His younger brother had told him countless times that he didn’t need to chain himself each day, and Snow had always countered that it was necessary and he did not mind it.
He did. He hated it.
That was beside the point though.
It was necessary, and ever since that fateful night centuries ago, he had always done whatever was necessary to protect others from himself.
Snow heaved a sigh, his chest expanding with it, powerful muscles straining, and ran his hand down his face.
It would have been so much easier if Antoine had agreed to do as Snow had asked that same night and destroyed him.
He deserved to be put down like the rabid beast he was.
Antoine was nothing if not stubborn though. He had been bleeding profusely from the savage wounds Snow had inflicted upon him, carving up his chest and arms so badly that Antoine had scarred rather than healed completely. Snow had thought he would seek revenge for himself and their family, or perhaps take his head as an act of mercy. He had dared to hope his brother would do what was right.
Antoine had refused to kill him and had even pressed him to promise that he would never kill himself either. Snow had agreed and regretted it the moment it had left his lips.
The past few centuries had been hell. Seeing Antoine every night and knowing what he had done to him, the fact he had almost killed the brother he loved with all of his black heart. Seeing Antoine and knowing that he had stolen everything from his brother in one night of madness. Seeing his brother and knowing that he had butchered their entire family.
Seeing Antoine’s face and seeing their mother’s pale blue eyes and their father’s dark brown hair.
It was enough to drive a man insane.
It was a good job he was already crazy.
Snow switched off the shower, ran his hands over his hair to squeeze the water out, and slid the glass cubicle door open. He stepped out onto the black tiles and grabbed a thick white towel. A very impractical colour, but he liked the touch of purity and lightness it brought into his dark world.
He scrubbed the towel over his hair and then dried himself off with one hand. He swiped his free palm across the clouded mirror, clearing enough to reveal his reflection and the main room of his apartment through the open door behind him.
He never liked to look at himself, normally hated seeing his reflection and seeing his mother’s eyes and hair, knowing what he had done to her, but he sometimes felt the need to look and remind himself of what he had done.
A twisted form of punishment.
He dropped the damp towel, pressed both palms against the edge of the black counter, and leaned forwards over the sink, staring hard at his reflection.
A face his mother had often called angelic.
The face of a cold-blooded murderer.
Snow growled and slammed his right fist into his face in the mirror, splintering the glass. Fire seared his knuckles and blood instantly ran down the shards of mirror. He pulled his fist back and plucked a sliver of glass from the soft flesh between his index and middle finger, and dropped it into the sink.
The scent of blood compelled him to taste it, stirring the darkness that constantly lurked within him, stalking just beneath the surface, barely restrained.
He rinsed his bloodied knuckles off in the black oval sink and then inspected them. Two of the cuts were deep. He lifted his hand to his face and sucked those two, drawing more blood to the surface. It tasted foul.
His stomach cramped and he spat the blood into the sink and then swiped his tongue across his knuckles to seal the wounds. The bleeding was already slowing. Within a few minutes, his flesh would begin to knit itself back together and heal.
He took a small towel and wrapped it around his hand, and then strolled naked into his bedroom. The bed loomed directly in front of him. He had promised Antoine that he would sleep and he meant to keep that promise.
He wanted to be sane enough to head down to the party even if it was only for a few minutes. Everyone was depending on him and he didn’t want to let all of them down. They had held off on celebrating the arrival of the twins so he could share in the joy of the event. He needed to be there.
He veered right, heading for the ebony chest of drawers that lined the black wall there next to his elegant wardrobe. He pulled out one of the smaller drawers at the top, fished a fresh pair of black boxers out, and shut it again. Someone spoke in the hall. Snow paused and listened. Callum was talking to Payne as they walked along the hall towards Callum’s apartment beyond Snow’s one. Discussing children.
Payne had taken responsibility for the witch’s youngling? Snow had never pictured the young vampire as a father. He had always imagined him to be more of a bachelor forever type because of his incubus blood.
Was everyone going to settle down and produce offspring now?
Snow tugged his boxer shorts on. They were all going to leave him behind. Everyone had a female now, something warm and tender in their lives. They were complete.
Where did that leave Snow?
With a frustrated growl, he pulled his wardrobe doors open, grabbed fresh bed linen from the stack he kept at the bottom, and slammed them shut again. What did he care about females? No female in her right mind would want him, and he certainly did not want a female.
He could never trust himself with something so weak and breakable.
He lumbered across his room, bare feet thumping against the wooden floor, and dumped the black linen beside his bed. He stripped the soiled covers off and focused on replacing them with fresh ones to keep his mind off a topic that had often angered him.
He had warred with himself many times about finding a female, debating the pros and cons of such a mission, and all the possible outcomes. It was highly likely that a female would leave him the moment she discovered the ugly truth about him, his bloodlust, and his horrific past.
He would probably react to her betrayal by losing his head to bloodlust and killing her.
