by L. D. Rose
“I need to speak with you,” he said, baritone low, his presence overwhelming as he towered over her. “We can talk here or in private.”
She looked into his slitted eyes and knew she didn’t have much of a choice. Did she want to relay everything she’d said to Dax in front of everyone? Was she strong enough to keep her cool as they all stared her down and judged her?
Probably not.
She cleared her throat, hoping her fear didn’t show. “In private. Please.”
He nodded and indicated the door. She turned away, feeling the hybrids’ intense regard again. She wasn’t used to giving someone her back and it made her skin crawl as she headed out into the elaborate hallway of the upper floor. She started to second-guess herself, wondering if it really was a good idea to speak to him alone after all. If she’d stayed in the conference room, she would at least have some witnesses, in case anything happened. But would they help her if something did?
Probably not.
She pushed the doubts away. If Blaze trusted Rome, then she had to learn to do the same, no matter how difficult it was.
Valerie took a deep, unsteady breath as she spun to face him, opening her mouth in preparation to defend herself.
“You don’t have to explain anything to me,” Rome said before she uttered a word as he closed the mahogany double doors behind him. “But I need your help.”
“My help?” she asked, confused.
Rome strode down the hallway, gesturing for her to follow. She quickened her pace to catch up to him. The corridor was dark, the gorgeous details of it slowly being consumed by the night.
Halfway down, he suddenly stopped to face her and she nearly collided with him. She recoiled, her heart leaping in her throat as she put distance between them. Her hand instinctively went for her gun at the small of her back, even though it would be useless against him.
He stood in front of one of the huge picture windows, the light of the moon framing him in silver and lining the irises of his golden eyes. The corner of his mouth lifted, and she decided right then and there that she was scared to death of him.
“I’m not going to hurt you, Val.”
She stared at him, hand still wrapped around the handle of her PPK. Blaze had said the same thing not so long ago. “You said you needed my help.” She didn’t acknowledge his remark because, unlike Blaze, she didn’t believe him. If he had to, he would hurt her—maybe not physically but mentally. Especially if it involved his brother’s life.
“I need to know if Blaze marked you.”
He said it so bluntly she wasn’t sure if she heard him right. “Marked me? You mean—”
“Took a bite.”
The mark between her legs pulsed to life and she nearly gasped at the unexpected sensation. The idea that Rome had anything to do with it raised her hackles as she swallowed down her fear and lit it on fire. “What, you’re not going to find out for yourself?”
He pitched a sigh, the air whistling through his nostrils as his gaze turned hard. “It may be hard to believe, Detective, but I prefer to ask rather than take.”
Valerie set her jaw, clenched it, forcing her hand back to her side, away from her gun. Yes, it was hard to believe, and she didn’t believe him for a minute. Not after what he’d done to her colleagues at the station. “What does Blaze marking me have to do with this?”
“I can trace him through it,” Rome said, as if it were no sweat off his back. “The fresher it is, the better.”
She stilled, her blood slowing in her veins as his words seeped into her mind. Fresher. Christ. She opened her mouth, closed it, opened it, closed it. Finally, she uttered, “How?”
“The mark leaves a psychic imprint behind, a link if you will. Did Blaze tell you that?”
Blaze’s voice murmured against her skull, the ghost of his touch brushing her inner thigh. If it let me sense you, your wants, your needs . . . If I could feel what you feel, would you regret it?
Valerie tried to swallow around the lump in her throat. “Yes.”
“If I connect with him through that link, I’ll be able to find him, but it depends on how strong it is. If he’s only marked you once, the link will be weak. The more time passes, the faster it fades.” Rome started moving again. “We need to do this quickly, if you’ll let me.”
She followed him, keeping her distance. If you’ll let me. As if she had an option. What he said made sense, but she knew nothing about this psychic business. And if he really could locate Blaze through her, how could she say no? Would she really refuse him, regardless of what it took? Of course not. No matter how hung up she was about Rome’s trait, she would do whatever it took to find Blaze.
But what scared the hell out of her was how Rome planned on extracting that information, and what would happen to her when he did.
Rome stopped at another set of double doors and the locks snapped open. He didn’t have any keys. Valerie gulped, clenching her fists to keep them from trembling.
“Have you done this before?” she asked, anxiety leaking into her voice unchecked. She cleared her throat, tried again. “Traced a mark, I mean.”
He pushed open one of the doors and she realized they stood in front of Blaze’s suite. The faded scent of him drifted out to tease her senses—tobacco, frankincense and myrrh—and it tugged at her heart, burning the backs of her eyes with a renewed threat of tears.
Why did Rome bring her here?
“Yes, I have.” Rome smiled a little as he motioned her inside. “You have nothing to worry about.”
Yeah, right. Her mouth was dry and her palms were sweaty as she stepped inside. The dim recessed lights were on, revealing Blaze’s messy, settled home, filled with life and memories—nothing like her cold, generic apartment back in the Bronx.
“So I’m taking this as a yes?” Rome asked, remaining out in the hallway, watching her with those disarming eyes. “You’ll do this?”
