by Juliet Lyons
Tearing my gaze away, I look up at the grinning barman. “I think you might be right.”
When I eventually flick my eyes back to Gerhard’s table, I freeze. He’s no longer there. The door to the restaurant is closing, a gust of wind blowing in and ruffling the hair of the patrons. If it were any other vampire, I would think he made a swift exit to save face, but he is one of Anastasia’s minions, and suddenly, I’m very worried for Jenna Gold.
At the other end of the bar is an open hatch for diners to watch the chef at work in the kitchen. When I first arrived, a man in starched chef’s whites was standing, slicing venison with an oversized carving knife and fork. The knife is still there, wedged into a pinky-brown splatter of remains. As soon as the barman turns to serve another customer, I leap off the stool. Speeding to the hatch, I seize the knife and blur out into the night before anyone can so much as blink.
I dart through the narrow, cobblestone alleyway running adjacent to the restaurant, following the smell of stale food and spices, hoping to find the backyard empty.
It’s not. Just as I suspected, Gerhard has his prey pinned to the brick wall, her face obscured by the thick ham of his neck, greasy hair curling over the back of his collar. There is no mistaking his intentions. I edge closer, the knife gripped tightly in my hand, moonlight flashing off its silver blade, as the girl begins to struggle.
If he wasn’t cawing with laughter, he would hear my approach. But he doesn’t, intent as he is on the girl thrashing for freedom within his iron grip.
I swing the crescent of metal wide, putting all my strength into the tip of the blade, and bury it in Gerhard’s dough-like neck. It sears through flesh, his decapitated head instantly disintegrating to dust and bone as it flies through the air. The rest of his body begins to fizz and hiss as the years claim him. His corpse drops to the concrete, twisting like a snake, shrinking to nothing more than a pile of clothes filled with dust and bone.
Only then do I look into the face of the woman collapsed in a terrified huddle at the bottom of the wall.
My stomach clenches. I wonder if I’m going mad. “Silver?”
Her wide, gray eyes meet mine, terror melting to relief. “Logan!”
She propels herself upward and I catch her in my arms, holding her shaking body tightly against mine. “What the hell is going on?” I ask into the top of her head, stroking her hair. “Jesus, Silver, he was about to murder you.”
I feel wet tears against my T-shirt, her hands clutching fistfuls of my denim jacket. “Logan, I think I’ve broken something—my back.” She looks down at the remains of Gerhard, and at the dusty carving knife lying on the ground beside him. “Since when did you turn into Buffy the Vampire Slayer?”
I shake my head. “Since when did you start dating psychos?”
Her eyes flick back to me, narrowing to slits. Hands on my chest, she shoves me away. “How did you know where to find me? Are you following me again?”
As the last word leaves her lips, she sways, stumbling back into my arms. “I hate you,” she mumbles. “This isn’t hugging. It’s a matter of necessity. If I thought I could raise my arm without fainting, I’d slap your face.”
In spite of the situation, I smile into her hair. “We need to get out of here. Can you climb onto my back?”
“I need the hospital, Logan,” she says, hanging limp as a rag doll in my arms.
I hold her steady. “I can fix you better than a hospital can. I’m going to lift you fireman style, just hang over my back. Leave the rest to me.”
Stooping down, I grab her around the knees and toss her over my shoulder, holding her in place by the thighs.
“I think I’m going to be sick,” she mutters. “Wait! I need my handbag.”
I turn on the spot, scanning the ground. “Where is it?”
“I can’t remember exactly. I was too busy getting murdered, remember?”
“Jeez, Silver. Do you ever stop with the sass?”
A short distance away, beneath an open, frosted-glass window is a dark lump on the concrete. I leap across and snatch it up. “Got it.”
“Don’t drop it. I’m on contract with the mobile.”
I let out a snort of derision. “Are you ready?”
