Chapter 2
Chapter
Two
Lucian
“Fuck.” I drop my head against the door.
What have I done?
“Saving me for me? Or for you?”
I can’t answer that because…because I really don’t know. I want to say it was for her, but when the memory of her bleeding out resurfaces, my heart clenches painfully and I know my selfishness drove me to give her my blood.
“Locking her up is for the best,” says a familiar voice behind me.
Straightening, I turn away from the soundproofed room I just locked the woman I love inside and face the woman who stands as my equal within the company, the one who opposed turning Elliot from the start.
Her arms are folded, and there’s a triumphant expression on her face.
I run a hand over mine. “You aren’t helping, Vittoria.”
“You never listen to me,” she says with a biting tone. “If you had to turn her, you should’ve let me do it. It would’ve been an easier transition for her.”
The thought of someone else’s fangs in Monty makes something ugly stir inside me. Jealousy isn’t a vice I’ve ever possessed. When you live as long as I have, you get used to sharing lovers or having multiple ones at once. What humans may see as taboos aren’t taboos for us.
But Elliot isn’t someone I want to share. With anyone.
“You’re not forming your own army,” I say to her. “I forbid it.”
She goes to the small monitor that shows surveillance of the room. Vittoria sighs and picks up one of the protein bars on the table. She tosses it up in the air, snatching it with ease. “I don’t require your permission to turn humans. And I have no intention of building an army.”
I raise a brow.
“But the girl isn’t why I’m here,” she continues. “Benicio’s family and business are.”
“What about them?” I ask, holding back annoyance. We’d killed a good number of them at the warehouse, but like us, the mafia has tentacles woven into everything. “Are they giving us trouble?”
“Trouble?” She scoffs. “Not in the least. I simply wondered if you wanted to come with me to finish the job. Like old times.”
Old times. I was a different man when I turned Vittoria, a different vampire.
“Or you could send your pet,” she suggests with a smirk. “I’m sure she’d love some fresh—”
“No. Elliot stays here. Letting her out now is dangerous.” I frown as I cross to her. “Who knows what she’d do if let loose.”
Vittoria’s eyes gleam. She knows better than to take a newly minted vampire out on that kind of hunt. But she’s just as bloodthirsty. Just as ruthless. And she wants to push me.
“She stays,” I repeat. “I’ll come.”
“You need to feed first.” She throws the protein bar at me, and I catch it like it’s a pesky insect.
A protein bar won’t give me what I need. The blood that I had at the warehouse wasn’t sufficient, especially after giving Elliot enough to restart her heart. I need to replenish.
It’s time I visit our food banks.
I take one last look at the camera feed. Elliot’s raging in the soundproofed room. I want to open the door. Hold her again. But instead, I turn once more to Vittoria. “Walk with me.”
Together, we take the VMR elevator to the floor designated as our living food bank. The moment the metal doors open, one of the vampires guarding the entrance almost falls over himself to greet us.
“Sir,” he says with a small bow. He’s young, maybe a decade into his undead life.
Vittoria rolls her eyes and shoves him aside. “Move, cretin.”
The youngling grabs the door and opens it for us. Beyond is a small foyer at the intersection of two hallways. To the left is storage with a huge refrigeration system and collected blood of all blood types. All freely given. And to the right is where our live donors reside.
Vittoria likes to call them our pets, and maybe they are, but they’re treated more like employees.
Men and women who are cared for, fed, and treated well.
From where I stand, I can see the first stall that is occupied by a beautiful woman with long, lustrous dark hair, skimpy outfit, and glazed-over eyes.
Her lips are parted in ecstasy as she sits on a chaise longue and a male vamp drinks from her wrist.
“Would you like me to make up a room for you, sir?” the young anxious vampire asks when he catches me staring.
Vittoria eyes me with a toothy smile.
“No, I’ll have some bags from storage,” I say.
He blinks, confused. “Sir?”
“Come on, Lucian,” Vittoria says. “I’m sure he can get you someone tasty. Someone who’ll be willing to do a little extra, too.”
I narrow my gaze on her, then turn back to the young one. “Just the bags.”
He disappears down the left hall and comes back a moment later with three full blood bags. When I take them from him, they’re warm, warmed to the desired body temperature.
“These are the most recently harvested,” he says. “Got them just before you came in.”
None of that matters to me. From the blood loss paired with the mental exhaustion of Elliot’s turn, my hunger is now ravenous. I’m not going to be picky. I just want the fucking blood.
I start for the door when Vittoria grabs my arm.
“Drink them now,” she says. “You need it.”
“Do I really look that bad?” I bite the top off of one and start to gulp the delicious warm liquid down. At first, it only seems to intensify my appetite. I quickly drain it and rip off the top of the next one. As I drink, Vittoria watches me with a wicked gleam in her eyes.
“I’m not going to answer that because I value my life,” she says.
“Smart.” I gulp down the last bag, feeling stronger and more like myself already.
When I’m done, I wipe my mouth with the handkerchief in my suit pocket and hand the young vampire the empty bags.
When he bows to me again, Vittoria snarls, causing him to scurry back down the storage hallway and out of sight.
But she seems satisfied with herself as we take the elevator to the main work floors.
It must be early morning since the people we pass are mostly human. VMR never sleeps, and there are still shows to put on, podcasts to tape, and articles to write in the daylight hours.
As Vittoria and I walk to my office, many of them pause what they are doing to stare at us. Frozen in place and watching our every move. They may not know exactly what we are, but they know we are different. Prey can sense a predator, no matter what the species.
