by Tessa Bailey
“Just to you.” His thumbs stoked her clit in turn, using her wetness to lubricate the sensitive bud, and the faster he rubbed, the quicker those hips pistoned. “Always to you. My mate. My woman. My only.”
He was at the point of no return, the precipice of release so great, he didn’t have enough knowledge until tonight to fantasize about it. But with his mate moaning in abandon on top of him, the wound in his neck glowing hot, the satisfaction of fulfilling her needs in so many ways pushed him to a place of utter bliss. Paradise, population two. This was it. If he could have remained in that moment for an eternity, watching Roksana cry out with a second climax, her head thrown back in ecstasy, he would have. But even his immortal body couldn’t withstand the brutal onslaught of lust fulfilled as it bore down on his bones, shaking him, sending him to an even higher plane of existence.
“Roksana!” His shout ripped up his throat, deep, wild satisfaction swallowing him whole. Light streaked across his vision, his body bowing upward, hips thrusting up, up, up, nearly unseating her in his quest to put every ounce of his seed as deep as it could go. When he drifted down from the highest high of his life and opened his eyes, Roksana was curled up on top of him, a sheen of sweat cooling on her body, her breathing deep and even. “I love you,” he whispered, shaken by the emotion expanding in his throat, cradling her in his arms and carrying her to bed. “No matter what happens this time tomorrow, that will never change.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
Roksana’s eyes popped open in the darkness, instantly on alert.
Nighttime or daytime? It could be either, considering she was sharing a cabin with a being that required the banishment of sunlight. Elias. His name whispered over her skin in the dark and every sore region of her body started to tingle.
Their lovemaking last night had almost been…ritualistic. She could still taste his coppery blood on her tongue. She still didn’t quite know what compelled her to drink from her vampire husband, but she wouldn’t take it back for anything in the world. Not after witnessing his breathtaking reaction. Feeling his approval inside of her. Beneath her. All over.
Erotic sounds and images from her wedding night flooded in and Roksana sat up, flushed from her thoughts. She squinted at the bedside clock, her spine snapping straight. Eight-oh-seven pm? Could that be right?
Apparently she was already living the vampire lifestyle.
The silence in the room registered and she twisted around, running a hand over the empty section of bed beside her. Elias slept infrequently, so she didn’t necessarily expect to find him there, but she’d kind of been hoping. Knowing Elias, he’d gone out to find her a bottle of Baikal or gather more weapons to surprise her. She should be grateful…but was it so much to ask for a cuddle session before she faced her mother again?
A chill walked like fingertips up her spine.
Inessa would already know she’d landed in Moscow. Most likely, she knew Elias was with her. What would the night bring? Would Inessa be satisfied with the game piece? Once Roksana explained that Elias had actually saved her life from those murderous vampires in Vegas, would Inessa still demand his life as payment?
Roksana prayed Inessa wouldn’t shred her heart like that, but if she did, Roksana was prepared to bargain. To call on any ounce of maternal instinct Inessa held for her. If her mother didn’t love her, care about her, she wouldn’t have invested so much time training her, right?
Internal silence greeted that question.
One thing was for certain. They would never see eye to eye on Roksana’s marriage to Elias and because of that, her duties as a slayer ended now. Her life would no longer include stakes. And ah, the relief of that decision was so vast, it almost slumped her back down into the bedsheets. Her grief over what happened in Vegas had driven her to kill vampires, but she counted too many of them as friends now. Her best friends.
Roksana didn’t know what her role would be in the upcoming war, but she could no longer walk the earth killing the undead, believing every single one of them to be a scourge on humanity when she knew differently. They could be bad or good or shades in between, just like humans. She wore one’s ring on her finger. Proudly.
Roksana took a deep breath and climbed out of bed. Her backpack sat on the ground near the bathroom door and she brought it into the bathroom with her, laying out a pair of black pants and a moss green sweater, though she didn’t remember buying anything involving color. Had Elias slipped it in? That thought put a smile on her face as she climbed into the shower, ducking her head under the hot spray and letting the water soothe her muscles. She planted her hands on the tile wall and tried to formulate a speech to give Inessa, but ten minutes later while blow-drying her hair, she still had nothing concrete. Probably didn’t matter anyway.
Her mother was nothing if not a wild card. Improvising would be key.
Roksana was surprised upon reentering the bedroom to find it was still empty. Where had Elias gone?
“Gross, Roksana. Day two and you are already a clingy wife,” she muttered.
Still, she frowned at the door, willing it to open while zipping on her boots and shrugging on her coat. She felt in the coat pocket for the red envelope from Tilda, holding it in front of her as she paced. What were the contents?
“None of your business,” she said firmly, tapping it against her thigh, a curious little tickle forming on the back of her neck. “Why don’t you just leave now? You don’t want Elias to come with you, right? This is your chance to sneak out and handle business without him. Really, your relationship is founded on frustrating one another. Think of the makeup sex later.”
What was she waiting for?
A kiss goodbye? A disagreement with her husband about him coming along?
Da. Kind of.
Where was he?