Without waiting for an answer, I take flight, leaping onto the roof of the restaurant and heading toward Chelsea. Despite the situation and the fact that Silver is groaning with pain and nausea, a quiet part of me rejoices at having her close again. Her fresh, lemony scent eases the ache that’s been building in my heart since that morning last week when I left her. I try not to think about the fact that I’ve just killed one of Anastasia’s wayward servants, or that very shortly, I am going to have to tell Silver exactly what I was doing at the restaurant.
Outside her basement flat, a light, misty drizzle has started to fall. I rummage in Silver’s bag for her keys. “Are you okay back there?” I ask, patting her thigh with one hand and twisting the key in the lock with the other.
“Fan-fucking-tastic,” she says. Her voice, though croaky, drips with sarcasm. “How do you think I am?”
I kick open the door with my toe. “Home sweet home,” I say, dropping her bag on the sofa and flicking on the light.
“Fuck you,” she mutters.
“Let’s not get ahead of ourselves, Silver. We have to get you patched up before we can start any of those shenanigans.”
There is a small grunt of disgust in reply.
In the bedroom, I lower her carefully onto the foot of her bed. “Can you sit?”
She gasps in pain, shaking her head. “No, it hurts to sit down.”
I flip her onto her side. “Is that better?”
“Yes,” she says, eyes screwed shut, face half-buried in a fold of the cream-colored duvet. “It hurts at the base of my spine.”
I stroke her cheek, damp with spent tears and rain, and tuck a strand of silky, auburn hair behind her ear. “I’m going to need to take off your clothes to fix it.”
Her lids flip open, gray eyes flashing with angry fire. “Are you taking the piss?”
I hold up my hands. “I swear, it’s for medicinal purposes. It only works skin on skin. Naked.” My eyebrows, which often have a will of their own, waggle suggestively on the last word.
She continues to glower at me, top lip curled. “If you’re doing this to take advantage—”
“I’m not,” I cut in. “Besides, it’s not like I haven’t seen it all before. There isn’t a square inch of your body I haven’t kissed, licked, or stroked. Or did I miss a spot?”
For a second, her eyes soften, a breath catching in her throat, then the steely glare returns, water freezing to ice. “Fine,” she barks. “Strip me.”
I try unsuccessfully to stifle a smile and she catches me, a brow slanting almost vertically into her forehead. To my shame, my trousers tighten, the thought of kissing her smudged, angry mouth sending a flame of desire pulsating through my body.
“Stop looking at me like that,” she snaps.
“Like what?” I ask, eyes wide with innocence.
“Like you’re not the same man who’s been ignoring my calls for the past week.”
I frown, tenderly grasping her under the arms and turning her over. “I’ll take your jacket off first.”
She buries her face in the duvet, gasping in pain as I remove the torn blazer. Beneath it, her skin is red raw, whorls of scarlet bruises trailing across her back like miniature crop circles. Her white, spaghetti-strap top sticks to the places where she’s bled in dark-red splotches.
“Bastard,” I whisper, clenching my fists in anger. “He’s lucky he’s already dead.”
“Is it really bad?” Silver asks, her voice muffled by the duvet.
“There’s some bleeding. This bit may hurt,” I say, unzipping her strappy top.
“Which bit might hur—ow!”
/> I peel off the fabric like a Band-Aid, exposing the cuts where the rough-brick wall punctured her skin. To get a better angle, I straddle her, one knee on either side of her hips. Then I lean down, running my tongue over the scrapes, the skin instantly puckering, knitting back together. Her blood tastes sweet, familiar, and I’m ashamed by the violent twitch of arousal in my jeans.
Silver moans loudly. “God,” she says, lifting her head. “That feels better already.”
Straightening up, I unzip her tight pencil skirt and roll it off her hips. I suppress a groan at the sight of her pert bottom encased in a pair of plain black knickers. They’re different from the ones she usually wears, which probably means she never intended for them to be seen. Thank God. I rub my hands together and place them on her shoulder blades, trying to ignore the growing bulge between my legs as I run flat palms down her back. When I reach the base of her spine, there is a click in her tailbone.
