Chapter 3
Chapter Three
Zuri’s blood on her tongue only amplified Elena’s thirst. Sitting alone in her office, it took her longer to gather herself than she liked. To shake the lingering heaviness in her chest. The memories on her lips.
There was no sense in wallowing, Elena decided. Ignoring the mess on her desk, she stood, intending to find something to chase away the useless ache crawling over her ribcage and trying to curl around her heart.
In the lounge outside her office, her inner circle chatted and laughed. Leaning against the bar, Librada kept watch over the group like she was expecting trouble. Her default setting.
Sleeping on thick cushions on either side of her door, Luna and Loba waited patiently for her. One hundred and eighty pounds each, her fawn-colored Spanish Mastiffs were imposing. Gentle and patient, they looked scarier than they were. As long as no one was stupid enough to fuck with Elena, they preferred belly rubs over maiming. Sometimes appearances did the job better than actions.
Upon noticing Elena, the dogs jumped up and eagerly accepted ear scratches before joining her and the rest of the group. In her territory, there were thousands of vampires, but only her progeny had permission to be here.
Her family spanned fifteen in all. The only females she’d ever turned were Librada and Sofia. On the outside, the two couldn’t appear more different, but inside, all three of them carried the same heart.
Tall and sleek and openly lethal, no one guessed Librada had been a nun in her first life. Only a few years younger than Elena, Librada had been with her since nearly the beginning. She was as ruthless as she was efficient.
But Sofia de Furia, she was so petite and unassuming that her marks didn’t see her coming until their throats were already slit. The same teenage looks that had made her a revoltingly popular courtesan in nineteenth century Rome made her an unmatched assassin in her second life. Elena’s two blood daughters were a source of pride.
“I got that drip.” Robert, built like a missing Hemsworth, stood at the center of the lounge, all eyes trained on him. Glass in hand, he made a show of pointing to his bright white sneakers. White pants and an oversized white hoodie went with his crisp white baseball cap.
“You look like an unused tampon,” Sofia joked before taking a sip from her wine glass. With her wavy blonde hair tied back, her green eyes were distractingly prominent. “Which I suppose is better than a used one.”
“I thought drip meant boring,” Elena said when she joined them, taking the turquoise armchair in front of Librada—one of the few people she’d trust with her literal back. The dogs moved through the gathering, accepting warm greetings before dropping at Elena’s feet.
“Now it means stylish,” Robert explained before spouting the words on god and no cap along with a string of other nonsensical phrases.
“I don’t know why meanings have to change,” Felix groused.
Dressed in loose trousers and a linen shirt, he was the same mustachioed papi she’d picked up in Havana just before the revolution scattered them to Miami seventy years ago. Felix was forever a beautiful thirty-year-old man with the sensibilities of a grandfather.
“Some of us want to look a little less like we’ve emerged from a Cold War bunker hunting for signs of life,” Robert shot back.
They descended into a conversation about the state of modern language that immediately turned tedious. Restless, Elena stood. Desperate for somewhere to put the disquiet Zuri had left behind, she approached the bar.
“Thirsty?” Librada asked, already heading behind the ornate wooden bar.
Elena made a noncommittal sound. Standing there, she realized she didn’t know what the hell she wanted.
Librada curled her claws around a bottle of bourbon. Like she was assessing how to disarm a bomb, she kept her eyes trained on Elena. After a beat, she let it go and changed tactics without Elena having to speak a word.
“The witch’s blood is still warm,” Librada offered.
“I’ve had enough witch bullshit for one day.” She hated feeling so off-kilter. “You drink it.”
“A palate cleanser then,” Librada decided and gestured somewhere behind Elena instead.
A moment later, Noor was at her side. Gorgeous by any definition, she moved like silk when she slid her arm around Elena’s waist. Reflexively, Elena gripped her hip and relished the sensation of Noor’s body molded to hers.
From the corner of her eye, she caught Librada’s smug expression before allowing herself to be led to a dark, unoccupied corner of the lounge.
“I didn’t think I was going to see you tonight,” Noor said when they approached a chaise away from the noise of conversation.
Elena sat, but stopped Noor before she could nestle in her lap. “Pull up your dress,” she demanded, tone low. The spike of arousal hit Noor instantly, altering her body chemistry in a way Elena could sense. The quickening of Noor’s pulse, the faint shift in her scent—warm, heady, and unmistakable. No scent was more intoxicating than arousal, though terror came close.
