by Kiersten Fay
When awake, Bray regaled her with stories from his long life, rarely pushing her to reciprocate. He told her his father had died long before his change. And that Cortez was younger by three years, though he’d always tried to act ten years older. Bray called him a stiff prick with brass balls. He always smiled when he spoke of Cortez, even when he had nothing good to say, which was kind of endearing.
On the occasions she couldn’t hold in her tears, Bray never failed to sooth her, saying that “it would be alright” and “we’ll find a way out of here.” And when she lost hope completely, he was full of encouragement, suggesting that Trent would likely double the search effort for her alone. She didn’t reveal that she wasn’t exactly Trent’s favorite person. Bray was clearly loyal to the man.
How he remained so positive, she couldn’t understand.
On the rare instances when he made her smile, he seemed to take it as a personal accomplishment, adorably jutting his chest, drawing another smile from her, which she could tell was always his intention.
However, there were cracks in his façade, and she began to realize it was put in place for her alone, as if it had become his sole purpose in life to comfort her. Every so often, mostly as he skated that place between sleep and consciousness, or when he came out of a drugged stupor, the deep-seeded threads of his loneliness choked strong emotions from her. It burrowed deep, to her very bones, and nested there.
The melancholy that accompanied Bray’s awakening dissipated quickly, however, once he caught sight of Cora and recognition took hold. Most of the time he was jovial. There was a natural goodness in him that had undoubtedly existed before his preternatural transformation, back when he’d been a hopeful and vibrant young man…young human. He’d been a heartbreaker, or so she imagined. For the opposite to be true would be impossible. Not with that mischievous, boyish smile of his. Women would have swooned. After his transformation, with the mysterious and dangerous nature each vampire seemed to exude, they would have died for him.
And to her own amazement, sometime during this nightmare, Bray had become her rock. She looked to him whenever maltreated by the guards. Just locking eyes with him kept her from mentally crumbling altogether. She would sink into the steadfast depths of his irises and wrap herself in emerald, finding that place in her mind where everything was calm and nothing could hurt her.
She perceived the same was true for Bray, that somehow she filled him with hope, as absurd as that might be. What the hell could she do to help their situation? A whole lot of nothing, that’s what!
However, this morning, she awoke sensing a charge in the air. She couldn’t explain it, but…
Today felt different.
Per usual, Bray greeted her with an upbeat “good morning” just as she opened her eyes, as though he’d been watching her while she’d slept, counting the minutes until she awoke—something that should have felt awkward, but was instead comforting.
She had come to accept that without him she would have broken long ago.
Doing a quick calculation, she realized today must be blood-swap day. Each time they came, she would try to escape, to contort her body out of the guard’s grasp, but they were too strong, too quick, and they’d come to anticipate it. She usually only ended up with fresh bruises, set to heal within hours thanks to her regular diet of Bray’s blood.
His bite, though he was always numbed by drugs, had, in a way, turned tender, breaking the barest minimum of skin to get to the blood he deliriously sought.
She had asked him once if he remained conscious when they drugged him and whether he remembered anything afterward. He’d nodded solemnly and said, “Things get fuzzy, though. And the world feels heavy.”
“So you realize when you’re feeding off me?”
He’d responded with another nod and a slow dip of his Adam’s apple. She didn’t need the bond to know he savored her blood, even while despising the ordeal. And she didn’t blame him for that. He was a vampire. That’s what they did. It would be like blaming a human for enjoying a juicy steak.
“Did you sleep well?” Bray’s question roused her back to the present. He always asked her that when she awoke. It was sweet.
“No better than yesterday.” She glanced toward the door, for some reason more anxious than normal, but she didn’t know why. “What’s happening?” she asked.
Bray looked at her curiously, then canted his head to listen. “Are you expecting something?”
She shook her head.
Odd. She couldn’t tell what, but something felt off. Her bones shivered with tension—not that tension wasn’t pretty much a constant at this point, but it was also mixed with a heavy dose of unnerving anticipation and a jittery sensation, like she’d downed too much coffee.
“Maybe I’m just coming off a dream,” she said. It had been exceptionally vivid, and Mace had even made an appearance, though she couldn’t tell if she’d made contact, or if she had just wanted to dream of him, therefore she had.
Bray seemed to accept that, but also appeared nettled. “You’re unusually agitated,” he informed her, and for a moment she had forgot that he could now harvest her innermost feelings. “What was your dream about?”
“Mace,” she replied.
Bray frowned.
“I don’t really remember much,” she continued. “Just that he was there.”
Shivers needled her shoulders. A cold sweat broke out along her forehead and goose bumps whispered over her nape. She glanced toward the door again.
“Are you, you know…”—he lowered his voice—“sensing something with your magic?”
If she was, she couldn’t say for sure. It was as if the very molecules around her were screaming out a warning that she couldn’t decipher. But that was crazy, wasn’t it?
Yet the tingling vibes persisted.
She tried to shrug it off. “Tell me more about your life,” she said, needing the diversion.
