by Joey W. Hill
His lips tugged in a wry smile. “I can’t fault him for that, because I’m a stubborn bastard. I might have taken two hundred and ninety-nine of my supposed three hundred years to make up my mind.”
“Okay.” She stood up.
“Okay?” Gideon’s brow creased. “You going to tell me what that means?”
“It means a lot of things, but first I need to talk to Wolf.”
“You don’t need more information?”
“No,” she said. “You told me there was no way to understand the reality of someone owning me and making all the decisions about my life until I was in it. It’s why some decisions have to be made with the heart, not the head. Thank you, Gideon.”
“Do you have a game plan?”
“We’ll see.” She stopped at the door leading back into the club. “But it isn’t a game, is it? That’s the point.”
As she looked at Gideon over her shoulder, he saw her eyes were steady, not blinking. Earlier in the evening she’d had her makeup done up, a glittering dark blue liner that made her eyes look faintly exotic and tipped upward. Now she’d taken that off, but she wore a silver pentagram on her neck that showed a cat sitting on the horizontal bar of the star portion. It caught the light. A pair of tiny pewter dogs chased one another around the outer ring. Everything about her said this is who I am. I will accept and follow the path I’m given, but on my own terms.
She’d make a hell of a vampire’s servant, Gideon realized with a start. Better than he’d ever be, but then he was as unconventional as the two vampires he served.
But Ella being a superlative submissive had never been her problem, had it? He wasn’t the kind of man who gave a lot of credit to the hand of fate, gods, whatever, for things to turn out as they should. He’d seen too fucking much that turned out ass-backwards and horrifyingly wrong. But since bonding with Daegan and Anwyn, he grudgingly gave Fate more of its due. So it crossed his mind now that the track of Ella’s life might have always been heading her toward an intersecting course with the vampire world.
The question was, would her heart survive it, or would that be the end of the story? Or of Ella herself?
Anwyn took the two ends of the pool stick with her, and laid them down on the conference room table. It felt better for her to have them far from where Lord Richard would have any reminder of them in the hands of her volatile male servant.
Gideon was in the alleyway with Ella, which was good, keeping him away from other vampires for awhile. She’d have sent him on an errand completely off property for the next couple hours, except she unfortunately needed him within close physical proximity.
Even while talking to Ella, his mind was warmly, intimately linked with Anwyn’s, helping to keep her steady. When it came to this, he had an uncanny intuition for knowing when the full focus of their mind link was needed to keep a seizure at bay. Though he might give himself shit later for adding to her stress—even knowing he couldn’t have done it differently, just as he’d told her—right now he kept even that out of the equation. Nothing but a full dose of support, and a rhythmic pulse of continuous strength.
She was well aware that often only two things kept Gideon alive. His brother was Jacob Green, the servant of Lady Lyssa, who happened to be the head of the Vampire Council. And Gideon was the servant of one of the most dangerous vampires in the vampire world other than Lady Lyssa—Daegan, of course, not Anwyn.
But vampires were well-known for asking for forgiveness rather than permission. Especially after they let their always ready-to-call bloodlust and stick-up-their-ass sense of proper servant behavior blend into an impulse execution.
Ssshhh… It was something she sometimes did with her gremlins, treating the vicious things like unruly children to calm them, soothe them. Rocking them in her mind. Didn’t always work, but now that the immediate danger had passed, it was easier. It had been a near thing, right before she’d entered the break room. She’d had to stop, let Wolf go first, because she’d been so close to losing it.
Speaking of which, Wolf had just come into the conference room. Rather than talking to her, though, he was facing the wall, his head dipped as if he was thinking hard about something. On closer inspection, and because it was hitting her vampire senses like torpedo pings on radar, she had a feeling he was closing out all other input, trying to get a handle on something. The vibrating volatility to him made her think they might need to take a few extra minutes before they began discussion.
