Jealous Vampire (Jealous & Possessive #6)

Chapter 1 Blood & Memory

BLOOD the thrill of taking her apart piece by agonising piece, the way I did with her chosen coven while she answers for her wrongs and betrayals.

Instead, jealousy floods my veins like acid.

Who the fuck kept her alive?

Whose protection allowed her to live while I rotted in damnation?

Has she belonged to another all this time? Fucked and worshipped and happy?

The questions burn until I can’t sit still.

I rise, zipping the length of the room in a frenzy of moment while shadows cling to me like loyal dogs.

Finally I still, breathe deep, reaffirm the most important truth.

Elara alive means answers—and answers mean blood.

Retribution. Closure.

I pour the rest of the decanter over the fire.

Flames roar up, licking the ceiling, illuminating the portraits on the walls. She’s in most of them. My obsession rendered in oil and memory. Her face painted over centuries by artists who never knew they were painting a ghost.

I tear one from the wall, the frame splintering in my hands.

“You took everything,” I whisper to the woman in the painting. “Now you’ll give it back.”

The clock on the mantel strikes midnight.

Outside, thunder rattles the windowpanes. I open the balcony doors and let the storm in. Rain lashes my skin, cleansing nothing.

Below, the streets pulse with mortal life.

The smell of it drives my fangs from their hiding place. I leap from the balcony, landing soundlessly in the alley, my fluttering coattail settling around me like a reassuring friend.

The city hums with blood and secrets.

I take one step, then another, until the jazz and laughter fade behind me and I am nothing but shadow and hunger.

By the time the horizon bruises with dawn, I will be gone.

Florence awaits.

And if she’s truly alive—if the woman in that photograph is my Elara—then the centuries of silence between us will end in fire and agony and death.

Because love never dies.

But jealousy never forgives.

Two Hundred and Fifty Years Ago

Somewhere outside Rouen, France

The night I lost her began with laughter with rain on the windows and wine in our blood. She wore my shirt, opened and white and pure, and nothing else. The firelight kissing her skin, turning her hair to living flame.

“You look at me like I’m your last meal,” she teased, tracing the edge of my jaw with her finger.

“You are,” I murmured, catching her wrist, pressing a kiss to her leaping pulse while my other hand teases the shirt open a little more, eager for another glimpse of those blood red nipples and the riot of curls framing her pussy, between which the hood of her well-sucked clit peeked, swollen and ready for another loving.

“Every century, every hunger—none of it compares to how your blood tastes in my mouth. Inside me. It’s like a miracle and a curse, all at once. ”

She smiled then, soft and dangerous. “You shouldn’t love me, Lucien.”

“I stopped listening to reason the day you walked into my crypt.”

Her laughter was the only sound and light and sustenance I ever needed.

She leaned in, brushing her lips against mine, slow and deliberate. I felt her magic spark beneath her skin, warm and golden and alive. The witchcraft she tried to hide from the world now completely owned and celebrated. Put to the vital use of making her near immortal.

My perfect mate.

Over a century after the Salem trials that sent witches into hiding, many still lived in fear even this far away from the horrors.

And her power was the one of the most potent. The same power that would one day curse us both.

When I pulled her closer, the room filled with the sound of her heartbeat. Fast. Sweet. Mine.

But there was something else that night, a tension in her body she couldn’t mask. Fear disguised as desire.

“Elara,” I said against her throat, “what are you keeping from me?”

She stilled. “Nothing.”

“Liar.” I lifted her chin until she met my gaze. “You smell of salt. Of wards. And while your arousal and our mingled spend is still the sweetest scent I ever want in my senses, I can’t dismiss the others. Tell me,” I insisted.

Her eyes shimmered, grew troubled. “They’re watching us,” she whispered. “The coven. They know what you are. What I’ve done.”

Our forbidden union—vampire and witch. Outlawed by a bunch of old crones cowering in caves.

“Then let them come,” I growled. “Let them try to take you from me.”

Her fingers trembled as they touched my face. “If they do, they’ll use me to destroy you.”

“Impossible. Need I remind you that I’m over three thousand years old? That I possess tricks many have forgotten about?”

My reassurance failed.

Her eyes grew more troubled, her small fingers stroking my chest. “Nothing is impossible where blood magic is concerned,” she said softly. “They think if they bind my soul, they can chain yours. They’ve seen our bond.”

I remember how I laughed then, arrogance born of immortality. “They can try.”

But she didn’t laugh.

That was the last night I ever saw her smile without sorrow.

I woke the next evening in the abbey, surrounded by chanting witches. And her.

Elara.

The red mouth I’d bruised with my kisses and my cock, chanting right beside them.

With the black as night stake in her hand.

The memory fades, leaving only the bottomless obsidian ache it carved deep into my unbeating heart.

I stare at the photograph again.

Her face is exactly as I remember it from that last night. Ethereal, breathtaking and magnificent in its treachery.

And somewhere in the dark recesses of my chest, something long-dead begins to stir.

Love turned to hate turned to something infinitely worse, simple in its inevitability.

The promise of sweet, blessed annihilation steeped in the reckoning that will turn us both to ash.

Because Elara doesn’t deserve to exist in the world after her treachery.

And I don’t deserve to exist in it without her.