He chuckled. “Soon, you’ll know everything about me, whereas you’re still a mystery.”
Not addressing that, she silently urged him on.
“Very well,” he said in a conversational tone. “You know of my brother. My father. That’s the sum of my human family. My mother died when I was too young to remember her.”
Cora’s lips puckered into a frown, instantly identifying.
“Trent essentially became my father in vampire terms. Before their falling out, Cortez and I were his right hands. Mind you, this was before the Revelation and the following uprisings.”
The Revelation, as it was widely referred to, Cora understood to be the year vampires revealed themselves to humanity; the year all hell broke loose, according to the historians. Armageddon to the overtly religious, who believed they were living in the end times. But history is written by the winners. There weren’t lot of records leftover from those days. A few tattered books here and there, but most of those were written by older vampires who had survived the wars from start to finish, and thus were always skewed in favor of the vampires.
And though a few humans were still in denial, she figured it was safe to say they’d lost. They were no longer top of the food chain.
Without solid documentation in those first few decades of destruction, humans had made due with oral accounts passed on to one another, like a human news chain, which was even less reliable than the vampire’s tales, in Cora’s opinion. Like a children’s game where one child whispered a specific phrase in the ear of another, then that child whispered it to another, and so forth till the last child announced the phrase aloud, which was, without fail, a wild slaughtering of the original verbiage.
Though many would stubbornly disagree, no one could know for sure what had really happened in those days and what was a myth unless they had lived through it.
She gasped as realization hit her. Bray was older than the Revelation. That meant he was upwards of a hundred. Possibly older.
“I’m lucky I wasn’t inducted during the uprisings,” he continued. “Like
Mace and Knox were.”
If she could have sat up, her back would have been iron-rod straight. “Oh?”
“Yeah. When you’re turned, emotions run wild at first. Fluctuate. Hard to control. It’s as though every sense is heightened. I had it easy by comparison.”
“Mace and Knox were turned during the wars?”
“They were turned for the wars.”
Cora’s mind reeled at this information, greedy for more. Luckily, Bray obliged without her having to press.
“Our numbers were dwindling, and Trent decided he needed new recruits. He started seeking out his blood relatives for added loyalty—”
The doctor’s antiseptic scent wafted in.
Bray’s gaze jerked to the door just as a set of tranquilizers landed in his torso. He cursed and locked eyes with Cora. Their hearts sank together, both of them feeling the other’s dread.
Moments later, his head drooped as the drugs kicked in.
Her pulse slammed through her veins, spurred by adrenaline. She would rather deal with bath time than the doctor.
The heavy cell door creaked open.
A high-pitched clattering preceded the doctor’s entrance as he pushed that familiar rolling cart across the room. Two syringes lay atop the silver tray. One seemed to be empty. The other was filled with that dreaded dark liquid.
Not again!
She sputtered, “Didn’t your boss say no more testing on me.”
The doctor supplied a heartless smile that took on the quality of a demented sneer. “The master isn’t here.”
He picked up the empty syringe, unceremoniously stabbed the vein in her arm, and pulled back on the plunger. She swallowed a cry as her blood filled the shaft—something told her the doctor would enjoy hearing it.
He retrieved the second syringe; the one she suspected was filled with concentrated liquid insanity.
She panicked. “Won’t there be consequences for this?”
“The master believes there’s something in the bond that I can’t recreate through science. I intend to prove him wrong and win my place at his side.”
In went the needle.
Chapter 22
Tremors burrowed maddening tunnels under her skin. Itching, crawling, unrelenting.
It had been a little more than an hour since the doctor left her to cope with the consequences of his vile concoction.
It was different than before. More potent. She seemed to be freezing and burning simultaneously, suffocating and taking in too much air, hyper aware and unbelievably exhausted.
Nothing made sense.
Nothing but the lust!
By the goddess, the lust was unbearable.
So much more engrossing than before. Every nerve ending, every cell, every nuance was keyed up to a ferociously carnal level. The animalistic need chased away rational thought, and she heard herself begging for salacious and horrendous things. For something, anything—anybody—to relieve her of the choking misery.
She eyed Brayden with furious longing. His head still hung limp, but his body stood taut, with delicious ridges of muscle she wanted to touch, lick, devour. She told him so, even though he seemed to be passed out. She called to him, enticing him to awaken with purring entreaties.
She didn’t recognize her own voice, and she couldn’t seem to stop.
But he must hear her. On some level. The cords of his stomach rippled with each of her licentious words. And his scrubs appeared tighter in the front.
Yet the rest of him did not move.
She licked her lips and moaned in frustration.
Her squirming caused her shirt to ride up over her stomach and the thin sheet to bunch at her calves. The sweat on her thighs caught the cool air, making her shiver. She thought she caught him peeking from under his hooded lids, but when she looked again, his eyes were closed.
And still her affliction grew worse. On a throaty moan, a beseeching, “Please,” tumbled from her lips, but there was no one to come to her rescue.
Or so she thought.
To her delight, one of the guards—the one with a newly lit cigar seated between half-rotted teeth—breached the cell door and approached her with deviant intent.
