idea?”
“Yes,” Cindel cut in before Rome opened his mouth to respond. “I need to do this. I want to help.”
“But Cindy, you’re shaking—”
She shook her head adamantly, grasping his hand and squeezing it tight. “I’m fine.” She fastened her eyes on Rome. “Let’s get this over with.”
Rome dragged the leather ottoman over and sat in front of her, so close she sensed his body heat. His scent intensified, easing her anxiety as he leaned forward, propping his elbows on his knees and clasping his hands together. He must’ve recently shaved, his tawny skin nearly immaculate, but he bore the faintest scar on his right upper lip. Something bulged beneath his shirt at the hollow of his throat, a medallion of some sort.
“You ready?” He lifted his brow, his expression pleasantly neutral. His aura strengthened, becoming tangible, a molten gold nimbus tainted with black.
Tainted like Jon, like Taylon.
Like Alek.
Swallowing hard, she nodded, slowly releasing the death grip she had on Dax. He continued to rub her back, worry thickening the air around him.
Rome offered his hands, palms up. He had big hands with long fingers, like Dax, and they were neatly manicured. Bracing herself, she slipped her sweaty palms into his in a quick, jittery motion.
She tensed. Waited. Nothing happened.
“Relax,” he murmured, his baritone buttery-smooth as his thumbs gently swept her knuckles. “Just close your eyes and empty your mind. Pretend you’re looking at a slate, your thoughts scrawled all over it in white chalk. You have an eraser in your hand and you wipe it away.”
Cindel smacked the proverbial eraser on the chalkboard and cleared off her troubles. Her fingers melted in his and her shoulders slumped.
“That’s it. Take a deep breath and let it out.”
She focused on his words, filling her lungs and slowly exhaling through her nostrils. Still wiping at the board, she pushed the eraser into every crevice, tidying every last doubt and fear.
Keep going. His voice boomed inside her skull and she wiped until her entire world became a blank slate.
The silence stretched for miles as she floated in the painless dark, drifting into nothingness.
Show me them. The Sanguinibus Auream. The Golden Bloods.
And just like that, a memory blossomed before her eyes and she was hurled right back into it.
~ ~ ~
Alek led her down into the bowels of the earth, the stone stairwell spiraling into darkness.
The torch light grew increasingly scarce, the warmth fading and the pressure changing below ground. Unbeknownst to anyone, a network of catacombs tunneled under The Metropolitan Museum of Art, bearing multiple caverns, channels, and vaults. Alek had them constructed when he took up residence in the mausoleum, proposing to utilize them as both a personal escape route and a detention camp. Although Cindel was aware of the underground prison, she had no idea who he’d detained beneath the concrete jungle of the city, and she’d been forbidden to venture into this part of the Met. She’d always assumed he’d held his greatest enemies here—hybrids, other high-ranking vampires who’d crossed him, and even other sires.
But never had she imagined a camp full of humans.
As they stepped off the last granite st
air into an enormous grotto, the atmosphere transformed from a torch-lit oubliette to a modern high-security facility. They met a pair of sealed tungsten carbide doors that required an access code, fingerprint and facial recognition, complete with a retinal scan. After Alek followed the prompts and gained entry, they ambled into a sterile laboratory and a penitentiary of transparent cells with composite plastic walls that were as strong as steel.
And each unit enclosed a human being within.
Wearing her hooded cloak, Cindel absorbed the harrowing sights with dismay, studying the ‘cages’ as they strode past them under the glaring lights. With the exception of the metallic walls and floors, each unit was white—the single toilet and sink, the twin-sized mattress and its bedding, the humans’ clothes and their toiletries.
Just like her bedroom.
Their world had been deprived of all color and sensory stimuli to the extent where even Cindel wondered how they kept time.
Some of the humans barely acknowledged their presence while others slammed into their cells with anger, throwing their bodies against the walls in a futile attempt to break out. But what bothered her most were the people who gawked at them in horror, cowering in their desolate corners with fear in their wide eyes as they looked upon Alek. Her sire simply smiled, almost basking in the glow of their emotions, chuckling softly as his ebony eyes glinted with exultance.
“Who are these people?” Cindel asked as a young boy hid under the blankets on his bed, visibly shaking.
“The Sanguinibus Auream,” Alek replied as they trekked farther into the virtual twilight zone. “The Golden Bloods. These humans are precious and exceptionally rare, with less than forty remaining worldwide. Their blood types are extraordinary because they’re not just O negative, but Rh null—the true universal blood donors.”
Cindel stopped dead in her tracks as he turned toward her with an elated grin on his face. For the past few years, Alek had begun to reject the majority of the blood he consumed, becoming terribly ill to the point where Cindel feared losing him. For weeks, he would endure fevers, rashes, chills, and physical instability that progressively worsened with each bout. He’d even lost consciousness a few times and all Cindel could do was alert his healers and wait, praying he’d awaken again.
Gaping at him now, her spirits lifted as he framed her face in his hands. He’d been so good to her lately, no arguments, no fights, no beatings, and she foolishly anticipated it would last, that he’d somehow changed.
“How did you find them?”
He kissed her tenderly before he took her hand and moved onward. “The American Rare Donor Program. It was quite easy once Taylon obtained the records. I’ve been hunting every human on the list since.”
She scanned the cells as they whirred by, men, women, and children of varying ages and races. They all appeared well-kempt but the misery in their eyes was haunting. “How many are here?”
“Eight.” He pushed past another set of double doors into a large chamber. “And I just found the ninth.”
The room was also sterile—what Cindel presumed the inside of a hospital looked like—but the scent of roses permeated the air amidst the harsh odor of antiseptic. A young woman lay splayed out on a stretcher, her arms and legs bound with zip ties to the steel poles rising from each corner of the bed. She’d struggled, her wrists and ankles raw and bleeding, her left eye swollen after suffering a blow to the face.
