by Nalini Singh
Whatever the other vampire heard in his voice— or perhaps it was the echo of her punishment— had fear creeping across her face. “My father is the only reason I’m still here,” she whispered, her voice raw. “I’ll be gone from the house of this monster the second he leaves me.”
Nimra stood at the window of her private sitting room, watching Amariyah’s unsteady progress through the dusk to the cottage. Christian had arranged for Fen to be out, so Amariyah would have time to clean herself up. “Fen is very intelligent,” she said to the man who’d entered the room without knocking. “I’m not sure he’ll accept the story about a business trip once he sees her gaunt appearance.” Blood and sleep would revive Amariyah, but it would take hours.
“Christian just sent me a message to say he engineered a delay from the city— they’ll spend the night.”
“Good.” She kept her back to him, knowing he had questions to which he deserved answers. Not because he was her wolf, but because he was becoming more, becoming something she’d never expected.
Now he said, “I brought you some food.”
Turning as Amariyah disappeared from sight, she met that gaze so startlingly bright in the shadowy light of day fading into night. “Do you think you’ll simply wear me down to your way of doing things?”
“Of course.” An unexpected smile that burned through the cold that had lingered in her veins ever since the punishment, as her body remembered that she was not only a being of terrible power, but a feminine creature. “I am a man, after all.”
Knowing she was being charmed, but unable to resist, she walked with him to the informal dining area—where he’d placed a tray full of fruit, sandwiches, and cookies. “This is no meal fit for an angel,” she said when he pulled out a chair.
“I see your smile, my lady Nimra.” A kiss pressed to her nape, a hot intimacy she had not given him permission to take.
“You walk a dangerous road, Noel.”
He rubbed his thumbs along the tendons that ran down the back of her neck, his touch firm and sure. “I never was one for taking the easy path.” His lips against her ear, his body big and solid around her own as he slid his hands down to brace them on the arms of her chair. “But first you must eat.”
When he moved to sit beside her, lifting a succulent slice of peach to her lips, she should’ve reminded him that she was no child. An angel could go without food for long periods and not suffer any ill effects. But the past few days had cut jagged wounds inside her, and Noel, with his rough tenderness, spoke to a part of her that had not seen the light since centuries before Eitriel.
Inexplicable that it should be this vampire, damaged on such a deep level, who should have so profound an impact on her… or perhaps not. Because beyond the shadows in the blue, she glimpsed the wary hope of a brutalized wolf.
So she allowed him to feed her the peach, then slices of pear, bites of sandwich, followed by a rich chocolate cookie. Somewhere along the way, she ended up sitting with her knees pressed up to his chair, his legs on either side of her own. Her hands spread on his thighs, the rock- solid strength of him flexing taut and beautiful under her touch.
Other parts of him were taut, too.
But though his eyes lingered on her lips, his thumb brushing off crumbs that weren’t there, he didn’t seek to come to her bed, this wolf who was starting to entangle himself in her life in a way no man had ever dared to attempt.
Noel didn’t sleep again that night, his mind full of the echoes of evil, the laughter of those who had debased him until he was less than an animal.
“It is done,” Raphael had said to him after it was all over, his face merciless in judgment, his wings glowing with power. “They have been executed.”
At the time, Noel had said, “Good,” with vicious pleasure, but now he knew vengeance alone would never be enough. His attackers had marked him in ways that might never be erased.
“Noel.”
Jerking up his head at that familiar feminine voice, he found Nimra had stepped out into the corridor where he paced in a vain attempt to outrun the laughter. “I woke you.” It was well past midnight.
“Sleep is an indulgence for me, not a necessity.” Eyes of brilliant topaz glimmering with streaks of amber, vivid against the cream of a fluid gown cinched at both shoulders, she said, “I would walk in the gardens.”
He fell into step with her. She said nothing until they reached the beautifully eerie shadows of the woods where the stream originated. “An immortal has many memories.” Her voice was an intimate caress in the night, her words poignant with ancient knowledge. “Even the most painful of them fade in time.”