In that moment, she cared nothing for her extreme abhorrence to the man. Disgust was a consequence for a later torment. Immediate relief was all her mind could comprehend.
But his black haired comrade rushed in and caught him by the arm, shaking his head in clear warning. “You remember what the doctor said. She belongs to Nikolai. Are you really that hard up?”
“She’s begging for it,” cigar man replied in a petulant manner, though his thinning hair declared him the elder of the two.
“There are a thousand ways you can kill yourself, but if you do this, it will be me scraping your innards from the walls. That is, if the master even allows me to live.”
“We can share her,” cigar man whispered. “No one need know.”
At the offer, the younger man’s gaze slipped to her, and she saw the desire he’d successfully buried till now. He wet his lips. She watched reason drain away and rejoiced at her impending release.
He eased up beside her. Cigar man took her other side, already unzipping his pants.
But just before either of them laid a hand on her, a threatening growl drew all their gazes toward Bray.
The vampire’s eyes were wide, alert, and they were fixed on the two men.
——
“Step toward me,” Bray said.
There was ancient power in his command, and the men obeyed without resistance. The effects of the tranq were waning, but he was still weak. The horny bastards hadn’t bothered to make sure he was fully doped up before following their dicks inside. Still, his trance wouldn’t last long.
“You.” He indicated the younger guard. “Release me.”
The man hurried to pull the pin from the manacle holding Bray’s left arm, but the rust had essentially glued it in place. Needing to obey Bray’s command, he retrieved a gun that had been shoved in the back of his jeans and began to pistol-whip the pin till much of the rust flaked off. Then he finally yanked it free.
The shackle creaked open.
Bray rolled and cracked his wrist, then reached toward the other manacle and popped out the second pin with much less effort than the human had required.
Both hands free, he reveled in his first steps of freedom in five years.
He gazed down at the thick metal pin in his hand that had kept him hostage so long. Then, without much warning, he rammed the pin four inches deep into the younger guard’s left eye socket.
The man’s right eye rolled back into his head as his body crumbled, dead.
Bray faced the older guard, still blank-faced and entranced. “Didn’t I tell you that you’d eventually screw up?”
The pathetic plump man nodded dumbly.
Cora’s frustrated moan claimed Bray’s attention. She squirmed fitfully. Feverishly.
What had the doctor given her? Not even an overload of vamp blood could make a woman accept two snakes such as these.
He glowered at the man who had been seconds from violating her. He reached out and snapped the ugly bastard’s neck, relishing the pop that rang out. Then he moved to unclasp Cora from the gurney.
A mistake, he soon realized.
She threw herself at him, nearly knocking the gurney over as she shoved off it. His back met that hated wall with the force of her advance. Her arms enwrapped his neck while she hiked her body up and clamped her legs around his waist.
His body reacted strongly to her aggression.
Her lustrous feminine scent blended with the sharp metallic spice of the blood rushing under her skin, knotting his stomach with more than one kind of hunger.
Her urgent lips felt too good against his neck, her pleas too sweet. His palm gripped her clinging thigh and luxuriated in her exquisitely soft flesh, softer than he’d even imagined. Everywhere their skin touched, she was like silk.
Her mouth took his
with urgent demand, and he found himself kissing her back with equal fervor.
Those guards hadn’t been the only ones hard up. When Bray had still been chained to the wall, it was all he could do to keep still while she had begged for his cock. He’d been waiting to see if those lechers would take her unwitting bait—they’d been arguing over it for half an hour at least. Thankfully they’d inadvertently waited till Bray was more coherent.
However, Cora’s sexy suggestions had affected him just as much as them. And if he was a lesser man…
He squashed the thought.
In her ear, he whispered, “I’m sorry you’re suffering, angel, but I cannot help you as you wish. At least not right now. We have to make our way out of here before we’re detected. But first I need strength.”
That was the only warning he gave before his clawing hunger led his fangs to the fast beating vein at her neck. Her delicious blood gushed into his mouth. Together they groaned, both for equally rapturous yet vastly different reasons.
Her invigorating essence rushed down his throat, filling him with life while she was submerged in the ecstasy that accompanied a vampire’s bite.
His teeth clamped harder, breaking through more skin as he drank her down. He drank until he was almost lightheaded from excess, and then drank some more.
Her thighs, still around his waist, clenched as she ground against him, seeking further release. His already ridged shaft went painfully tight. The temptation nearly became too great for his half-drugged, blood-drunk mind.
Without removing his fangs, he whirled around and leveraged her against the wall, then pressed his crotch to her core. The only thing that separated them was his thin scrubs and the wispy fabric of her panties. She moaned, undulating her hips at a frantic pace. Her sweet fragrance saturated his senses, driving him to want to do something despicable, like take them both over the edge.
His head reared back, and he captured her lusty gaze. “Calm yourself,” he commanded, using compulsion.
“That doesn’t work on me,” she cried miserably. “I can’t be compelled.” She flushed as though embarrassed over the salacious actions she seemed to have no control over.