Cuts and bruises marred her slender body, and she looked tall, lithe, her limbs practically dangling off the gurney. She still writhed, even now, staring at them with her single dark eye, gasping and panicking at the sight of Alek.
“This one will take some time to . . . train.” Alek smirked as he released Cindel and approached the girl.
“Help me,” she pleaded with Cindel, her voice tattered and desperate. Her skin appeared ochre under the fluorescent lights, lines and tubes running out of both crooks in her arms, and her heritage spoke of an exotic faraway land. Her long, wavy dark hair was tangled and knotted around her head, and her bloodshot eye was a warm russet brown. A golden medallion rested on the pillow beside her head, its leather cord loose around the slim column of her throat. “Please, help me.”
Realization dawned on the girl’s battered face when Cindel drew back her hood, closing the distance between them. Her expression twisted with grief at Cindel’s black gaze, all hope sapping from her lovely features. Clear human tears cascaded down her cheeks, cutting paths through the dirt and rust as she unleashed a sob. Dressed in a flimsy hospital gown, she cringed beneath Alek’s touch as he cupped her neck.
“She’s a perfect match.” He smiled down at her, his lips curved with malice as he squeezed harder and the girl choked. Cindel recognized this moment, her breath catching and her lungs expanding as if she were being suffocated, the brief déjà vu stunning her.
“Meet Zia.” Alek leveled his sinister regard at Cindel across the stretcher, his face darkening with wicked satisfaction. “My new blood slave.”
~ ~ ~
Rome yanked out of her mind so quickly Cindel yelped, the imaginary grip on her throat still strangling her. He was on his feet and across the room in no time, veering away from her, cradling his head in what looked like anguish. A dull throb pulsed behind her forehead, hardly perceptible at first but magnifying by the second. The chokehold let go, her ears knelling as the headache pounded against her temples like a gong. She groaned, swayed, and Dax caught her by the shoulders, his shouts muted by the din in her head.
“Cindy?” He gently shook her, only exacerbating the pain. “Are you all right?”
She nodded, but another nail of agony hammered into the back of her skull and she pressed her palm to her forehead and grimaced.
“Rome.” Dax leapt to his feet, the word chock-full of menace.
“I’m sorry,” Rome uttered as if he too felt her distress, pushing the heels of his hands into his eyes. “Too much, too quick.”
“Fuck.” Dax growled, his every muscle primed with the urge to act, to retaliate somehow.
Rome strove to regulate his uneven breath. “We’re done.”
The vision of the harvest room lingered like a transparency over Cindel’s eyes, and for some reason she kept seeing that medallion over and over, lying on the pillow with its unreadable inscriptions.
“C’mon, Cindy, let’s go.” Dax helped her stand, frustration in his angry tone. “Can you walk?”
She nodded, winced. “Yes.”
He wrapped an arm around her shoulders, tucking her against him as they headed for the door.
“Are they still there?” Rome asked the single question, his broad back facing them, dropping his hands and lifting his head.
Comprehension trickled into Cindel’s aching brain, drizzling at first before it became a downpour that briefly washed away the pain.
The medallion. He wore a medallion under his shirt.
He knows her. Zia.
Cindel turned to him as he slowly pivoted, the knowledge written all over his tormented face. But he swiftly wiped it clean, another type of chalkboard, his expression emptying like a decanter.
Though his gilded eyes smoldered with so much more.
“Right up until I left Alek, yes.” God, she could hardly breathe. “They were there.”
“For how long?” His voice was steady but barely a whisper now, as if he didn’t trust its strength.
She contemplated it for a moment, swiping through the haze of her memories. “Five years. At least.”
“Mind letting me in on this?” Dax demanded, his irritated words contradicting the soothing way he stroked her arm.
“I’ll tell you,” Cindel said, unable to tear her eyes off Rome for the life of her, a picture of tragedy developing in the frame of her mind. “I’ll tell you everything.”
R
ome inclined his head and walked away, disappearing into an adjacent room and slamming the heavy door shut.
Dax watched him go, his anger quickly fizzling to worry. He moved to follow his brother, but Cindel latched on to his arm.
“Let him go.”
He spun on her with confusion. She raised her trembling hand and combed her fingers through his silky hair, her eyes burning as the gravity of the situation settled in her bones.
“You have so much to learn,” she murmured, a crippling sadness weighing on her heart. “And it will be so painful. For all of you.”
EPILOGUE
“Oh my God.” Cindy moaned with sheer pleasure. “This is delicious.”
Dax grinned as she chomped on her third MacIntosh apple, both of them seated by the shoreline in the compound’s backyard. Fortunately—or unfortunately—they’d arrived just in time for sunrise, and Dax’s body ached and his eyes stung from the early wake-up call.
She wasn’t kidding about liking mornings.
He’d spread a blanket over the sand, carrying a picnic basket packed with apples, a container of Skippy, and a half-gallon of milk for their date. Cindy had already demolished the Skippy, smearing peanut butter on her apple after each bite.
“I warned you.” He downed the rest of his wineglass of milk. “It’s like crack.”
“Crack?” She arched a slender brow at him. “You’ve tried crack?”
“No.” He chuckled, wiping a dollop of peanut butter off her cheek with his thumb. “It’s just a figure of speech.”
“That’s an odd figure of speech.” She shrugged, lapping at her fingers and purring with content. Today was the summer solstice and she intended to spend the entire day outside, from sunrise to sunset. Dax was happy to oblige, but he was still half-asleep and he had to restrain himself from lathering peanut butter all over her porcelain skin and licking it clean.