“Some memories,” he said, “are embedded.” As the glass had been embedded in his flesh. As… other things had been embedded in his body. His hand fisted.
Nimra’s wing brushed against his arm. “But is it a memory you wish to shine like a jewel, keep always at the forefront?”
“I can’t control it,” he admitted through a jaw clenched so tight, he could hear his bones grinding against one another, drowning out the whispering secrets of the warm Louisiana night.
An angel’s perceptive gaze met his under the silver caress of the moon. “You will learn.” There was utmost confidence in her voice.
His laugh was harsh. “Yeah? What makes you so sure?”
“Because that is who you are, Noel.” Stepping forward, she raised her hand to touch his cheek, her wings arcing at her back.
When he flinched at the contact, she didn’t pull back. “What was done to you,” she said, “would’ve broken other men. It did not break you.”
“I’m not who I once was.”
“Neither am I.” She dropped her hand, and he found he didn’t like the kiss of the night against his skin now that he’d felt the softness of her. “Life changes us. To wish otherwise is pointless.”
The pragmatic truth of her words affected him more than any gentle reassurances. “Nimra.”
She looked at him with those inhuman eyes. “My wolf.”
So breathtaking, he thought, so dangerous. “There are other ways to blunt the impact of memory.” It was a sudden, primal decision. Too long—he’d been hiding in the dark too long.
Nimra knew what Noel was asking, knew, too, that if she acquiesced, he would be no easy lover— either in the act or in his temperament afterward. “I have not taken a lover,” she murmured, her gaze on the rough angles of his face, “for many years.”
Noel said nothing.
“Very well.”
“So romantic.”
There was a black edge to the words, but Nimra didn’t take it personally. Like the wolf she called him, he might yet show her his teeth. Trust was a precious commodity, one that took time to develop. Patience was something Nimra had learned long ago. “Romance,” she said, turning to head back to the house, “is a matter of interpretation.”
Nothing from the man at her side, not until they were behind the closed doors of her suite. “No matter what the interpretation,” he warned, his body held with a rigid control that told her he was on the finest of edges, “it’s not what I’m going to give you tonight.”
Touching her fingers to his jaw, she allowed the desire, so heavy and drugging in her veins, to show on her face. “And it’s not what I need.” What she’d done to Amariyah had been just, but it had marked her as it always did. Tonight she needed to feel like a woman, not the inhuman monster Amariyah had named her.
A strong hand gripped her wrist. “Sex for sex’s sake?”
Noel’s anger, his pain, was a raw blade, cutting and tearing, but Nimra was made of sterner stuff. “If I wanted that, I would’ve accepted Christian into my bed long ago.”
Ice blue turned to midnight as his hand tightened. All at once, her pulse was in her mouth, on her skin. “You hunger,” she whispered as her blood sang to the haunting kiss of this vampire’s touch.
His gaze went to the pulse that thudded in her neck, his thumb rubbing over the beat in her wrist. �
��I haven’t fed from the vein in months.” It was a harsh admission. “I would rip out your throat.”
“I’m immortal,” she reminded him when he released his grip on her wrist to curve his fingers around that throat. “You can’t hurt me.”
A laugh that sounded like broken glass. “There are ways to hurt a woman that have nothing to do with anything so simple as pain.”
And she knew. Understood what she had to do. Pulling away to walk into her dressing room, she returned with a long silk scarf. “Then I,” she said, handing him the strip of peacock blue, “will have to trust you.” In saying the words, she found her humanity— it was the woman who offered him this, not a being with a terrible gift.
Noel’s hand clenched around the soft fabric. It was a symbol, nothing more, Nimra’s power more than enough to permit escape should she wish it. But that she’d given it to him meant she’d seen the broken pieces he didn’t want anyone to see… and still she looked at him with a woman’s lingering appreciation. “No bonds,” he said, letting the scarf float to the floor in a grace of blue. “Never any bonds.”
