by V M Black
I remembered not wanting to go to the introduction, but even now I couldn’t capture the feeling of resistance that I’d had, only the anger and fear that he’d taken that choice away from me.
Choices. It had seemed like I had so many, but when all roads but one were dead ends, what did a choice even mean? All I wanted was one real choice, one viable alternative. But in Dorian’s world, my future had been mapped out even before I had been changed, and now there was no escape.
“I’ve already told you that missing the introduction simply was not an option,” Dorian said. “And I thought I was helping with the dancing. I didn’t mean to cause you distress.” His eyes tightened at the last word. “But there are circumstances in which I think even you would call certain alterations justified.”
He reached the top of the stairs and pressed a latch, and another door sprang open. I recognized his bedroom from my glimpse through the door the other day.
“I don’t think so,” I said, frowning up at him as he crossed the room.
“Before my research made our offer appealing to those humans whose need was great enough to overcome the obvious risks, many agnates with objections to killing the innocent chose our candidates from among the dregs of society,” Dorian said. I blinked at what seemed an abrupt change of subject. “The desperately ill, the hopelessly mad, and the criminal. Do you remember meeting Zhang Wei?”
I nodded. He was a cognate, one of the handful among the guests who weren’t some admixture of European, Middle Eastern, or North African descent, and he’d shared Isabella’s dead-eyed gaze.
“In his human life, he lusted after his brother’s wife,” he said, opening the door that led to my bedroom and carrying me through. “He seduced her or raped her—the story isn’t clear, and at that time in China, there was little attention paid to the difference. When she threatened to tell her husband, he killed her children and splayed out their bodies on the marriage bed that he had defiled with her for her to find, and after she made the discovery, he attacked and killed her, too.”
I shrank back in his arms. “Damn.”
He continued the story. “Ling-Ling visited him the night before he was to be executed. He survived the feeding and was bonded to her. She needed him, wanted him, loved him, as she must—but he was a monster. Until she wiped all of that away.”
He set me on my feet in the center of the room.
“How?” I demanded, a cold horror in the pit of my stomach. “How could she love someone who had done something like that?”
“I have killed so many more, Cora,” he said sadly. “How could you want me?”
He was right. I knew he was, but still I needed him, craved his touch, his voice, his presence. The bond was a kind of madness, but at that moment, I couldn’t even want to get away, as I knew I should.
I shivered. I really was crazy.
“And what about you?” I challenged. “What if I were a doll-woman, too? Could you feel for it what you claim to feel for me?”
“Cora, I don’t want you to be an Isabella,” he said. “Unlike Etienne, I do not believe that is the best for you. But if some terrible accident befell you and crippled your mind or disfigured your body in a way that couldn’t heal, I would not—could not—change.”
There was a peculiar reassurance in that, a security that was frighteningly inviting. At the same time, how real could a feeling be if it were so completely involuntary? Could he even love, if the love wasn’t based on who I was but on some strange chemical reaction? How could that be a love at all, if it didn’t matter what I was? How could it be more than a compulsion?
And what did I feel for him? What name should it have? If I could call it lust and stop there, I wouldn’t be so afraid.
“But you’ll change me anyway,” I said. “In other ways, if it’s important enough to you—or if you want it badly enough, maybe you’ll change me without even realizing it.”
“You also change me,” Dorian said, his voice low. “When we agnates are alone, the burden of existence becomes crippling. So many years, one after another, days that feel like they have been lived before, when even the hours feel used, so heavy and empty at once....”
He trailed off, then continued more matter-of-factly. “It wears on you until you chase the rush, doing anything to get a momentary thrill so that you feel, at least for a moment, alive. Or you shut out everything and everyone and slowly descend into the kind of isolation that you never come back from—the senility of the agnates is not something that is ever recoverable. The only escape for that crushing isolation is a cognate. A bond. The other, missing half. You. And the bond is never entirely one way.”
Not me, I thought. Not me, specifically, but any cognate, any girl who didn’t die....
But how many human men in the world might I fall for, if I were free from Dorian? How many chance meetings might, under the right circumstances, fill a human definition of true love?
How different was I from him, really? Did it matter that he might have bonded to another if the one he ended up with was me?
I didn’t even know whether I could trust that thought, whether it was truly mine at all.
Dorian turned me away from him and untied the corset laces. This time, he worked them loose so that the hooks on the front could be slid apart. I sighed with relief as the garment dropped from my body, and he pulled me back against him for a moment and kissed the top of my head.
He released me, and I turned back around. I was naked now except for his jewels in my ears, at my wrist and my throat. And I was increasingly aware of the wetness that was running down my leg.
I cleared my throat. “Um. If you don’t mind, I need to use the bathroom.”
He grinned then, an expression I’d never seen on him before. Standing there, with his hair tousled and that look on his face, he almost seemed human, as if he hadn’t been confessing his own atrocities just moments before.
“Be my guest,” he said. “I will join you in a minute.”