He had a tendency to react violently whenever someone sought to hurt him.
Breaking his heart would cause him the ultimate pain.
Snow shook that thought away and smoothed the edges of his black covers down, neatening them. He grabbed his black robe and slung it on, but didn’t bother to fasten the belt.
Darkness swirled inside him like a rising tide that he was powerless to hold back. He breathed slowly, trying to work past the tightening knot in his breast, hoping to calm down before he lost himself again.
He sat on the bed and lay with his back against the pillows and his head against the steel bars of the headboard. He cast a glance at the restraints that rested on the pillows on either side of him. They were there if he needed them and that gave him back a fraction of his control, but didn’t quell his rising bloodlust.
His heart galloped, refusing to heed his attempts to slow it, and he closed his eyes and focused on positive things. The battle between his darker hungers and his desire to remain sane intensified and he breathed harder, drawing deep and filling his lungs with cool air. The soft scent of lilies and snow lingered in that air and his mind drifted to the lyrics of the song.
Calm swept through him, driving back the darkness for a brief second before it surged forwards again, obliterating the sense of peace.
A breeze washed over his bare flesh.
Snow frowned. There were no windows in his room. The breeze carried the unmistakable scent of snow yet it felt warm, and familiar.
Someone was in his apartment. He felt their presence as a soft caress that reached right down to his tainted soul and chased the black shadows from it.
Snow drew in a deeper breath of lily of the valley and snow, the pure feminine scent stirring his body and soothing the tension from it. He held it in his lungs and slowly opened his eyes, settling them directly on the dark beauty standing at the foot of his bed.
She was stunning, with a fall of glossy raven hair that playfully curled around slender shoulders and contrasted aga
inst her milky skin, heart-shaped rosy lips, a button nose, and the most incredible yet familiar eyes. They were turquoise around the outside but faded to a brilliant blue at their centres, around the dark mesmerising chasms of her pupils.
A pure white dress clung to dangerous curves and full breasts that would make any man’s eyes linger on her, evoking images in his head that he shouldn’t entertain but couldn’t keep at bay. He had never seen a female like her.
The white layers of her dress criss-crossed over her torso, forming a zigzagging line downwards from between the swell of her creamy breasts to the point above her navel. They flowed from there, free and untamed, drifting down to caress her ankles and her small bare feet.
Beautiful.
It was the large black wings furled against her back that eventually stole his attention away from the sublime innocence of her face and the wickedness of her body.
An angel.
“I never thought I would see one of your kind.” Snow had meant it to come out strong and forceful, but the words left his lips as an awed whisper.
She moved a step closer and the scent of her grew stronger, and while that pleased him, his senses screamed of danger and his bloodlust reacted violently to her proximity. A seething, vicious hunger to launch himself from the bed, capture her head in his hands and smash it hard against the unyielding wooden floor of his room bolted through him and he struggled to resist complying with it and satisfying his need to render her unconscious in order to make himself safe once more.
He ground his teeth and shot her a glare when she appeared to consider moving another step closer.
“What do you want?” It came out snappish this time, as dark and menacing as the twisted desires that taunted him.
The angel moved back a step and surveyed his room in silence. Ignoring his question was not the wisest move she could have made. Until he understood why she was in his room, he would feel threatened, and he would eventually lose his fight to retain control of himself.
Her striking eyes settled on his bed.
“Your bed is strange.” Her voice was melodic and light, a sound that curled around him and soothed his ears but not his bloodlust. That worsened, as though it despised her presence. She played havoc with it, and with him, and he was haemorrhaging patience. She pointed to the thick steel bars at the corners of his bed and the cuffs attached to them. “You have strange tastes. Why?”
Her gaze lit upon him, bright and curious, and Snow had the feeling that she was testing him for some infernal reason.
He could ignore questions too. “What do you want?”
She walked in a shallow circle, those curious eyes flickering around everything, cataloguing it and then coming back to take every inch of him in.
“I want nothing,” she said and drifted across the room to his dressing table.
Her fingertips danced over everything on it, from the lamp to the candles, to the stack of books. She leaned forwards, cocked her head to one side, and ran her fingers down the spines. The action shifted her black wings, causing the longest feathers of the right one to graze the floor.
She straightened and turned back to face him. “I felt you suffering again and was unable to ignore it, even though I know I should have this time.”
Snow frowned. “You were here with me… before. It was you.”
She nodded and walked towards him, her steps so light even he couldn’t hear them. She twirled her black hair around the fingers of her left hand and smiled at him. It hit him square in the chest and knocked the wind out of him.
“If you were here… then you know why my bed is the way that it is, and why I must chain myself. So why did you ask?” He growled the question, growing tired of her cryptic behaviour.
“I was curious to know what you would tell me.” She wrapped her small hands around one of the steel posts at the end of his bed and leaned her shoulder against it.
Snow didn’t like that she had seen him in the throes of his bloodlust, but he was beginning to share her sense of curiosity. “Why are you here… and why did you sing to me?”