Roksana sat down on the edge of the bed, balancing the game piece on her knee. A laugh worked its way up from her belly, sounding odd in the empty room. “I know what you’re doing, vampire husband. You’re leaving me to my own devices, so I will open the envelope. You do not agree with my blind faith. That was very obvious. But it’s not going to work.”
She threw the red envelope up in the air and caught it, her smile slowly dissipating.
“Dammit.”
After a second of hesitation, Roksana shoved to her feet, shrugging her coat off on the way to the portable coffee pot located on top of the mini-fridge. She took it to the bathroom and filled it with water, hitting the button to make it boil, pacing back and forth while waiting. When it was finished, she cursed, holding the sealed part of the envelope over the steam, loosening the glue.
A folded sheaf of papers fell out onto the surface of the mini-fridge. She stared at them for several breaths before snatching them up. The words on the papers were sloppily handwritten and it took Roksana a moment to figure out what exactly she was looking at. Names and addresses? Of whom?
Then she saw her own name. First and last.
With the address of her crummy Coney Island apartment.
She flipped to the next page, recognizing two more names. Then a third and fourth.
These were slayers.
Slayers located in America, to be exact. Who had compiled a list of names and locations? They were meant to remain undetected. A list like this could endanger them if it fell into the wrong hands. Before Jonas took the vampire throne, his High Order predecessors would have found this information very valuable. And now…with vampire slayings on a steep rise, maybe Jonas would want this information so he could handle the problem.
But why did Inessa want these names and addresses?
As Russia’s slayer queen, Inessa wouldn’t be privy to this information. Only the American slayer queen would—
Had Tilda, a fae, been the American slayer queen?
Roksana refolded the papers and stuffed them back into the envelope, sealing it as much as possible. Inessa must have known Tilda would be abandoning her post. She must have wanted this information for safekeeping. To p
rotect the American slayers. That was the only explanation Roksana could fathom. Her mother was trying to do the right thing. Keep this harmful information out of the hands of the wrong people. With the dark uprising taking place back in the States, Inessa didn’t want these slayer identities to become a tool to do harm.
Breathing easier, Roksana put her coat back on and secured the envelope in her pocket. Fear had been her chief emotion upon waking this morning, but she felt a lot more confident about facing her mother now that she’d discovered proof of Inessa’s good faith.
Something made her pause before she walked out the door, though.
A wrinkle of intuition.
She turned back and completed a quick task, even though it was totally unnecessary, stomping back to the front of the cabin and shaking her head at herself moments later. Refusing to wait any longer for her missing husband, Roksana closed the door behind her and trekked out into the surrounding woods, her boots sinking into the few inches of snow that had fallen the night before. Even now, tiny bits of fluff fell from the sky, the cold biting the gloveless skin of her hands and exposed cheeks.
She’d only been walking for a minute when she heard Elias’s voice.
Followed sharply by Inessa’s.
The white cloud of her aggrieved exhale obscured her vision. No. No no no. What was going on? Inessa was here? Now?
She didn’t want her slayer mother anywhere near her husband. One slide of a stake into his chest and he would cease to exist. Already agony was searing her insides and she didn’t even know why they were meeting in the woods. Forcing herself to calm, Roksana called on her training to stay totally silent, creeping forward on the balls of her feet until she could make out the conversation.
“Once again you’ve come to bargain for my daughter’s life, have you? Maybe trade another year of your life away in my prison?” Inessa laughed merrily, freezing the oxygen in Roksana’s lungs. “No dice this time, son-in-law. We’re all full. Sweet of you to ask, though.”
Elias had imagined this moment hundreds of times, but he’d failed to anticipate how different facing Inessa would be now that his heart beat. Last time he’d stood toe to toe with the Queen of Shadows, he’d been in possession of human emotions. They’d been fierce. But his immortal ones fairly ran amuck inside of him, wailing, demanding an outlet. Blood seemed to pump to and from his heart faster than ever. He was no longer indebted to Inessa by duty and sacrifice, but by love for his mate. Love that increased many times over with every tick of time. His pulse beat in the rhythm of her name.
While watching his wife sleep, her naked body curled around a pillow, replete in her trust that Elias would keep her safe, he’d sensed Inessa’s presence out in the woods. And when she’d shown no shock at his solitary arrival, he knew she’d chosen to be heard.
“Once again you’ve come to bargain for my daughter’s life, have you? Maybe trade another year of your life away in my prison?” Inessa’s laugh was gleeful. “No dice this time, son-in-law. We’re all full. Sweet of you to ask, though.”
“She has done everything asked of her,” he rasped.
“Not everything.” Considering Elias, she dragged her tongue back and forth across the upper row of her teeth. “I must admit, I’m surprised she let you live this time. Such a head of determination my daughter had when last she left me. Perhaps you failed to keep our secret and turned her against me to save your own hide?”
Elias gave her a baleful look. “No, I have not told her.” His boot crunched in the snow when he took an involuntary step forward, his finger jabbing the bitter cold air. “But only because she’s lost so much already. I couldn’t save her friends. Couldn’t save her from that heartbreak. And I wouldn’t be the one to reveal her mother as a fraud and a murderer, too.”