Chapter Eight
My heart sped up, and I ducked quickly into the bathroom. I should have been acutely self-conscious, I thought. I’d felt that way on Wednesday, my first time with him. And what had happened in the study had been more intimate than that, more intimate than I’d imagined possible. But now any sense of embarrassment seemed to have gone.
Could it be because he didn’t want me to feel it? I tried that idea out in my mind. I didn’t think so. I thought that I was changing on my own, or at least in my own response to whatever held me to him.
But it didn’t matter why. Change was dangerous. He was dangerous, desperately so, a threat to everything I was or ever wanted to be. And yet when he’d grinned at me, I’d smiled back, as if he were an ordinary man. As if he didn’t threaten everything I cared about.
I should be running away now, throwing on any clothes I could find and scrambling out of the window after what I had seen that night. The horror of the introduction had shown me just how bad Dorian’s world could be.
But it wouldn’t do any good. I could run away, escape for a day or a week, but I knew that he would eventually find me. And worse, I knew that eventually, I would walk over broken glass to get back to him. No matter what it meant to me.
As long as there was a bond between us, there was no way out.
Already, I hardly recognized my reflection. My ash brown hair was still elegant, if haphazardly so, like nothing that I’d ever worn before, and though Jane Worth’s cosmetics had been smudged, they still gave an illusion of sophistication that I’d never had. A beautiful woman dripping with beautiful jewels in a beautiful house possessed by a beautiful man....
It was all so desperately, dangerously seductive, and it came with a terrible price. I took the jewelry off quickly, setting it on the counter, but the woman in the mirror looked no less strange to me.
There was a knock on the bathroom door.
I turned, my bare feet soundless on the heated marble, and stopped, my hand an inch from the knob
.
Another choice that I didn’t really have. Not because he’d make me but because I couldn’t force myself to stop.
I opened it.
Dorian stood there, dressed in nothing but a pair of dark blue pants. I wondered why he hadn’t paused to put on a shirt and shoes. Could he have wanted to see me so badly?
As badly as I now realized I wanted to see him?
I felt more naked now than I had before, shockingly naked, and I backed away hurriedly at the thrill that went through me.
His gaze raked over me, but all he said was, “If you get dressed, I’ll take you home.”
“Yes,” I said. I’d kept backing up, and now I stood in the center of the room, a dozen feet from the door.
But I made no move toward the dressing room, where my clothes waited for me.
After a long moment in which neither of us moved, he shut the door and hit a button near it. A low hum indicated that a fan had come on somewhere.
“Heat,” he said, catching the question in my expression.
We were going to go. Go away, go to my apartment, where he would leave me alone. That’s what I wanted. It had to be, because this craziness, the lust and the ache and all the things I didn’t want to name, they were all a lie.
But I couldn’t look away from his eyes, searching them, as if they held the secrets of my own soul.
And I said, “Dorian, I can’t. Please don’t make me.”
At those words, he rocked on his toes, and a muscle in his jaw spasmed. The night he’d found me freezing on the road, I’d hit him with all my strength, and he hadn’t even flinched. But now my words made his entire body sway.
Oh, God. What had I done. What was I doing....
“A little while,” he said. “Just an hour longer. And then you have to promise me that you’ll go.”
“Okay.” I was ready to agree to almost anything.
“Okay,” he repeated, and he smiled then, but his eyes looked like something was broken inside.
He crossed to the shower, the transition to which was marked by an arched frameless glass enclosure flush against the basket-weave floor. After tapping on the touch screen on the wall next to the opening, he reached in and manipulated several of the imposing array of chrome knobs and buttons, and water sheeted down like rain from a series of panels in the ceiling as steam rose up to frost the glass.
He extended his hand wordlessly, and I approached, hesitant in spite of my own plea to stay. My body drew tight with awareness of the nearness of him.
I put my hand in his.
He drew me close, his face serious, his eyes shadowed, but all he said was, “Your hair is still up. More or less.”
Without invitation, Dorian began plucking bobby pins from my tousled chignon, dropping them carelessly to the floor. The look in his eyes turned the impersonal action into a caress, and the glorious mess that Jane had created slipped downward until it fell in a mass of waves to just brush my nipples, which hardened at the touch. Dorian’s wicked smile returned, and my heart sped up. Tiny goose bumps rose on my scalp as his fingers searched through my hair for any fasteners that he had missed, and his fingers felt so good, so right in my hair.
“Come here,” Dorian said, hooking an arm around me and pulling me against his body. I obeyed, a little breathless, melting against his strength.
He took my mouth, and I reveled in the insistent demand of his lips and tongue. I felt him harden through the fabric of his pants. An answering ache bloomed between my thighs.
Dorian broke off the kiss. He stepped backward into the sheeting water and pulled me with him, tugging the shower door closed after us.
The shower was warm enough to startle a small yelp from me—I’d become more chilled than I realized, standing naked in the bathroom. But after just a moment, my skin adjusted, and muscles I had not realized were tight began to loosen under the warm, steady wash. The styling products that had kept my hair in place began to flow down into my face, and I screwed my eyes shut and scraped my hair back.