A pretty blush coloured her flawless pale cheeks. “You remember?”
Wasn’t he supposed to have remembered? Evidently, she hadn’t expected him to recall that someone had been in his room, singing him to sleep, speaking to him in a language that hadn’t left his lips in close to one thousand years before he had awoken to find Antoine watching over him.
Snow nodded.
She didn’t tell him why she was here. She pushed away from the post and twirled so her back was to him, the white layers of her dress spinning outwards to reveal the outline of her shapely legs beneath. Snow barely bit back the growl that rumbled up his throat at the sight of her long slender legs.
Her black wings shifted and stretched, almost spanning his room before settling against her back again.
“I do not enjoy your choice of decor,” she said in a bright tone and looked over her shoulder, past her black wing to him. “It is morbid. Mortals would call it depressing.”
Snow folded his arms across his chest. “You know that I am not mortal, and I feel this decor suits me and this place.”
He smiled slowly. Desire to make her blush again so he could see it shot through him.
“You must know the sort of business I run with the others here, and the sort of creature I am.”
“I do not care.” She twirled to face him, affording him another glimpse of long legs that would have made him blush if he hadn’t been in perfect control of himself.
“Again, female, why are you here?” If she didn’t answer this time, he might leave the bed, grab her shoulders and shake the answer out of her.
She was petite, delicate in appearance, but his senses warned that she was powerful and more than able to put him on his arse if he tried to harm her.
“I said… I was watching over you.” Her black eyebrows pinched in a frown. “Do you not listen?”
Snow scowled back at her and scoffed at her words. “My own guardian angel? I have done nothing to deserve an angel watching over me. Your kind should be put to better use, given to those who deserve you.”
Her frown hardened. “You do not deserve compassion?”
There was an edge to her expression and the hint of her emotions that he could detect that told him she didn’t believe him worthy of compassion either and that she hated being here. Confusing female.
He wanted to pick her up on her feelings towards him and ask her why she was here when she harboured such dark, un-angel-like emotions. Did she despise all of his kind or just him? Had he done something to gain her scorn?
It bothered him but he pushed it to the back of his mind, unwilling to contemplate the notion that she may hate all vampires because it would inevitably lead to him deciding that she was a danger to everyone at the theatre and then his bloodlust would break free of the tattered threads that restrained it.
She had been in the room before, and he didn’t know how many other times she had visited him over the twenty-one days he had been out of his mind. If she were a threat, she would have attacked before now.
No. Attacking the theatre or killing him were not the reasons she was here. There was another one, one she was unwilling to share with him right now.
The angel meandered around his room again, the longest feathers of her black wings almost grazing the wooden floor with each silent step.
She delighted in the strangest things, such as looking through his drawers and pulling out items of clothing and holding them up for inspection. She rummaged through his wardrobe too, and held more than one shirt against her small, wickedly sensual body.
Those shirts would smell like her, and he had the stupidest urge to wear one of them tonight and carry her sweet scent with him to the party. It was almost as pathetic as the pleasing image of her dressed in only one of his shirts, curled up asleep and sated on his bed, that leaped into his mind.
She hummed as she poked at everything on top of his dressing tab
le again and thumbed through several of his books. The same melody she had sung to him. The sound of it soothed his bloodlust and relaxed him, and he found himself enjoying her company.
She turned on the spot again and looked from his black-tiled bathroom and the broken mirror to him, her dark eyebrows rising as her gaze fell to his injured hand.
“Why did you taste your blood only to spit it into the sink?” That question leaving her lips caught him off guard and almost knocked the wind from him.
“You saw?”
“Of course,” she said in a matter of fact tone, as though it shouldn’t surprise him that he hadn’t been as alone as he had thought.
“From here?” He didn’t like the thought of her being in his room, invisible to his senses, watching him. It stirred his bloodlust, reawakening the sense that she was a threat to him.
She shook her head.
“No. From my home.” Another pretty blush stained her cheeks. “I did not watch when I should not have. I only saw you strike the mirror and what came afterwards, and then I turned my gaze away from you again.”
Snow raised a single eyebrow at her. He hadn’t even considered that she could have been watching him in the shower. The thought of this beauty secretly watching him bathe had something other than his bloodlust rising and he cleared his throat and shifted his leg so she wouldn’t notice.
“Why did you spit out your blood?”
Snow averted his gaze, settling it on the black covers beside his left hip. Why indeed. He would sound stupid if he told her the truth, but the thought of lying to her didn’t sit well in his stomach, causing it to squirm worse than his hunger did.
He sighed. “Because it tastes foul.”
Snow lifted his head again, locking his eyes on her, monitoring her for a sign that might tell him what she thought of that. Her expression remained placid but the pink tint on her cheeks darkened as he stared at her and a flicker of curiosity reignited in her striking eyes.
Unleash (Vampire Erotic Theatre Romance Series Book 6) Page 5