Glancing over her shoulder, Noor hesitated. Any performed shyness was an act, Elena knew. The thundering in Noor’s chest was deafening. There wasn’t a trace of anxiety flowing from her.
Noor brought her attention back to Elena before tossing her long hair to one side. Instead of leaning back and waiting for Noor to drape herself over her, Elena lunged forward. She pulled Noor’s leg up, propping her foot on the sofa, the seam of her dress ripping under the strain of her parting thighs. Noor’s punishment for her delay.
“Fuck,” Noor groaned, hand in Elena’s hair and urging her in.
Shadows draped around them like a velvet curtain when Elena sank her fangs into the sensitive flesh of Noor’s inner thigh. An evolutionary trait vampires didn’t need now that they invariably fed behind closed doors, but their surroundings were cloaked in shadow as soon as Elena bit. The bite was a delicate invasion, precise and controlled. A world away from the violence her fangs could unleash.
Blood, hot and sweet against Elena’s mouth, was a symphony of surrender, each pulsing wave echoing the desire tumbling from Noor’s pretty lips. Savoring the warmth that spread through her, the life that sparked on her tongue, Elena relaxed.
This wasn’t the frenzied drain of a kill, but a slow, intimate dance of need and fulfillment. Each delicate draw was a promise whispered against Noor’s skin. One Elena didn’t plan to keep.
Noor pulled her closer, tempting her to have more than she should. “Take me upstairs,” she begged. “Please.”
For a moment, Elena considered it. Palms gliding up the side of her thighs, she drank deeper when Noor trembled at her touch. But Elena stopped herself before indulging. Pulling away instead of slipping her fingers in through the side of Noor’s silky underwear.
The darkness that had concealed them fell away the moment Elena released her tortured skin and leaned back, full but not satisfied.
“Not tonight,” she decided, wiping the blood from around her mouth instead of allowing Noor to lick it off.
With a nod, she signaled to Librada that she’d finished. A moment later, Lib was ushering away a disappointed Noor so she could tend to her puncture wounds. Elena decided she was in a weird fucking mood and got up.
She shouldn’t have seen Zuri, she decided, and headed for the door. It hadn’t been long enough. Maybe it would never be long enough. The combination of Zuri’s last kiss and Catalina’s first had reminded her of all the things she’d lost. She was tired of missing. Tired of aching. Tired of love slipping through her fingers.
“Elena, hang on.” Robert, in his ridiculous cotton swab outfit, appeared at her side before her hand was on the doorknob. “Lib is with your blood bag and Felix took Sofia and the dogs back to?—”
“I don’t need an escort. I’m going home,” Elena snapped despite her amusement at Robert’s open concern. “Despite what you might think, my pretty face isn’t what made me who I am.” She patted his cheek. “Tell them I went home.”
Robert shook his head. “If I let you leave by yourself, Lib and Sofia will arm wrestle for the privilege of stringing me up by the balls.”
Elena chuckled despite the horrific mental picture. Before she could tell him to fuck off in no uncertain terms, Robert was calling over Lance and Jesus.
“Oh, boss duty!” Lance wiggled his eyebrows—or where eyebrows would be if he didn’t shave them off.
“Did Lib say it was okay?” Jesus asked when he joined them.
“Have you all forgotten that I’m the bitch in charge here?” Elena feigned offense. “If you insist on this production to travel a few yards to my car, let’s get it moving.”
“I’ll get Olivia,” Jesus said before flinging open the door and letting in the crush of noise from the human bar. One of Elena’s many fronts, but by far the noisiest.
Assaulted by the clamor of sounds and smells, Elena’s skin crawled while she waited for her human proxy. The two-level bar had become the go-to place for young professionals in downtown Miami.
She hated the energy. Hated the desperation that poured from them. Polished facades with rotted cores. She’d never had a taste for false bravado masking insecurity or the desperate need to be liked. It didn’t help that the irritating proxy charade was because of them.
“Ready,” Olivia said when she joined them near the painted black door camouflaging the entrance of Elena’s private lounge.
Not exactly a body double, Olivia was taller and fairer than Elena. Her purpose wasn’t to be her clone, it was to age normally as the face of her enterprise.
As if Elena didn’t already know they were sleeping together, Robert pretended to hesitate before presenting his arm for Olivia to take. It was almost endearing enough to clear the heaviness from Elena’s chest. But not quite.
When they finally started their trek through the bar, Elena’s patience had worn down to the bone. Playing her role as Olivia’s assistant, she rushed them through attempts at glad-handing and out to the warm spring night. She’d never been so happy to inhale the humid air, thick before an impending rainstorm.