She opened her mouth to suggest Wolf go walk it off some more, and they’d reconvene after she gave Lord Richard his tour. Unfortunately, Allan stepped into the suddenly way too small meeting room. He’d taken a short break to go to the locker room, change back into street clothes. His face was already healed. He must have fed earlier in the evening, accelerating the already miraculously rapid process, when the injury wasn’t too severe. Wolf’s back had healed in a matter of a couple days, with Ella’s blood, though the soreness had lingered somewhat longer.
“So I get she was second marked under violent circumstances,” he said to Wolf. “But what the hell have you been doing these past few days that you couldn’t bring her up to speed? Especially when you knew a fucking Region Master was going to be here tonight?”
Great. The perfect way to start off a calm conversation. But it wasn’t the first time she’d had to deal with two males overflowing with testosterone, locked and loaded.
“I think we should focus on the problem at hand,” she said. “Not how we got here.”
“Why not?” Wolf spoke without turning, the muscles in his wide shoulders rippling as he jerked with a shrug. “You made me second mark her. I told you it was a mistake.”
She’d wrestled with it herself since it had happened. Maybe what she’d seen growing between him and Ella before the attack had happened had made it easier to act on the split-second decision. Maybe she’d unconsciously thought of it as a way to give it a push, a vampire-servant matchmaker thing. She knew just how valuable and important it was for a vampire to have a third mark servant, and it was well past time for Wolf. But that hadn’t been her call to make.
Since then, she’d watched what was growing between him and Ella with a mix of trepidation and hope for both of the people she cared about. Now she was second guessing herself again.
But in all fairness, when the second mark thing had happened, it had been a crazy fifteen minutes. A bomb going off, Wolf horribly injured in the alley. The first responders on scene, with only a few moments to keep Wolf from being taken to a hospital where his physiology would definitely raise eyebrows.
During all that stress, she’d been holding off an army of gremlins in her head, even with Gideon at her side, helping her keep it together.
It was that thought, all of it, that helped her rally. She was the Mistress of Atlantis and a vampire, and she wasn’t going to take punches she hadn’t earned.
“My top priority in the alley wasn’t a philosophical debate on the pros and cons of giving Ella the second mark. I believe I told you shortly thereafter, if you considered it a mistake, it was a manageable one. Simply don’t take advantage of that mark, keep the distance between you and her that you’d always so oddly and determinedly maintained—at least until a couple weeks before the attack happened.”
His expression tightened and she nodded. “You chose to spend more time with her, get closer to her. I’m not the asshole who has been enjoying all the benefits, engaging her heart, head and soul, without taking stock of the cost, without bringing her fully into the loop.”
She’d intended to keep this conversation calm, but her vampire side strengthened her annoyance as she spoke. Maybe that was what was needed. She’d made it around the table and stood before him, hands on her hips. His fists were clenched and his eyes were sparking dangerously, concerning Gideon, but she sent him a firm command to keep doing what he was doing.
Being a Mistress had uniquely prepared her for a world where she couldn’t show weakness, particularly wh
en a male vampire got snarly. If Wolf wanted to go a round, they’d go a round. She’d been sparring with Gideon and Daegan for months now. She was ready to test it out, and she had blood lust and violent impulses of her own.
Yes, you do, cher. Daegan’s voice, telling her he’d been following things pretty closely. Damn it, she didn’t want his attention divided.
You and Gideon worry needlessly for me, he responded. Be a Mistress first and a vampire second. Something is coming off of him I do not like. He is hurting. Badly. You can see it if you push the rest aside and put the intuitive Mistress first. Ella’s tears and what holds him from her have brought him close to breaking. Do not push him unnecessarily. He will not forgive himself for hurting you, and I will not be able to excuse it.
Shit. She closed her eyes, stepped back. One, two. It was harder than she expected. Most of what she was pushing back was fledgling vampire bloodlust, not the gremlins that could throw her into a seizure. That was a relief, but the vampire side didn’t want to back down. It was telling her she’d appear weak in front of Wolf and Allan.