Valerie wrapped her arms around herself and nodded, feeling cold inside, her stomach twisting into knots as bile rose in the back of her throat. A child’s voice whispered through her mind, and she realized it was her own, when she was ten years old.
Leesy let someone in and look what happened to her.
She immediately shut the voice away, locking it back up in the dark closet of her mind. Yes, Rome was frightening, but he wasn’t anything like the leech who’d hurt Elise, or any leech for that matter. Yet Valerie couldn’t help the fear scrambling her insides, because she would have no control over what he was about to do. She would be helpless as she exposed her most private part to someone she hardly knew, someone who could damage that part beyond repair.
And after her mother had lost her mind, Valerie wanted to keep hers intact for as long as humanly possible.
“Will it hurt?” she asked softly, looking away from him, down at the floor, hating how vulnerable she sounded.
“No.” He stepped into the suite and closed the door behind him, the finality of the sound resonating through her. “It won’t. I promise you that.”
She nodded in resignation, still staring at the gold veins in the black marble floor. “Where do you need me to go?”
“Wherever you feel the strongest connection to him.”
She looked at him, his face so guarded and distant, so closed off. Was it some kind of defense mechanism from the bombardment of thoughts and emotions coming off her, or was he just that empty?
She turned toward the bedroom and the fall of his boots resounded behind her.
Unlike the rest of the suite, the bedroom had changed since she’d last been there. The giant sleigh bed was unmade, a tangle of red satin sheets, and two IV poles stood at the far corner with empty bags of saline dangling from each. Valerie’s chest ached at the sight. Blaze must’ve recovered here. She’d made the bed before they
left for the terminal and he’d teased her, laughing that wonderful, booming laugh of his.
What’s the point when we’re just going to mess it up again? He’d said with a devilish grin as he drew her against him and nuzzled her neck, so confident, so relaxed, even though they were heading straight into a war zone. Cleaning had always been a nervous habit of hers—as if it hadn’t been obvious from her apartment—and she’d been very nervous then.
Hell, she was very nervous now.
She pivoted to face Rome as he hit the lights and dimmed them. He didn’t need light; she knew he was trying to make her comfortable. She appreciated the gesture, but it wouldn’t work. She’d nearly killed the man she loved and now he was gone. For all she knew, he could be lying in a gutter somewhere, or back in the clutches of a real monster.
God, this was all her fault.
Valerie sank down onto the foot of the bed, grabbing a mound of satin sheets and clutching them against her chest. She inhaled Blaze’s scent, wondering if she would ever smell him, see him, touch him again. Rome leaned against the archway, waiting ever so patiently, giving her whatever time she needed.
We need to do this quickly, if you’ll let me.
“I’m ready,” she said as she folded her legs beneath her, sitting Indian style with the sheets bunched in her lap. She glanced at him, hugging the sheets like a lifeline. Like Peter, the stuffed white rabbit who’d kept her company after Elise died.
Rome pushed off the archway with that catlike grace of his and squatted down in front of her, his eyes iridescent beneath the recessed lights. He smelled like leather, aftershave, and clove. Valerie had never been this close to him before, and the closer he came, the more exotic he looked. Many of his genes weren’t of the European variety; they were more the flavor of merciless sun and desert sand. Blaze had the same effect, except his gave way to wet heat and rainforest. She noticed a leather cord around Rome’s neck that disappeared under the black shirt of his battle uniform, the outline of a medallion popping out over his sternum.
“Where did he mark you?”
She placed her hand on her inner thigh, panic rising at the thought of him touching her there. His expression was neutral as he lifted his hands, showing them to her.
“I’m going to put them on your knees. Nowhere else. That okay?”
Relief washed over her momentarily and she nodded. She nearly flinched at the contact, expecting some kind of electric shock, but nothing happened. It was just a man’s warm hands on her knees, nothing more, nothing less.
“I need you to relax,” he murmured, his baritone soothing, pitching deeper. “Breathe fully.”
She did and it came out shaky. She tried again and it was a little better this time.
“Close your eyes.”
She closed them.
“And think of him.”
Blaze. Valerie thought of when they’d first met, of how intimidating and infuriating he was, with his fatalistic attitude and crazy tattoos. She remembered when he admitted what he was to her, how he’d been so anxious, smoking like a fiend and lighting cigarettes with his bare hands. She thought of how he’d always asked her to join him wherever he went, allowing her to be involved rather than attempting to lock her up like some damsel in distress.
She remembered their feverish first kiss, the intense way they’d made love, the discovery of that terrifying mark between her legs.
And as that mark pulsed to life, as a curious buzz coursed from her knees to her skull, Valerie thought of the compassion he’d shown her when she told him about her family, of the fear she’d felt when he disappeared beneath the earth, of the overwhelming relief at the sight of his stumbling form. She remembered the anger and the horror that had ripped through her when she watched him kill an innocent, of the hate and love she felt when he showed up at her door, unaware of what she’d seen. The way he’d lifted her gun between his eyes and told her to pull the goddamn trigger, as if he’d never really learned to live with himself, and if she couldn’t, well, neither could he.
