Take Me Slowly (Forever in Their Thrall Book 1)

by Lidiya Foxglove

  “I wasn’t trying to leave her in despair. She told me she wanted to be alone. She’s afraid of me.”

  “Bring her Calrose,” Silvus said.

  Silvus always had cats. His familiar died when I turned him, as familiars must—but I didn’t know that at the time. I knew very little of warlocks back then. His familiar was a toad, but ever since then he had cats. Cats, he said, ordinary cats, still acted very much like familiars, in that they were tame and affectionate—but not entirely tame. Silvus coddled his cats, feeding them morsels of raw meat and letting them into bed with him. Having grown up in the age of the plague, he felt we owed them our devotion for killing rats. They got a little too fat and they were very devoted to him in return.

  He found Calrose at an Asian grocery store in Maryland, while Jie was buying his favorite green tea. He was a gray, mangy kitten, gender unknown, but Silvus immediately spotted potential in his golden eyes and whisked the cat off into a life of luxury. He was named after a type of rice, because Silvus noted that it sounded like male and female names and could be referred to as either Cal or Rose. The cat was currently sprawled in a chair in the corner of the room, his eyes slitted open just enough to give me a lazy stare.

  “She’ll feel better with a little companionship,” Silvus said. “And then…you can assuage your needs.” Freed of my knee, he shifted to lay on his side, and gave me a look that made me feel inferior, and accordingly, made me want to torture him.

  I buttoned my clothes up again and picked up the cat. The lazy beast didn’t care. I rapped gently on Lisbeth’s door. “Tulip, I have something to keep you company tonight.”

  “I said I want to be alone,” she said, and she had been crying. I could imagine the taste of her tears.

  “It’s a pet,” I said.

  “A…pet?”

  “Do you…like cats?”

  She opened the door, looking at Calrose and at me. The cat was purring excessively and ridiculously, reaching a paw toward my precious girl.

  “Cats,” she said.

  “I trust you have heard of the concept of pet cats?” I wasn’t trying to be sarcastic, but sometimes it just came off that way. She looked like maybe she had not.

  “We weren’t allowed any pets in the Order,” she whispered. “Is it friendly?”

  “He’s very friendly. Just back off if he gets tense or stops purring, but he usually doesn’t.” I carefully put Calrose in her arms, eager for this excuse to touch my beloved one more time before I departed for the night. My fingers brushed the invisibly tiny hairs on her bare forearm and I felt a little shiver go through her, but she seemed more delighted by the cat.

  She had known other cats, of course. In prior lives, they were useful for catching mice, but my girl indulged them as much as Silvus did.

  I had never seen her look at an animal with such wonderment, as if she had never seen one before.

  “It’s…purring?” She looked at me. “It’s purring, isn’t it?” She smiled, the tiniest bit. “I’ve never held a cat before. He’s looking at me so earnestly.”

  “He does that.”

  “Is this your pet?”

  “You’re the only pet I want.”

  Her cheeks turned a sudden, deep shade of red that made her entire face unbearably beautiful and alluring. She looked a little upset at me, but she lowered her gaze, clearly afraid to challenge me. I was abruptly reminded again that she had been abused by this man, and the desire to kill him flamed up in me again.

  She was very sensitive to my temper even when I didn’t say a word, recoiling from me. I scratched Calrose’s cheek, and the cat leaned in, blinking at her lovingly. I let the cat carry her a message of reassurance.

  “Sleep well, my Tulip,” I said, and I shut the door before I was overwhelmed by the urge to touch her, claim her, kill for her.

  I think, if I had her all the time, I could have controlled myself. If we lived as man and wife, and grew old—or remained immortal—together, the way love should be. Yes.

  As it was, out of my five hundred or so years on this planet, less than a third had been spent with her. She had been lost to me now for nearly a century. Bertie died in my arms in 1930. The last time I saw her as a woman was 1849.

  My God. Is that possible? My cock hasn’t known a woman’s body in almost two centuries? No wonder I can hardly think straight.

