by Lexi C. Foss
And all their perfect features did was make me sad.
I allowed my E.V.I.E. training to kick in at that moment, observing the other things that set them apart from their human counterparts.
Their movements were more fluid. Thinking back on it now, when they’d all walked out of the bedroom, their walk had been more like a glide. It was more predatory, like they could easily break out into a sprint at any moment to subdue their prey.
As humans, they’d been stunning, but as vampires, they were awe-inspiring, everything about them designed to attract you and lure you in.
A burst of jealousy hit me again as I wondered just what they’d done over the past year with their unforgettable beauty.
“Olivia,” Ryan said quietly to me, and I let myself savor the sound of his lovely voice saying my name. No matter how upset I was, I couldn’t forget that just a day ago, I’d thought I would never hear him say my name again.
I walked towards them, well aware of their gleaming eyes watching me the whole way.
They were all seated in elegant leather-backed chairs around a heavy, wooden, circular table. Three wine glasses filled with a dark red liquid sat in front of each of them.
I blanched when I saw them, realizing that the red liquid was blood.
All three of their gazes flicked from their drinks back to my face. Ryan picked up the wine glass defiantly and took a huge gulp, wiping his bloody lips with the back of his hand like a savage.
Noah snorted at Ryan and folded his arms while Wyatt rolled his eyes and shook his head.
"Want some?" Ryan asked innocently.
I scoffed, my gaze darting from his drink to his red-stained lips once again, trying to reconcile in my brain the fact that the boy I loved with all my heart...now drank blood.
"How does that work?" I asked hesitantly, trying to remember everything we learned in our E.V.I.E. classes about drinking blood.
One thing that suddenly stood out in Technicolor was the fact that a vampire's bite was known to be incredibly pleasurable...when they wanted it to be.
Evidently there were actual vampire clubs around the world where human junkies met up with vampires to get fed on repeatedly.
Just the thought of one of them feeding on someone like that made my skin start to burn, like the Hulk was all of a sudden going to burst out of me and destroy everything in sight. Had they done that to another girl? Who had they been feeding on?
I had to clench my hands into fists so that I wouldn't start tearing at my skin.
What I was thinking must have been all over my face because a glimmer of pleasure appeared in Ryan's eyes. Noah, for his part, just looked wary. And Wyatt's face was perfectly blank.
"Are you going to explain or not?" I asked in a rough voice.
"About our new drink of choice?" Noah responded, trying for levity.
I nodded, unable to take my eyes off Ryan as he picked up the glass again and took another long sip.
My hand darted up to my neck as I imagined his beautiful mouth touching another woman's skin.
"Do you bite..." My words trailed off. I couldn't bring myself to say it.
"Aren't you supposed to be some sort of bad-ass slayer now? Why don't you just ask if we've fed directly from the source?" Ryan said, amused.
I glared at him.
There was a long pause as Ryan just stared at me and my heart sank in my chest.
Ryan stood up and stalked towards me, the black in his pupils widening until they almost overtook his entire face. He circled me and stopped right behind me.
"Did the hunters teach you about a vampire's bite?" he murmured, his breath a caress across my skin.
Goosebumps. I felt them everywhere.
"Did they teach you that one bite and I could make you immediately orgasm? And not just orgasm, but give you more pleasure than you'd ever experience again in your life.
My breath was heavy, my breasts felt tight and swollen, like they could burst out of my shirt at any second.
"They may have mentioned that," I muttered, my eyes closing as I imagined Ryan biting me right now. My whole body began to course with pleasure, ascending that cliff that I was desperate to fall off of.
"You can't wait to experience it for yourself, pretty girl. You're dying for it."
His words were a bucket of cold water on my head.
I snarled and jerked away from him. "How many girls exactly have experienced that pleasure from you?"
My heart felt like it was beating out of my chest.
"Oh for fuck's sake, Ryan. Stop being an asshole," Noah snarled.
"Besides a few times where the blood lust took over and we ripped into a few throats, we haven't fed directly from the source," interjected Wyatt calmly.
I ignored how shaky my whole body felt. I probably should have felt bad that the guy from last night hadn't been their only victim.
But all I felt was relief.
"But it's something we've been looking forward to," smirked Noah, his gaze boring into me knowingly like he was envisioning feeding on me right that second.
I shook my head, trying to clear it.
“I want answers,” I demanded, ignoring the lust coursing through me.
Ryan walked back to the table and noticed my shirt just then. He stared at it as I stood there, confirming that he was the idiot who’d packed it. It was annoying to me that I’d bought this from a little shop in New York for the specific reason that it had reminded me of something he would find funny.
“It’s complicated,” Noah said seriously as he leaned back in his chair, balancing perfectly on two of the legs.
“Try me,” I growled.
“Have you ever heard of Morgana, the Vampire Queen of the South?” he asked, setting his chair legs down and leaning forward to look at me intently.
I racked my brain, trying to remember the lessons we’d had about different vampire clans at the headquarters.
It sounded familiar.
“I think so,” I said slowly, wondering what she had to do with anything.
“She’s the one who had us killed and turned.”