Then, suddenly, the visions changed as the mark between her legs burned hotter. Valerie saw a woman in a black burqa on a very familiar bench, saw the blue sky as she collapsed to the ground, felt the horror of paralysis and the terror of helplessness. She saw the black roof of the Jeep, the dead skyscrapers of Manhattan, a black spider web frame of broken glass as she was dragged across a travertine floor. She saw exotic red marble, a colorful ceiling fresco, the rich wood paneling of an elevator door. She saw a beautiful Arabic woman reveal herself, not a woman but a vampire, before a monstrous African male filled her vision and injected her with a fear unlike anything she’d ever felt.
Then there was anger—God, there was so much anger—and she knew the male was no other than Cyrus. A breathtaking skyscape of ravaged lower Manhattan lit her mind as the paralysis faded, as the numbness receded. A rumbling word echoed against her eardrums—Miami—before a pair of knife blade fangs tore into her throat, sending a jolt of excruciating pain through her.
And she blacked out.
The mark rapidly cooled into a block of ice inside her skin and Valerie’s eyes snapped open. She clutched Rome’s wrists desperately, digging her fingernails into him, drawing blood. He stared at her, his hands still gripping her knees, his goat pupils nearly engulfing the swirling fury of his irises.
Her blood roared in her ears, her heart punched against her ribcage, and she felt like she’d been sucked of oxygen. She tried to catch her breath, gasping for air, reeling from the horrific out-of-body experience as her scattered mind tried to put the pieces of the terrifying images into the frame of the final picture.
“He’s—he’s in . . .”
“The Chrysler building,” Rome finished for her, his voice a low growl. “And we need to go. Now.”
Blaze slowly became aware of the lips against his throat, of the loud suckling in his ear.
Nabila was wrapped around him, mouth sealed over the wound Cyrus had ripped open. Her fangs dug into him, tearing at the fibers of his neck muscles. She clung to him desperately, her body grinding against him, her hands pinning his head in place. A warm tingle started in the back of his skull and spread through his brain, making him slow and lightheaded. He felt so weak, and if she hadn’t been holding his head up, he wouldn’t have the strength.
They were already sucking the life out of him.
Blaze tried to swallow but his mouth was dry as the Sahara. Nabila made little mewling noises, and goddamn it to hell, his wretched body responded to her. Hatred and self-disgust flooded him, but it did nothing to stop his dick from getting hard, even though he was running out of blood to fill it.
God, he couldn’t do this again. He couldn’t sink back into that black hole of nothingness where he’d escaped to all those years ago because it was no longer there. He couldn’t watch all of his efforts at recovery flush down the toilet, couldn’t bear the thought of losing the pieces of his already fractured soul little by little, until they finally shattered him completely. He wouldn’t survive it this time, at least not mentally.
And he was deathly afraid of becoming the vessel Cyrus wanted. Because without those pieces that kept him human, he would be nothing more than a monster, nothing more than a mindless demon who would destroy everything and everyone in his path.
And he knew Cyrus would first turn him loose on those he loved most. Starting with Valerie.
The image of her invaded his brain, and for a split second, his twisted mind placed her at his throat, gnawing on his jugular. He tried to tamp down the rogue thought, but it escaped him and only worsened his arousal. His shallow breath quickened as his gums grew tight, pushing his fangs against his lips.
You’re a sick fuck.
“That’s it,” Nabila panted in his ear and he smelled his blood on her breath, heavy and metallic. “Think of he
r, hybrid.”
Anger flared as he struggled against her, chains rattling, knowing his attempts at pulling away were futile. The bitch was connected to him now, wasn’t she, so she knew his every thought, sensed his every move, felt his every emotion.
She laughed at his pathetic efforts to escape, her voice a rich, husky purr that made him want to tear his middle ear out. She slowly licked the line of his jaw, tightening his skin and making it crawl.
“Who’s the whore now, Knight?”
She struck him like a snake, harder this time, burying her teeth deeper inside him. He gasped as white-hot pain lanced through him, firing through every nerve in his useless body and drawing his muscles tight.
“Easy, habibati.” Chimola’s rough bass tugged at Blaze’s brain. “We don’t want to kill him now, do we?”
Blaze peeled open his two-ton eyelids with much struggle. Nightfall had cast its black shroud over the city, blanketing the skyscrapers in darkness and wiping most of them from his vision. Once upon a time, millions of lights lit up this very skyscape, but that pulse had died long ago. The skeleton of Manhattan was now only framed by moonlight, without a spark of its once vital life in sight.
Cyrus leaned against the balcony windowpane, watching with gleaming eyes and a languid smile as Nabila chewed on Blaze’s neck. Blaze would’ve done just about anything to cut that fucking smile off his face. The leech glowed brightly from the fresh hybrid blood running through his veins, looking entirely pleased and sated. He smoked a cigarette, one of Blaze’s, the butt pinned between his thick lips and the tip shining like a star. Cyrus snapped a flame between his fingers—on, off, on, off—as if he were playing with a Zippo. The fire was brighter now, stronger and more vibrant than before, empowered by Blaze’s blood.