  It was never enough. Not nearly. No sooner had I found her than her fleeting life was over again, and the loneliness of my immortal existence threatened to consume me. The thought of beginning the hunt all over—

  I threw the door to the other bedroom open again and Silvus was right where I’d left him, although he had grabbed a book off the nightstand to read.

  My need was unbearable by now, and I hardly was aware of the moments between when I shut the door and when I was fucking him. Silvus understood me, knew me so well, that for all the arguments between us, when I was inside him it felt almost like I was pleasuring myself. His restrained sighs and grunts of satisfaction still held a note of desperate hunger and I knew we were both thinking the same thing. Her body between us, spread and wet, her moans unbidden and loud.

  “Ah—so rough,” Silvus gasped.

  “You knew I wouldn’t go easy on you. Not on a night like this,” I said, and I wrapped my hand around his throat so he couldn’t say anything else.

  Chapter Fifteen

  Alissa

  Much to my own surprise, it was suddenly morning. I had slept through the night. I must have been exhausted. The memories of everything that had happened slammed in to me so hard that I felt sick. Silvus’ cat stirred and walked up my chest, stretching one paw toward my face. He was purring very noisily and rubbed his cheek against my face. Then he made a beeline for the lamp cord and bit it.

  “Don’t do that! You’ll electrocute yourself,” I whispered. “Are you hungry?”

  Calrose struggled out of my arms and leapt toward the door, circling it with a plaintive meow.

  I guess I couldn’t pretend to keep sleeping, but I was incredibly nervous just to crack open the door. As soon as I stood up, I felt an urgent need to pee, so I was forced into the hall.

  I heard dishes clinking in the kitchen and Calrose ran out ahead of me.

  Maybe Silvus was awake to feed his cat. He seemed a little safer than Rayner. I crept out very slowly, trying not to make a sound, as I heard a can pop open and the cat letting out urgent cries.

  “There you go, beast.”

  It was Rayner, and just Rayner. He was standing in the kitchen of the cabin, wearing nothing but a worn pair of black jeans that fit him like a glove around his hips. I was greeted by the view of his honey blonde hair tousled from sleep, smooth and sculpted skin forming the chiseled muscle of his back and arms. I had never seen any man without his shirt before, other than Father Joshua, who was so pale and skinny. For one moment, I was stunned into silence by Rayner’s beauty, something stirred deep inside me.

  He turned, a look in his own eyes that met mine. Primal. Predatory.

  I shied back.

  He said, “I didn’t hear you coming.” He was clearly surprised. Vampires had very good hearing, from what I knew, but he must have been lost in his thoughts.

  Thoughts of me.

  “My beautiful girl,” he said, putting the food down for Calrose.

  I hugged myself. “Where is the bathroom?”

  “Right here in the hall. You must have just passed it.” He walked up to me and put a hand on my back. “Here.”

  My heart was beating fast and scared. My entire body was alight with awareness of how close he was. I reached for the door, and he wrapped his arms around me suddenly, pinning my arms at my sides. He sniffed my neck and then peeled away the bandage. “You’ve healed already.”

  “Oh—“

  “Not even a mark on your beautiful body, Tulip.” He whispered to me. “When you come out, put your dress from yesterday back on and come to breakfast. I will make you a nourishing soup to restore you
r blood. Everyone wants to taste you and it’s very hard to wait.”

  “Sir…”

  “Rayner. Please, you must call me my name. We’ll talk and whatever haunts you, whoever hurt you, I will make them go away. I will give you the world, you understand? You will feel the pure pleasure of being our beloved thrall again once you are no longer afraid.”

  He let go of me, allowed me to step into the bathroom and shut the door, but I felt no privacy. Even alone, I felt watched. I was sure he was listening. I could hardly get my bladder to work, peeing in a hesitant trickle.

  I kept thinking of Father Joshua watching me from his cold, powerful perch atop my entire community. He could hurt me any way he wanted.

  Rayner was very different from that.

  I will give you the world.

  ‘The world’ was not a thing I ever thought of having. I met my face in the mirror and all I could see was grief and exhaustion.