But Daegan was telling her she wouldn’t. She had to believe him, not some primal part of herself she couldn’t yet adequately control.
“We can spend all day on this,” she said shortly, opening her eyes and meeting Wolf’s. “It’s not helping.”
“You’re right,” Allan said. He directed his next words to Wolf. “Maybe you should go ahead and mark Haru. It will tell Lord Richard your intentions, make Ella’s transition to Anwyn’s protection clearer.”
Wolf swung toward him. “That serves your and Fort’s purposes, doesn’t it? Gets me hooked up with your hand-chosen servant.”
Allan’s eyes narrowed. “Sorry that everyone wants to see you happy, moving on, moving forward. We’re getting damn tired of you denying your potential in this world because you can’t get past how you got here, the choice you made. Focus, damn it. Richard isn’t going to let it go. We have to come to a decision on a punishment that fits the crime, that satisfies Richard, while—”
Daegan had been right. That energy exploded off Wolf, and violence erupted. Everything happened so quickly. Before the gasp caught in Anwyn’s throat, Wolf had Allan against the wall. Only the threat wasn’t to Allan.
Wolf had picked up one of the broken pool stick pieces, and had that jagged end pressed against his own chest. His other hand clasped Allan’s, forcing his friend to hold the shoving end of that stake.
“She committed no crime,” Wolf snarled. “Except being exactly who she is, a soul incapable of failing another human being to the extent I did. If there’s a punishment here, it is mine. Have my life as payment for her damaging your pretty face. The worst choices were mine, but you know damn well there was one thing that was not my choice. Finish what I should have had the balls to let be finished, decades ago.”
“No.”
Before Anwyn could react, Ella flew into the room, shoving herself between the two men.
Ella had reached the conference room in time to see Wolf bare his fangs, growl something savage to Allan, obviously designed to escalate the fight. As the two men struggled, her eyes latched onto the pool stick. The broken end was pressed so forcefully against Wolf’s chest it had cut through his shirt and drawn blood.
In an instant, she was wriggling in between the two males, pulling on Allan’s clenched hand, pulling on Wolf’s, terrifyingly unable to get either one to let go. Their rigid faces were inches apart, fangs bared, eyes like flame. Something evil and howling had broken loose in the dense energy in the room, something that wanted this to happen. All of it centered around the struggle between those two hard fists.
Then she realized Allan wasn’t driving the stake toward Wolf’s chest. He was fighting to pull it back.
“Stop, please. Stop, stop, stop. This is so stupid.”
In her peripheral vision, she saw Fort and Saturnia barge into the room. Fort sized things up the quickest.
“For fuck’s sake,” Fort thundered. “Break it up, soldiers. Right this goddamn minute, or I’ll stake both of you. Using the orifice that will do the most good.”
They barely reacted, so even before Fort finished the command, he and Saturnia were in the mix, prying the two vampire males apart. Anwyn darted in, pulling Ella away. Haru had come with Fort and Saturnia, and reached out to take Ella’s arm, she assumed so Anwyn could be free to join the fray. Ella recoiled from him, moving toward Gideon, who apparently had followed her from the alley.
Haru lifted both hands, respecting her desire, but positioned himself in her path to Wolf and Allan so she couldn’t interfere again. She glared at him, even though Gideon laid a hand on her upper arm, probably for the same reason.
Fortunately, Fort made sure there was no need for her to figure out a way around him. He shoved Wolf hard, and the two vampires broke apart. The broken stick clattered to the ground. Anwyn darted in and took it, and two seconds later, neither piece of the pool stick was in the room, as if she’d simply flung them in the hall to get them out of sight, out of mind.
Fort put himself between Wolf and Allan as Wolf threw himself forward again. Fort shoved him backward a couple more times, pushing him toward the far corner.
“Damn it, this is not helping anything,” Fort snapped at him. “You have better control than this. So does he.”
“May I—” Ella started urgently.