“The pain’s gone,” she says with surprise.
I trail my hands farther south, resting them on the soft, warm flesh of her buttocks. “It was your coccyx. Fractured, probably. It’s fixed.”
Pushing up on her elbows, she glares over her shoulder at me. “Your hands are lingering on my ass rather a long time. Is that broken too?”
For a minute, I forget Gerhard, forget that I’m going to have to tell her the truth. Our eyes lock. Mesmerized, I stare into her gray eyes, a flutter of dark lashes on pink cheeks. I squeeze her peachy butt, the erection in my pants at full mast, desperate to be buried in those perfect, creamy thighs. “It could be,” I say, my voice a low growl. “I think a full-body examination might be in order.”
Her mouth opens, a bead of moisture clinging to the cleft of her upper lip. We stare, held together by an invisible string of tension, and I lean forward, pushing her hair to one side, my mouth irresistibly drawn to the pulse battering like a jackhammer in the side of her neck.
“Silver,” I murmur.
But before my lips can connect, she twists, flipping over and shoving me away. “Stop,” she says. “Don’t you dare touch me.”
I sit back, hands dropping to my sides. “Let me explain.”
“There’s nothing to explain,” she hisses, holding her unzipped top over her breasts.
The gesture breaks my heart. On one of her days off, we spent the whole day naked. I know from memory every line of her curves, every secret fold of her body. There is no need for modesty—she covers up because I’ve hurt her. I see it in her eyes, gray and stormy as a wind-whipped sea, and the only comfort I have is that to feel so betrayed, she must have felt as deeply as I do.
“I had to back away, Silver,” I begin. “For both our sakes.”
“Why? So I didn’t get too attached? So when you move on to your next woman, you don’t have yet another girl showing up at your flat in a trench coat and spoiling things?”
I frown. “What?”
She breaks my gaze, swinging her legs over the side of the bed and standing up. A pulse throbs in her tightly clenched jaw. “Last night. I went to your flat.” Instead of making eye contact, she stares at a corner of the ceiling. “I had an interesting conversation with a blond in a beige overcoat. She said this is your modus operandi. You sleep with women and then chuck them away when you’re bored. Like you did to her.”
“Collette,” I say miserably.
Her gray eyes cut back to mine. “Oh, it has a name.”
“I slept with her last year, before I met you. She was just a one-night stand. I never even really liked her. Silver, you don’t really think I’ve not answered your calls because I’m bored?”
Shivering, she folds her arms over her chest, pinning the falling top in place. She looks vulnerable, more so than I’ve ever seen her, worrying at her bottom lip. I imagine this is how she looked as a child, as she still looks on the inside, beneath the sarcasm and the anger. I’m struck by the urge to protect her, heal her—inside and out.
“You disappeared,” she says in a broken voice—the same voice I heard once before, when I’d picked up the photo of her mother in the lounge. “I became a desperado stalking the streets of London with Google Maps. I signed up to an ancestry website just so I could find the apothecary you said you worked at.”
I bound across the room, but she holds a hand up. “Don’t.” Her eyes finally meet mine. “It’s over. Even if this Collette person does have you all wrong.”
Drawing back like a wounded puppy, I sink down onto the edge of the bed. “I have to tell you the truth, Silver, and then you can say it’s over.”
She shivers again, rubbing the sides of her arms, and I pull my jacket off, standing up to wrap it around her.
Snatching it, she holds it over her chest. “What truth? What other grubby little secrets are knocking around your closet?”
“You’re cold. Put a robe on.”
She spins around, grabbing a T-shirt from a chair next to her bed. “First time you’ve ever asked me to put clothes on,” she mutters, tugging it over her head. As the crumpled top slips to the floor, my eyes snag on the brief flash of her full breasts before the material covers them. “Stop staring at my boobs.”
“I wasn’t,” I lie. “It’s my T-shirt, that’s all. I was wondering where I left it.”
“Well, you can take it with you when you leave in a few moments, can’t you?”
I motion to the bed. “Will you sit?”