  I tried to slip back into my room unnoticed, but Silvus was waiting for me. “Good morning, dearest. I’ll help you back into your clothes. You look so tired, but don’t worry. There are no expectations of you today. We’ll pamper you thoroughly and all you need to do is rest up from your ordeal, while we figure out what to do next.” I felt like a mannequin as he dressed me, and then he took my hands in his and looked at my palms.

  “Your hands are too clean for a witch,” he said.

  “I’m not really a witch…,” I said.

  “Of course you are.”

  “I don’t even have a familiar.”

  A small furrow creased his brow. “You don’t?”

  “No.”

  “That is strange.” He took a comb from his pocket and smoothed it through my hair before his eyes hooded. “Just be sure not to mistake me for the mother of the group just because I’m English and I like things in their place,” he said, plucking my lower lip with his thumb. “I’m more dangerous than any of them, when I put my mind to it. Now, come to breakfast, pet.”

  One of the defining characteristics of the life of a woman in the Order was that we were invisible. In school, boys learned to speak up and we learned to be silent. They were not taught to avoid eye contact with their teachers. They had their world, a bold striding world, and we had our world—soft and hidden. Boys didn’t even look at girls much either. They knew a partner would be chosen for them when they grew up. Dating was forbidden. We were all nervous around each other and told nothing about marriage and sex.

  As I came to the table, all four of them were awake and alert, waiting for me. They were drinking tea or coffee, thankfully not blood. They couldn’t eat so the only place setting was mine, a bowl of soup with greens and mushrooms that smelled savory and exotic but also a little familiar. Rayner was standing, sipping his coffee, a shirt now hanging loosely off his shoulders, but I could still see too much of him. Silvus pinched a sugar into his tea while Jie poured his, shooting me a little grin. “Good mornin’, darlin’,” Thomas said.

  “Eat your soup,” Rayner said. “I made it, but it’s Jie’s old recipe. You will take it in the morning every time we feed on you.”

  “Ancient Chinese secret,” Jie said, with a little self-deprecating laugh. “The mushrooms are what Chinese vampires give their thralls to keep them healthy, along with a blend of herbs and greens for nourishing the blood. If you take it every morning, you won’t lose energy very quickly.”

  The soup actually smelled delicious, but I didn’t want to eat. It wasn’t easy to muster my courage to defy four men, when I had been taught to never deny any man, ever.

  “I—I don’t want to be your…your thrall,” I said. “I don’t want you to just take my blood every day. I’m not a Sinistral. And my family needs me.”

  “Not every day!” Silvus said. “No one could give that much. Every five days is the most we ever push it, less if you aren’t feeling well.”

  “I don’t want to give my blood to vampires. At all. Ever. The world is going to end soon and…”

  “You believe that junk?” Jie said. “Because that man who hurt you said so? You know he’s lying, don’t you? The madness of crowds…”

  “He might have scared me, but…the world is ending, isn’t it? He showed me human newspapers talking about it.”

  “Darlin’, they always say that,” Thom said. “The world’s been ending as long as I’ve been living in it. I guess one day they’ll be right, and until the day it does, you’re better off with those who love you.”

  Rayner pounded the counter. “He scared you in order to control you,” he hissed. “So you wouldn’t leave or question him. He cherrypicked alarmist news stories to reinforce his narrative. Believe me, Tulip, I’ve seen enough men like that in my five hundred years. He’s a weak creature whose only power is sniffing the weaknesses of his ‘flock’ before you realize that the emperor has no clothes.”

  “Even if that is true…you want to control me too,” I said, wincing as I braced myself for someone to strike me or at least shout.

  “I want to protect you,” Rayner said. “I want to give you the things I know you want. You always resist me at first, because you think you are a normal person. You think your destiny is like everyone else’s. When I find you, it’s terrifying to you. It changes everything you thought you knew. But you have never been able to resist me for long. None of this is new to us, Tulip. We’ve already done everything a man and his lover can do. I know what you like. I know what makes you cry out my name, what makes you whimper and beg…and as much as I want to remind you of every single moment of it right now, as you can see…I’m patient.”

  “The four of us give you something you can’t get anywhere else,” Thomas said.