Dread lit up my insides as I thought about that day, about the screams of the Masterson’s filling the air, about the phone call that had changed everything.
“Why would she do that?” I asked, trying to keep the tremble out of my voice.
“Morgana doesn’t believe in depriving herself of anything. When she sees something she wants, she takes it. She saw that newspaper article the local paper had written about the four of us going to college. And that was all it took.” Ryan recited the story in a hollow, empty voice, his gaze haunted as he stared at the wall unseeingly.
“We’d just parked when we were attacked and dragged off. They brought bodies in as stand-ins and then staged the crash. A little thrall, and everything was taken care of,” Wyatt added, his voice bitter.
“What did she want you for?” I asked, even though I knew the answer. I was just hoping with every fiber of my being that I was wrong.
There was a lengthy pause before anyone answered that only increased my dread.
“She wanted us as additions to her harem. The queen keeps a large collection of concubines,” Noah finally replied.
Hot fury licked against my insides. I had no idea what this queen looked like, but my mind could create a beautiful vampire easily enough. I saw them touching her, kissing her…fucking her.
I bent over and promptly heaved up a torrent of disgusting bile…all over their pristine carpet.
“Fuck, sweetheart.” Ryan had me in his arms in a flash, just a reminder that the loves of my existence weren’t human anymore. He held back my hair in one hand, while he stroked my back with the other.
After one more disgusting heave, I shakily straightened up, wiping my mouth with a towel Wyatt grabbed from somewhere.
“So let me get this straight,” I began in a dead voice. “While I’ve been mourning your existence and wishing I was dead…you’ve been the glorified fuck
-toys for the vampire queen that took you from me in the first place?”
All three of their horrified yells of “No!” filled the room, and a tear of relief slipped from my eye.
“That was her plan, yes,” Ryan began anxiously. “But Wyatt tried to knife her the first time she tried to sleep with him, and I stuck a pen in her left eye. After Noah broke her neck, it didn’t take much convincing that we would need a bit of time before there would be any bedroom activity. We’ve been working as her personal assassins while she gives us ‘time,’” Ryan ended sarcastically.
“You never did anything with her?” I asked in a small voice, a small tendril of hope foolishly growing out of the ashes of my heart.
Noah winced, and the tendril quickly died. “I kissed her. We’d just come back from a mission, and I’d found out that you’d been recruited to start hunting vampires… I snapped. I…just didn’t see a way back to you…” His voice trailed off, and another tear slid down my face, and then another. “That was all that happened, and I ended it right away…by a left hook no less.” His tone was begging…beseeching.
I felt pathetic sitting there, the only one crying, as my three ex-boyfriends all stared at me.
“We’ve been following you,” Ryan added softly. “We were supposed to be hunting a rogue vampire who’d stolen from the queen, and instead, we went to New York.”
I looked at him in surprise. “I thought I was going crazy… I felt you… I thought I saw you…so many times.”
Wyatt winced. “It was the very definition of torture being near you and not being able to talk to you. We stepped out of bounds a few times.”
My fingers feathered across my lips…remembering…tasting.
Ryan.
Wyatt rolled his eyes at the dreamy look that I’m sure had just appeared on my face and elbowed Ryan. I was keeping my gaze deliberately from Noah’s mournful features.
“Ryan here got a little overzealous and slipped away one night. He raised a disapproving eyebrow, but Ryan just grinned. “A little thrall, and your boy here convinced you that it was all a dream when he ate you out.” Wyatt growled. “He rubbed it in our faces for a month. We could smell you on him.” His eyes closed like he was remembering the smell.
My face flushed a thousand shades of red. That hope…it wasn’t a tendril anymore. It was a fucking menagerie.
“So you’ve been stalking me,” I stated wryly with an eyebrow raised, the fact making me feel marginally…okay incredibly better.
“We’ve been protecting you,” Noah blurted out.
“What?”
“She knows about you. She’s been sending various members of the clan after you all year. It’s been a full-time job to keep you alive.”
Noah laughed like he’d just told a joke, and the other two glared at him.
The sick feeling that had been present since I’d found out about queen bitch got worse.
“Why is she doing that?”
Wyatt looked at me like I was an idiot. “You don’t think she’d want to kill off the girl that was making it impossible for her to get in our pants?”
I glared at the visual image, and he had the decency to look chagrined. I was reminded of a pressing issue as I gazed at his mouth watering features.
“Are you the one who’s been hunting on UD’s campus?” I blurted out.
Wyatt’s mouth fell open in disbelief, his face filled with betrayal.
“You’re kidding me, right?”
“You did kill Jason.”
“Oh, so you did actually know his name before you opened your legs,” Wyatt spit out. My hand flew out and slapped him across the face before I knew what was happening.
That silence was back—the one we’d never had before.
“I’m sorry. I didn’t mean that,” Wyatt said sadly.
“I’m not sure you can really talk since you were hooking up with Brittany behind my back.”
Wyatt looked at me like I was crazy. “Brittany?”
“The cheerleader. You invited her to the afterparty at your concert the night everything happened.” I felt like a juvenile as I sat there with my arms crossed on my chest defiantly, bringing up something that shouldn’t have been a blip on my radar after everything that had happened.