I have no problem ignoring them. Vittoria, on the other hand, sneers until they glance away and pretend to be busy again.
When we enter my office, I walk over to my desk. “We’ll have to wait until nightfall to visit Diamond Hills,” I say. “Hopefully de Santis’s people don’t clear out before then.”
“If Andrew did his job right, word shouldn’t have traveled—”
“Hold on.” My phone buzzes, and I pull it from my pocket. It’s a text from the very vampire himself.
Andrew
Got it done before dawn. Spotless in the warehouse. Not a drop of blood. What do you want done with the bodies?
Me
I’ll get back to you. Give me ten.
Andrew
Alright.
I sigh, putting my phone away. My brain’s still a bit fuzzy, but I’m starting to suspect it isn’t from the blood loss like I originally thought. It’s something else.
The possibility of almost losing Elliot had rocked me. Clouded my judgement. Made me weak. It’s the closest to human I’ve felt in a couple hundred years. And that scares me.
Everything had happened so fast, I—
Vittoria snaps her fingers in my face, jolting me out of my thoughts. “Lucian. Hello?”
I blink and focus on her. “Yes?”
“I asked you what Andrew wanted?” she says, irritated. “Maybe we should have gotten you three more bags.”
“I’m fine,” I say, “and he wanted to know what to do with the bodies.”
“Dump them. Burn them. Rip them to shreds and bury the pieces across the States,” she replies. “What a dumb question. He can’t figure that out on his own?”
Moving to the sofa, I sit, lean my head back, and close my eyes. All I can think about is her. She’s a part of me now more than she was before, a constant thrum against my senses.
I don’t know how long I stay like that. The room is silent, and for a moment I wonder if Vittoria left my office, but then I sense her hovering close. Her presence is like a prickle down my spine.
“I have something that may cheer you up,” she whispers, her breath tickling across my face.
When I open my eyes, she’s right there, her face mere inches from mine, perched on the couch like a cat.
Not touching me, just perfectly balanced with one leg on the armrest and the other on the cushion beside me.
Her crimson lips are pulled back in a smile.
I cock my head. “And what is that?”
“Before I ate one of de Santis’s men—” She pauses and her grin widens. “—he gave me some information.”
“Do not tease me, Vittoria.”
Carefully, methodically, she steps off the couch to stand in front of me. “Okay, okay. As we already know, Benicio de Santis had a lot of enemies. And he was powerful.”
I nod. “He was the king of crime in Tenebris City who had a strange obsession with me.”
“Who doesn’t nowadays?” She snorts. “But de Santis had one enemy in particular that his lackey wouldn’t shut up about. One he tried to bribe me with in exchange for his life.”
“Go on.”
“He claimed that Benicio wasn’t working alone. That his obsession was sparked from someone else,” she says.
“There’s someone above him? Someone else was pulling his strings?”
She nods.
“Who?”
“I’m not sure. He said it was another mafia family.”
“Do you think this meal of yours lied to save his skin, Vittoria?” I ask.
“No.”
“I’ll ask you again, as my closest ally, my friend, my trusted second, and as your master, do you think he lied?”
She’s silent for too long. And then she hisses, “Yes, okay, yes. But he might not have.”
“Here’s what I think,” I say and rise to my feet.
Aggravation is building, and all I want to do is check on Elliot again, not bat around speculations and hypotheticals.
“Whether the human was lying or not, it isn’t something worth my time.
De Santis is dead. His empire is about to collapse, but there’ll always be someone else trying to take me out. Immortal or mortal. You know this.”
“But—”
“I’m not afraid. Never have been. We’ve always handled what’s been thrown at us. We’ve survived and we’ve thrived,” I say.
She snorts. “Of course I’m not afraid. But if we destroy everyone, take out all links in the chain, then it’ll show them what we are—”
“Then we have a war we don’t want. We possibly expose what we are to the world, which will only make things harder, bloodier.” I look at her. “Which is not what we want.”
She rolls her eyes.
“Right?” I press.
“Yes, Lucian,” she mutters. “Sure. And what about the warehouse?”
I wave a hand. “We’ll give the cops something.”
Her mouth turns up in a smirk. “Like what? An invitation to a ball?”
I smooth a hand over my bloodstained suit. It’s so like Vittoria not to see the bigger picture. “We direct the narrative.”
She wants revenge. Not just because; she wants it for me. It’s almost sweet.
“And the de Santis compound?” she asks.
“We hit that. Make it look like a de Santis uprising and power grab gone horribly wrong.”
“So that’s how you’ll give the cops their mafia investigation.” Her slight smile tells me she likes it, but she does ask something else. “But if there is another threat, and they come looking for us, what do we do then?”
“Then we’ve flushed them out.” I go behind my desk.
“We need an enemy for de Santis.”
I laugh. In the mafia world, like the supernatural, enemies abound. Power grabs abound.
It’s all in choosing the right one.
I’m not going anywhere tonight. I’ll need more blood later, just to hit my pre-draining self. But I have discipline. I thrive on it. And in the bedroom, it gets me off. This isn’t far from that, this self-torture game of control.
“We don’t need to act tonight,” I say. “I’m going to look into who the biggest enemy of de Santis is, and if there isn’t one, we’ll create a straight-up power grab gone wrong.”
“For the cops,” she says.
I nod.
“Good,” she says. “And if someone else does want another fight?”
I smile, spread my hands. “Bring it the fuck on.”