  “Well…I don’t doubt that,” I whispered. “But I just—I don’t want anything. I want to take care of my sisters. I wanted to marry a nice man and be a part of the village. I wasn’t unhappy there. I just didn’t want to marry him.”

  Rayner’s nostrils flared. Silvus put a hand on his arm.

  “You weren’t happy,” Rayner said. “It’s a lie you tell yourself because you know nothing else. It’s a lie you tell yourself every time.”

  “Why don’t we tell you,” Silvus said, “our history together. And maybe you will understand a little better why things are this way. Eat your soup.”

  I picked up my spoon. “All right…tell me."

  Chapter Sixteen

  Alissa

  “When Rayner met you…” Silvus started, as Rayner looked temperamental, and then he butted in.

  “It was the early seventeenth century,” Rayner said. “Not that the years matter much anymore. That was where it began for you and me, Tulip. As I told you, I was a regular human and I never meant for our lives to be anything but ordinary. I was just trying my damnedest to win you. You were from a family with some wealth, having benefited from the trading power of the Dutch back then. You were beautiful. And you were more than beautiful. You were whatever that thing is that makes a man fall deeply in love. You had other potential suitors, but I’m sure you were never as special to any man as you were to me. You were my match, and I was yours, and we both felt it.”

  His eyes were searching me for Lisbeth as he spoke, his voice full of youthful passion. He didn’t sound the same just now. For a moment, I thought, he was human again. He was a boy who loved a girl.

  Me. No one looked at me or spoke of me this way.

  I didn’t want to believe him, but the honesty in his voice was impossible to ignore, the way it lit his handsome face.

  “I was working hard to save money. I was studying and making connections on the side, trying to move up in the world and make myself worthy of you. It tore me apart to think you might be ashamed of marrying a man like me. I wanted to offer you a house that would bring you pride. I was thinking of how many rooms we might have, how many babies we would have, how much sugar and spice and meat in our larder, how many servants… I was just dreaming wildly of all the things I wanted to give you. You said you didn�
��t care, but I know you did. You had to care. That was our world, then. It was very simple.” He finally looked away from me and paced.

  “Rayner,” Silvus said.

  “No, I can tell it,” he said. “Tulip, I got tangled up with some bad business. The man who would become my sire told me your mother was a witch. She wasn’t practicing, but he brought me to a warlock who showed me your mother’s name written in a log from what we thought of as the devil’s church. She had participated in some occult rituals in her young years. My sire and this warlock had some grudge with her and they tried to blackmail me. They said they would save you in exchange for turning in your mother. When I refused, he turned me. He told me I now had to cooperate. Instead, I fled and I spoke to your mother, and she told me how to kill the vampire but she also told me to stay away from you forever. Your father had his thriving business and no idea that his wife’s bloodline had witches. I tried to stay away, but—not only was I weak in the face of my adoration for you, but I also knew that this warlock was still holding a grudge against your mother and I feared that they would brand her as a witch and you as well.”

  “Was…my mother all right?” I asked. I was sensitive to the fate of mothers, just now. I didn’t want to hear about this other woman’s death, not even four hundred years ago.

  “Yes. She was able to keep herself safe. But I had already persuaded you to run away with me, for your safety and mine. Well, it wasn’t very hard. We were both caught in the desire to do anything to be together.”

  “Did I know you were a vampire?”

  “Yes,” he said, sounding fierce with his own defense. “I didn’t lie to you. I have never been a deceitful man, Lisbeth. You knew everything and you chose me. Of course, the decision was not made lightly. The details blur, but we discussed it all in detail, and we decided to go to London together, for the reason that London had a community of vampires who worked together to survive. There…it was just you and me.”

  He seemed more somber now, almost tender, a glow in his eyes like the embers glowing in a fire that stopped blazing hours ago. “It was not the life I thought I would give you, but I do believe you were happy. In many ways, we were like any husband and wife. That was the one time…it was all perfectly normal.” He looked sad. “You kept the house and took in a little fancywork because you said you enjoyed it, and I found work there. Our great regret was that we couldn’t have children. The knowledge that you would grow old and leave me…it haunted us both. And then came…the plague.”