Inessa preened as if he’d delivered a compliment. “Then she shall find out on her own,” she said with a minor shoulder lift. “If she’s to lead the Russian slayers one day, she’ll need to understand that hard and creative decisions will be expected of her.”
His voice shook when he responded, his arms aching to cradle his mate. To rock her in his lap and howl at the injustices done to her. “Like creating a weapon out of your own daughter, borne of pain and grief that you yourself inflicted?”
A flash of Inessa’s teeth, white as the snow that fell around them. “It would have served her well, were it not for her stubborn, pitiful heart.”
“Her heart is too beautiful and resilient for someone like you to fathom.” He bit off a humorless laugh. “She must have gotten it from her father.”
Inessa lurched at the insult, her fingers stretching and flexing like claws, but she quickly reined in her rage. “Did you come here merely to incite me, son-in-law, or do you have something useful to say before I make my daughter choose between us?” She clutched her hands together beneath her chin with mock playfulness. “Who do you think it’ll be?”
Refusing to let the uncertainty show on his face, agony nonetheless severed his vocal cords. He willed his body to knit them back together so he could make the vow he’d known for some time would be required of him. “I will not allow that choice to be put in front of her.”
“It is a choice that must be made,” Inessa spat, the curls quivering around her face. “I’ve long demanded she kill you not only to keep our secret, but to satisfy her goddamn vengeance. Only then could her heart be hardened, the way a cold assassin’s must be to fight every battle like it’s her last. There is more urgency to my demand now, though. She cannot have loyalty to a vampire and help lead us into the uprising as a slayer.”
“Maybe you’re afraid of her fighting on the right side.”
She regarded him like a simpleton. “There is no right side in a war. Only profiteers.”
Elias couldn’t mask his disgust. “Such as yourself.”
“Yes, I do like to keep a foot in both ponds, don’t I?” She narrowed her eyes at him. “My daughter has secured me the game piece, you say?”
He nodded curtly.
“Hmm. I’m surprised you allowed her to bring it this far, considering how valuable it would be to your king. You do know it contains names and addresses for every member of the North American slayerhood, don’t you?” Elias showed no reaction, though there was a heavy sinking in his gut. Inessa clucked her tongue. “It’s going to be very valuable in the hands of whoever pays me the most.”
Elias shook his head. “You’re loyal to no one but yourself.”
“A hardened heart frees one of their conscience and my daughter will learn that valuable lesson soon enough.”
He felt his wife before he saw her.
When she stepped out into the clearing, he wondered how she’d managed to approach without his notice. Either the riot of his heart had drowned her out—or she was just that damn good. Maybe a combination of both. The organ in his chest clamored all the louder now, though less out of anger and more out of anguish. Not for him, but for his mate.
The betrayal and disbelief on her face was haunting.
“Roksana,” he gritted out, lunging forward to insert his body between his wife and treacherous Inessa. But Roksana held up her hand, shooting him a brief, imploring glance that did nothing to deplete her tortured expression.
Though it made his bones want to rip free of his skin, he remained in place, muscles tensed and ready to cut through atoms at a moment’s notice. He would kill Inessa only if his mate’s life was in danger. If he only had one option, he would lose her love to keep her safe, though he would live in hell for the rest of his life.
“What secret does he keep?” Roksana’s voice was little more than a strangled whisper. “What pain and grief have you inflicted on me?”
For several breaths, Inessa appeared to be made of stone. He’d never been in the same place with mother and daughter at the same time, so their dynamic had always been a mystery. As much as he wanted to believe the Queen of Shadows purely evil, he couldn’t deny the way she hesitated and looked down, as if asha
med, before regaining her bravado.
“You will not dictate the order of this meeting, daughter. Especially not while reeking of vampire.” Inessa gave his mate a once-over that kindled a growl in his throat. “You will explain to me why your mission has not been completed in full. Not only does the vampire live, but you share his bed. Allow him to defile your body. I hope you’ve arrived prepared to meet your death for such a bold transgression.”
If possible, Roksana’s face lost even more of its color, but he recognized the stubborn set of her chin and the show of courage filled him with pride. “He did not murder my friends. I was mistaken. Elias saved my life. He does not deserve to die.”
“Does he not?” Inessa’s tone was crafted of silk, but her eyes were twin flames. “He is a vampire. Have you forgotten your vow?”
Roksana’s confidence faltered. “I have not.”
“Then why does he still plague the earth?”
“I love him,” Roksana breathed, her declaration seeming to slow to fall of snow. Or maybe the intensity of his reaction altered time, because he could have flown up to kiss the moon or tunneled to the center of the earth, her admission in Inessa’s presence shot him through with such power. Gratitude. Love so deep a bottom didn’t exist.
He expected a violent outburst from Inessa.
What they got instead was something twice as dangerous.
“It’s okay, daughter. I forgive you.”
Inessa reached out her arms with maternal compassion—and Roksana went with a sob.
Roksana’s head was a beehive.
Enfolded in Inessa’s arms, she forced herself to soften. To think. To reason, though she felt as if she dangled from the edge of a rocky cliff, two fingers left to keep her from plunging into the turbulent sea below.