I opened my eyes to catch Dorian looking keenly down at me, water running off the flawless planes of his face.
“Your clothes,” I said reaching out to the waistband of his soaked pants.
He just reached between us and unfastened his pants, peeling off the clinging fabric and flinging it into a corner of the shower.
“Better?” he asked, catching an arm around my waist and pulling me against him. We were front-to-front, and his hardness pressed between our bellies. The strangeness of it, of everything, hit me again.
“I can’t believe I’m here,” I blurted. “Doing this.” I’d wanted to do this. I’d chosen to do this, asked to do it. What was wrong with me? “My friends—they would freak out. They’d kill me. They’d kill you, some rich old pervert taking advantage of an undergrad.”
He caught the nape of my neck and bent his head down to mine, nuzzling against my cheek before brushing his lips to mine.
I shivered and shut my eyes, leaning into him.
“And what would you tell them?” he asked softly.
“I don’t know. I still don’t know what this is,” I admitted. “It’s not like anything I ever expected.” I opened my eyes and pulled back to look at him squarely. “Or wanted.”
His hands slipped over my water-slick body, one on my back, the other cupping my rear and pulling me more firmly against him. My skin flamed with awareness where he touched me.
“But you want it now.” It was not a question.
“Yes,” I breathed. Oh, yes. For as long as he was with me, I would want this—and when we were apart, I would ache for it. It was the bond, had to be the bond.
“This isn’t something your friends can understand.” He kissed my neck, and I shivered as my knees weakened slightly.
“But I don’t understand it, either,” I protested. Who could? I’d known this man—this half-devil, half-angel—for scarcely more than a month. If I didn’t count the time I spent unconscious, I had spent time with him only over seven days. At the third, he’d transported me out of my body, taken my blood because I had given it to him and in return had presented me with a new life. I’d let him do it, wanted him to do it more than I had ever wanted anything. At our forth meeting, I’d tumbled into bed with him, and now, at our seventh, he’d proceeded to frighten me beyond my imagining with the terrible society of his people. Yet I was here again, in his arms.
And I couldn’t want to be anywhere else.
His voice was low in my ear. “You will understand, Cora. We have all the time you need.”
His head dipped to my shoulder, and I leaned back against the cool shower wall as his mouth and the water moved over me, letting the sensations carry me away. The heat was back, the thrumming need that started deep in my womb and lanced along my nerves, into my clit, my nipples, my lips, following his mouth and making me hurt with desire.
Dorian cupped a hand with the lower edge against my breast, holding it away so that the shower ran to fill it up, the trickling edge of water teasing at my nipple. He caressed the hard nub with his thumb through the warmth of the water, and I shivered.
He kissed a line between my breasts, kneeling to lavish my hips and navel with attention. The image of him, on his knees before me, burned into my brain and shook me as much as the feel of his mouth on my body did.
Dorian rose up again to take my other nipple into his mouth, stroking and pulling it into a peak so hard that the juncture of my thighs ached. I grabbed his hair, unable to stop myself, my breath hissing through my teeth.
His hand slipped between us, and he cupped my mound and entrance in one hand, unmoving for a long moment as his mouth tortured first one breast and then the other, the water sheeting down over us.
Then he slid two fingers in to their limit, and I gasped at the friction at my entrance. He half withdrew them to find the place—that place—that had pushed me into climax before. My body knew what was coming next and tightened in response.
“Plea
se,” I said, not even sure whether I meant for him to do it or to spare me—not because I didn’t want it but because I was afraid of what pieces of myself I’d leave behind when I came.
He pressed against it, and I shuddered in his arms. His thumb was still on my mound, and he clasped me, inside and out, rhythmically tightening and loosening his grasp as his mouth continued its assault on my self-control. I spiraled up and up, rocking with him until I went crashing sideways into the heat of another orgasm, my skin so hot that the water felt like ice, my legs giving way so that he had to slip his free arm around me and hold me up, against him.
The waves receded, and I was left, limp and panting, in his arms as he looked down at me, his eyes so dark with desire that the blue had retreated to a thin line around the well of blackness.
“Turn around,” he said, setting me on my feet and turning me so that I faced the shower wall.
Water poured across my too-sensitive skin.
“Lean forward,” he ordered. “More.”
I whimpered as I obeyed, remembering the closet—wanting that again, the force and the urgency and, yes, the edge of pain. I felt thin, pulled to the limit. The marble wall was blessedly cool against my forearms, a welcome counterpoint to the torture of the water.
He nudged my legs apart with his, and I felt him step between them, urging me wider. One hand gripped my hip, and I braced myself. I felt the hard head slide up my thigh, and other hand was between my thighs, opening me and guiding his erection into me.
I gasped as he entered—the head pressed against the place that his hand had just taken to acute sensitivity. I marveled at the sense of being invaded and filled, so alien and intimate, satisfying a void that I hadn’t even known existed a week ago. He held me there, against the shower wall, thrust in so deep so that I could feel the nest of hair at the base pressing against my buttocks, the root of him hard against my entrance. The stillness of him was a torment.