Anwyn was back beside Ella and immediately clamped a restraining hand on her other arm. There was probably some rule here that said she wasn’t supposed to interrupt vampires when they were talking. Like Doms, in certain situations.
Still, when Ella spoke those two words, they’d been high and sharp enough to capture Fort’s attention. Even better, Wolf’s eyes turned her way. The look on his face, an incomprehensible rage, almost froze the words in her throat, but she shoved them out.
Sometimes even when Doms ordered a sub not to speak unless given permission, it was necessary.
“I…I think I can help with the decision, if my Master will allow it. But I really need…may I speak to him first, just the two of us?” She kept her gaze on Wolf, showing that her appeal was going straight to him, that it had been spoken first to Fort merely as a formality. She added to it, sinking to her knees, easing herself out of Anwyn’s hands. “Please, Master.”
When she knelt, she brought the bulk of Wolf’s attention to her. He was fighting for control, and she was the only one in the room he could look at right now without wanting to do all sorts of violence.
Allan and Haru exchanged a look. Ella steadfastly refused to look at Haru, though her tense body language telegraphed her awareness of his presence.
Fort and Saturnia stayed in between him and Allan, but they’d backed off some, giving him some space. Wolf spent a couple of long seconds gazing down at Ella. She had her head lifted, her gaze on his face, waiting on his decision. He cocked his head at her at last and she swept her gaze down. She knew his cues so well, knew what he needed before he needed it. That act of submission was like she’d gathered up the pieces of control he’d lost and handed them back to him. He was her Master. She expected him to act like it.
It almost made him smile, how horrified she’d be if he interpreted her behavior that way. She would never try to direct a Dom that way. Not consciously. She didn’t recognize what it was about her that made a Master want to embrace that side of himself in every way possible. Fuck.
“Go to the entrance and wait for me there.”
She lifted her gaze again, uncertain. He went to her, bent and lifted her to her feet by her elbows. He kept her so close she had to tilt her head up to meet his eyes. He made sure they possessed the vital elements of the Master she knew. Then he gave her the direction to reinforce it. Obey me, little girl. Don’t make me blister your ass.
She gave him a searching look. As she did, another emotion gripped him. Regret so fierce it could double him over worse than a grenade shoved into his gut. He wished, he wanted, he yearned. And yet he’
d accepted, so very long ago, what he could have and what he couldn’t.
Was there any wonder, her acceptance and resignation about never finding, or being offered the love she deserved so much, had found an answering chord in him? The acceptance part, not the deserving part. She deserved everything good the world could give her. Instead, he was going to be just one more person who’d stopped short of offering it to her.
A fist clenched around his heart as she swallowed, the movement like a fragile bird egg in her slim throat, and nodded.
Yes, sir.
She turned away. He heard her footsteps receding up the hallway. He imagined her placing her feet so precisely, wearing the canvas sneakers she preferred, no laces or socks.
The doorway to the main floor opened and shut quietly. She was gone.
“Wolf,” Fort began.
Wolf lifted a hand, shooting a hard look at him that made Fort’s expression tighten, but there was no disrespect in Wolf’s gesture. Just a harsh need for no one to say anything until he could get this out.
Wolf looked at Allan. “What I did in the past, I live and act as I do now because I know it’s right to value the life I’ve been given. But there’s a problem, and I’ve no idea how to make you understand it. There is something inside me that nothing in the universe can change or make me forget. I can only make sure nothing shines a light too bright on it.”
He looked toward Anwyn. “You’re right. You weren’t at fault. It’s all on me, for not being strong enough to resist.”
He pointed toward the doorway where Ella had disappeared. When he spoke, there was a hoarseness to his voice he couldn’t disguise, which he could tell startled all of them. He was trusting them with something a vampire wasn’t supposed to, but if he couldn’t trust the people in this room, then he was lost anyway.
“Every time I let her inside me, it’s like sunlight, burning everything not worth her love to ash. You are not touching a fucking hair on her head. No one is, even if Richard kills me for it.”