“As you say, Noel.” Holding his gaze with the promise of her own, she reached up to the clasps on her shoulders, flicked them open. Her gown shimmered over her body to pool at her feet, knocking all the air out of him.
She may have been petite, but she was lush curves and feminine invitation, the smooth brown of her skin interrupted only by a triangle of lace at the juncture of her thighs. Her breasts were full and heavy against her slender frame, her nipples dark and, at this moment, furled into tight buds. Spreading her wings in invitation, she waited.
The choice was his.
As you say, Noel.
Such a simple statement. Such a powerful gift.
Reaching out, he cupped the erotic weight of one breast, had the satisfaction of feeling a tremor race across her skin. It awakened the part of him that had gone into numb slumber when his abusers had turned him into a piece of meat, crushed and broken. Tonight, that part, the one that had made him an adventurer who’d conquered mountains, caused women to sigh in pleasure, roared to the surface.
It was instinct to thrust his hand into her hair, to slant his mouth over her own, to demand entrance. She opened to him, dark and hot and sweet, her power a lick against his senses as lusciously female as the body under his touch. Tucking her closer, he slid his hand up from her breast to grip her jaw, holding her in place as he explored every inch of that mouth he’d dreamed of tasting for longer than she knew.
He wanted to move slow, to map every curve and every pleasure point, but her pulse, it beat a seductive tattoo against his senses, inviting him to take that which he hadn’t taken for months. Circling his hand around to her neck, he rubbed his thumb over the beating invitation of her. Her hands clenched on his waist, but she made no demur when he began to kiss his way down to the spot that was a siren song to the vampirism that was as much a part of him as his desire for her.
Lips against his ear. “Sip from me, Noel. It is a gift given freely.”
He’d never been a man who fed indiscriminately. When he hadn’t had a lover, he’d turned to friends, for the feeding didn’t need to be a sexual thing. Since the attack, he hadn’t been able to stand being that intimate with another being. Even now, with this woman who made him hunger in every way, and though his erection was a hard ridge in his pants, he said, “I can’t make it pleasurable.” Not because he’d lost the ability, but because he wasn’t ready for the connection forged by the sexual ecstasy his kiss could bestow… the vulnerability that came with allowing another being any kind of inroad into him.
She arched her neck in silent response.
His blood pounding in time to her own, he slid his arms around her, his fingers brushing her wings as he sucked a kiss over the spot before piercing the delicate skin with his fangs. Her blood was an erotic rush against his senses, the punch of power staggering. The hunger in him, the darkness that had turned into a furious rage during the events at the Refuge, rose to the surface, glorying in the taste of her. She saturated his senses, drowned him in sensation, and in spite of his earlier words, he was male enough to want her to feel the same.
Acting on naked instinct, he pumped pleasure into her system as he took blood from hers, felt her body arch, shudder— he hadn’t held anything back, hadn’t stopped with simple arousal. She came apart in his arms, her blood earthy with the flavor of her desire. Drugged to raw pleasure, he found he’d thrust his thigh between her own, splayed his hands on her back, his fingers touching the sensitive inner edges of her wings, her breasts crushed against his chest.
But as he halted in his gluttony to lick the small wounds closed, he discovered he didn’t flinch at having let her so near— and not only on the physical level. Perhaps it was because she’d ceded him the control he needed… or perhaps it was simply because she was Nimra.
Nimra lay boneless in Noel’s arms, conscious of him licking at the skin of her neck to heal the marks caused by his fangs. She didn’t tell him not to worry— the puncture site would’ve healed on its own in minutes— because it was an unexpected pleasure to know he wanted to care for her, this man who had left her body quivering in ecstasy unlike any she had ever before felt, even as his own flesh strained hard and unsatiated against her abdomen.