Glaring at me, she climbs onto the bed, leaning back against the pillows. “Spit it out. I’d like to take a shower.”
I sink back into the folds of the crumpled duvet, trying not to let my thoughts drift to the showers we took together in her cramped bathroom—our bodies slick with soapy water as I slid inside her, slender legs wrapped tight around my hips.
“There’s a reason I was at the restaurant tonight,” I begin. “A reason I showed up here that night you ran across the garden and slapped me outside Etta Marlow’s front door.” I sigh, toying with a button on the bottom of the quilt. “You remember I told you about Anastasia? About how much I hated her?”
Her tone softens. “Yes, of course I remember.”
I look up, filled with wild hope, but her eyes are still as hard and unforgiving as steel blades.
“Even after I went back to Ireland, I was still tied to her. A vampire remains linked to their ancient for the rest of their lives afterward. There are laws, and if you break them, it’s punishable by death.”
“Laws?” she asks, frowning.
“A code of conduct. It’s supposed to stop chaos from breaking out among vampires, but some, like Anastasia, use it to manipulate and control. She loves toying with people.”
She sighs loudly. “What does this have to do with me?”
I smile grimly. “I’m getting to it, I promise. Even after she let me go, she continued to toy with me—threatening me, goading me. If my family wasn’t gypsies, they would’ve been in grave danger. But thankfully they were good at slipping into the shadows, and like I said, I never knew where they went after that night I showed up like a ghost by the campfire. It was during this time I had the bloodlust pretty badly. I don’t remember much. It’s sort of like asking an alcoholic to recall his past debauchery, but I know I never killed anyone.”
Silver doesn’t speak. She continues to watch and wait with slanted brow. My fingers itch to touch her. Sitting here with no physical contact feels unnatural. Even when we were arguing, I always managed to find a way to hold her. Now, I don’t dare. Not until I’ve said what needs to be said.
“One night, I was drinking, for want of a better word. The donor was a barmaid. I healed her, just like I did all of them. But I was being watched. Another ancient, Ronin McDermott, was at the tavern. He saw everything—my gift, what a mess I was. He offered to break my bond with Anastasia.”
“How did he do that?”
“The shari
ng of blood. A simple ritual. We did it palm to palm, the way you sometimes see kids do it, though it can be done from any part of the body. An ancient’s blood, or venom if they bite you, overpowers the vessel it enters, even when the person is already a vampire. It’s like a rebirth.”
“This guy Ronin—was he good?”
“Compared to Anastasia he’s a saint. He’s still around,” I say, seeing her frown deepen.
“So now you’re linked to him?”
“Yes, but more than that—I owe him. It’s not a matter of honor either; it’s life and death. He may be a better person than Anastasia, but he’s still an ancient—a demon. If I were to betray him in any way, he will snuff me out. I’ve seen it happen before.”
Silver gulps, a crease forming between her brows. “Carry on.”
“When I lost the clinic in Peru, I came back to London. To work for him. He runs a club where he conducts most of his business. Like I said, I owe him. I could hardly refuse.”
“What kind of work do you do?” she asks suspiciously.
I take a deep breath. “The club is a place where humans go to meet vampires. It’s been around for years. Long before the whole world knew about us. My job is to make sure no one gets hurt. If they do, I heal them. That’s why Ronin was so keen to acquire me all those years ago. Like I told you before, there aren’t many vampires who can do what I do.” I break her gaze, focusing instead on the selection of beads and belts hanging off the end of the white metal bedstead. “Then New Year’s Eve, he gave me something a little different. I was heading out to see him the night we met—that’s why I left you at your fake house. When I got to the club, he told me about V-Date, that the authorities are using it to spy on vampires.”
She flinches, the color draining from her face. Until now, I’ve ignored the fact she was on a date this evening under a false name. But now there’s no denying it—her pale features freeze in horror. I know beyond a shadow of a doubt that I’ve failed—both to glamour her and to win her over enough to stop her getting involved with the police.