The night clung to Elena like a shroud as they navigated the scattered humans milling between the converted warehouse near the Port of Miami and the parking garage across the alley. Flanked by Lance and Jesus while Robert walked ahead with Oliva, Elena rolled her eyes.
She wasn’t in the mood for the production of them scanning for threats. Elena was older and stronger than all of them combined. It was like asking Pomeranians to escort a crocodile. She was nearly to the garage storing her Bugatti when the world around them changed.
It started with a single, sharp crack echoing through the alley. A popping sound that Elena was reacting to even before she processed its nature. Instinct triggered her fangs, sharpening her vision, heightening her hearing, making her sense of smell keen.
Elena shoved Olivia toward Robert, her voice a razor’s edge. “Get her inside.”
Another shot, this one aimed at Elena, whizzed past her head. She tasted copper in the air, the tang of violence.
Her gaze snapped upward, seeking the source. A glint of moonlight on metal, a silhouette framed against the glassy reflection of a half-constructed high-rise balcony. Male. The scent of his rage, acrid and sharp, cut through the humid air.
Coward. Hiding instead of facing her head-on. Instead of facing certain death.
More shots exploded from the balcony, the staccato rhythm of gunfire shattering the night. At her sides, Lance and Jesus used their bodies to cover Olivia, turning toward the bar and following her orders.
Focused on where she’d seen the glint of metal seven landings up, Elena darted across the street, dodging bullets while she moved with a speed that defied human comprehension. There was no time to care about witnesses.
“Get out of here,” Elena shouted, adrenaline surging through her veins.
But it was too late for their retreat. Like a swarm, vampires, all male by the scent, descended from the adjoining buildings, from the alley, from parked vans. Their faces twisted in feral hunger, their fangs bared.
They were nothing. Elena was a hurricane, an unstoppable force. She tore through them, cutting down anyone who lunged at her while she kept her eyes on the gunman. He was the threat she needed to neutralize.
As she ran so fast her feet barely touched the ground, searing pain ripped through her hip, a bullet lodging deep in her flesh. Paralysis surged through her limbs, an unexpected numbness threatening to consume her. But Elena was fueled by rage. Animated by the primal need to protect her own. She pushed forward, her only focus on getting up the building.
Leaping onto the second-floor balcony, her body didn’t respond to her demands to go faster. By the time she was on the fifth floor, all she had was her upper body strength to power herself up the last two floors.
When she landed on the balcony, body broken in a way that shouldn’t be possible, the gunman hesitated. Elena didn’t give him the chance to take another breath.
She was on him, her fangs sinking deep into the taut muscle of his throat, tearing through tendon and sinew. His scream was still rattling in his throat when Elena spit it out onto the concrete.
Panting, agony the only sensation in her lower body, Elena nearly choked on his anger. She grimaced at the bitter aftertaste on her tongue.
Around her, the city lights swirled and bowed, her vision blurring. She had to get back to her sons. She had to protect them. But her body was betraying her, the paralysis spreading like death. She stumbled, her vision going black at the edges. Her other senses failing her.
Clutching at her left hip where a bullet had shredded her pants, she was shocked to find the deep wound still bleeding. She should be healing. Shouldn’t feel like she was dying.
There was something on the projectile, she realized in cold horror. There was more than the harmless bullet she should have already expelled. Gnashing her teeth, she dug her fingers into the hole in her flesh and tore out the crushed metal with a groan.
A new pain raced up her spine before seizing her chest. Screaming into the night, anguish, like she’d only known once before, gripped her. She couldn’t breathe, couldn’t think when it dropped her to her knees. Forehead pressed to the balcony glass, she froze.
Below, on the blood-soaked pavement, was Robert. His pristine white clothes were covered in blood. Laying motionless, the attacking vampires had left him for dead. She felt his life force flicker, a slow, agonizing fade that mirrored the excruciating pain in her own body. It was like losing a limb, a piece of her soul ripping away.
And then the others, fighting to the end despite being outnumbered. Despite the fading that dismembered Elena’s soul. She wrapped her fingers around the handrail, dragging herself over the ledge and intending to leap.
Despite Elena’s direct orders to the contrary, her legs buckled, her muscles refusing to obey. She tumbled over the edge of the balcony, the world tilting on its axis as she fell.
Darkness covered her eyes as she felt the last of her sons die. Losing them like balloons cut from their ribbons as the sound of sirens joined the screaming. Then oblivion swallowed her whole.