Wyatt looked like he was thinking hard, a look of confusion heavy on his brows. He all of a sudden snorted. “You thought I was cheating on you with Brittany Clark?”
I just nodded.
“Fuck. She had been talking crap about you. I was trying to throw her off the scent. I hated that bitch.”
I groaned, feeling like an idiot for even bringing it up.
“I killed Jason because I’m a new vampire whose mate was about to give her virginity to another man. We’re not exactly known for having much control in the beginning. And I couldn’t stand it. His hands touching you. His lips tasting you.”
All three of them growled, their fangs clicking out in a demonstration that made my panties uncomfortably wet.
“I didn’t kill those girls. And I can’t believe you would think that.”
“We’re strangers now, Wyatt. You let me wallow in my sorrow for a year, while you watched me the entire time.”
“We were trying to protect you,” Ryan said beseechingly.
I closed my eyes and took a deep breath, trying to control my wild emotions.
“I’m on a mission for E.V.I.E. right now. I have to get back to campus.” I hated the words, even as they came out of my mouth. I didn’t want to be away from them, not now that I’d just gotten them back. But no matter their intentions, I didn’t agree with their decision to ruin me for a year. E.V.I.E. had given me purpose again in life, and I couldn’t just forget that. I needed to finish this mission, especially knowing it wasn’t one of the guys.
Thank fuck it wasn’t one of them.
The three of them looked at me incredulously, frustration and despair in their gazes.
“You’re not going anywhere, not now that we’ve gotten you back,” snarled Wyatt. “Do you want to see me rip someone apart again? Because it’s going to happen if another asshole dares to touch you. You’re ours, and that’s never going to change.”
“But are you still mine?” I asked them. There was a queen in between me and them, and standing here, the gulf between us suddenly seemed bigger than when I’d thought they were dead and gone forever.
Silence. Nothing but silence.
“We’ll meet up later,” I told them, hating how the words sounded like a question.
I turned and walked away from them, feeling like my heart was breaking all over again with the feeling that I was losing them once again.
Stiffening my shoulders, I left the room and went down the long hallway, deciding I would get my phone and try to call a cab or something…once I figured out exactly where I was.
I stopped in surprise when Noah was standing there in the room, waiting for me, even though I’d just left him back in that office.
Fuck…vampires were fast. I kept forgetting he was one of them now, shrouded in all of the capabilities I’d spent months studying.
“What do you want, Noah?” I asked him despondently.
His eyes were burning, fangs extended as he stared at me intensely.
“You don’t get to walk away, not now that I finally have you. I dreamed of you, was desperate for you, was dying without you. I knew as soon as I woke up and was told that I had forever in front of me that immortality would be hell without you. You’re not going anywhere unless I’m by your side,” he growled.
I opened my mouth to object, and he was on me, grabbing me and drawing me roughly to him. His lips crushed against mine with an urgency that my soul was desperate for. Strong arms coiled around my waist, tightening possessively as he cradled my back. He tasted of mint…and blood, passion and promises, and my lips parted instinctually as his tongue slid into my mouth. His kiss was forceful, commanding, and I found myself slipping under his control, my body molding against his as I soften
ed under the heat of our embrace.
His tongue flicked lazily against my teeth, and my mouth spread wider in welcome. He accepted, thrusting his tongue deeper, drawing my own into his mouth and capturing it with a languid suction. I felt pricks from his fangs, and the sensation had me shivering. My legs buckled weakly, my body ready to sink to the floor under him, but he pressed me closer to him, the hardness of his body bracing me. His hand slipped from my waist to the hollow at the small of my back. The intimate gesture spurred me to life, and my fingers tangled into his silky hair as I held on to the kiss, certain I would fade to nothing without his body crushed against mine.
He scooped me up and walked over to the bed where I’d first woken up beside him and laid me on top of the sheets. I watched, lust building into a frantic pulse, as he stripped himself of his shirt. He stood before me, flagrantly masculine and more indescribably beautiful than I could comprehend.
I couldn’t grasp that he was actually here. That we had this chance to explore each other’s bodies. Had a chance to express our love. Because that’s what this was. No matter how upset I was, how many questions I had, how many obstacles lay in front of us, I loved him. Them. Always.
The truth stole my breath. He was mine. Always. Mine forever. No queen could get between us.
And I wanted our forever to start right fucking now.
My fingers fumbled with my shirt, but he stooped, gripping the fabric, and wrenched it open. Scraps flew across the bed and floor, a showcase of strength that had my mouth falling open in shock.
Noah shoved what was left of the shirt off my shoulders, wrestling it past my arms as we tangled together and my breasts fell into his hot palms, heavy with arousal.
“I need to taste you. I’ve thought about your body every day we’ve been apart,” he said gruffly.
My head fell back as he descended down my torso, licking and sucking every inch of my soft flesh he could reach as he pulled down my pants desperately. His hands massaged my breasts, kneading them as he continued his ravenous descent until he reached my bikini line. He nudged my thighs open with his chin, the slight scruff of his five o’clock shadow grazing the delicate skin and making me giggle.