When he nuzzled at her before raising his head, the affection was another act she hadn’t expected, a sign of the man hidden beyond the shadows of nightmare. As she luxuriated in the feeling, he stroked one hand down the center of her back, just touching the sensitive edges where her wings grew out of her back. “Does that feel good?” he murmured, a difference to him that made her skin tighten over her flesh, her thighs clench on the rough intrusion of his own.
“Yes.” No angel allowed anyone but a trusted lover to caress her in such a fashion. “Are you not afraid?” she asked, echoes of her own past sliding oily and dark through the aftershocks of pleasure. “You saw what I did to Amariyah.”
Noel continued with the exquisite delicacy of his caresses. “You did what you did with thought and care. You aren’t a capricious woman.”
She’d given him her blood, her body, but his words, they were as precious. “I’m pleased you see me in such a way.” It was strange to be standing here unclothed, in the arms of a man who continued to wear his armor of cotton and denim— and yet she was, if not content, then oddly at peace.
Then Noel spoke, and his words carried within them the promise of splintering the peace to nothingness. “Will you tell me about your power?”
8
“What would you say if I told you it was a secret for me to keep?”
No change in his expression. “I’m patient.”
Laughing at the arrogance even as something very old in her grew still, quiet, she went to touch her fingers to his face, dropped her hand midway. “I would show you, Noel, but no.” It would be a violation for this man who’d had all choice stripped from him by the monsters who had stained the Refuge with their crimes, regardless of the fact that he’d feel no pain, only the same bone- melting pleasure he’d lavished on her. “I give back,” she whispered. “I give back what was given unto others.”
“Pleasure for pleasure,” Noel said, understanding at once. “Pain for pain.”
A solemn nod. “It is not the act itself, but the intent behind it that determines what someone will feel when I use my power.”
It made him change his hold, shift her into the protection of his body. Yes, she was a powerful angel, but whatever it was her gift demanded from her, it haunted her. “That’s why Nazarach leaves you alone.” The other angel was renowned for his viciousness.
Nimra’s voice when it came was hard. “We had a meeting when I first took over this territory. He thought to control me. He has never returned to my lands.”
Noel felt his lips curve in a feral smile. “Good.”
Noel’s body continued to hum with the taste of Nimra the next day. Her blood held such power that he knew he
wouldn’t need to feed again for a week… though there were different kinds of need, he thought, as he began to go through the file Nimra had sent him that morning. It was a list of people she knew had had access to Midnight and who might wish her harm.
However, from what Noel understood of the people on the list— and what he was able to learn from Dmitri when he called the leader of Raphael’s Seven— none of them would have left anything to chance, especially given how difficult Midnight was to source. The fact that Nimra’s cat had died, betraying the game, spoke of an amateur. Of course, there was also the old adage that poison was a woman’s weapon.
Amariyah had convinced him with her confusion, and Asirani— no matter her unrequited feelings for Christian— seemed loyal. But Noel wasn’t about to write her off without further investigation. Knowing the vampire had a habit of coming in early to the small office she had on the lower floor, he decided to see if he could track her down. He was in the corridor leading to her office when he heard whispering, low and furious. It was instinct to soften his footsteps.
“… just listen.” Soft, feminine. Asirani.
“It will change nothing.” Christian’s stiff tones. “I don’t wish to hurt you, but I have no such feelings for you.”
“She’s never going to look at you the way you want.” Not bitter, almost… sad.
“That is none of your concern.”
“Of course it is. She might be our lady, but she’s also my friend.” An exhale that telegraphed frustration. “She plays with Noel, but it’s because he’s a vampire. There’s no chance of a serious relationship.”
“I will be here when she is ready for that relationship.”
Noel stepped forward until he could see the pair reflected in the antique mirror on the other side of the corridor. Asirani, striking in a sheath of emerald green, her hair swept up off her neck, was shaking her head, her expression solemn, while black- garbed Christian did his impression of a Roman statue. When the female vampire turned, as if to enter her office, Noel retraced his steps away from the couple.
