16. Chapter 16
Serenity
It’s been four days and two more feeds in the regular room, and not once has he tried to finish what he started that night.
And it’s driving me crazy.
Tonight I’ve been called for again, and I’m already tingling before the guard arrives. I take extra care with my hair, pinch my cheeks and nip my lips until they’re pink.
I know what it will cost me, and I do it anyway.
I’m a woman with color in her cheeks, who dressed extra carefully to feed a vampire, and I’m looking forward to it.
I used to dread these moments. Now I count the hours down to dusk.
Somewhere in the last week, that change happened without my permission, and I can stand here all night calling myself a liar, or I can go.
I’m at the door before the guard arrives, bursting into the hall as soon as he opens it, and striding forward ahead of him.
He walks me down from my own floor, through two sets of doors, onto the familiar carpet outside his room.
My feet automatically pick up the pace the way they always do. Tonight I let them.
Don’t skip, you idiot!
I can’t help myself.
The guard opens the door without knocking the way he usually does.
The scent reaches me first. Perfume—sweet, cheap under the sweetness, another woman’s skin warmed by his fire. Then fresh blood on the air, and my wolf comes up my spine with her hackles rising before I’ve finished one step into the room.
“What the fuck!” I don’t plan to say it, but I do.
He’s in his chair. There’s a woman across his lap with her head tipped back over his arm, and his mouth is at her throat, and he’s drinking.
I know her face. The blonde from cell two. I’ve stood behind her in the draw line, watched her smile at the guards, thinking that smiling buys something in this place. Her eyes are half closed now. Her hand lies curled against his chest, and a low, throaty “mm” slips out of her.
I have made that sound. In that chair.
No.
The growl gets up my throat and out between my teeth before I can close them. An actual snarl, low and guttural. Behind me, the guard takes one step back.
He lifts his head. Blood on his lower lip, his eyes finding me over her hair, taking his time.
“You’re early,” he says.
“Should that be a problem?” I say it through gritted teeth.
“Apparently, yes.” His tongue crosses the punctures at her throat, closing them. He lifts her to her feet with two hands at her waist and sets her steady. “Thank you. That will be all.”
She wobbles. She finds her balance on his shoulder, and on her way past me, her eyes come up, hazy. Pity, plain as anything, is right there in her face. She stands there swaying in her cheap perfume, sorry for me. I could kill her for it with both hands.
“Get out,” I snarl when she hesitates beside me.
Her eyes widen. The door closes sharply behind her. The perfume stays.
“You could knock,” he says, “if you’d rather not watch me feed.”
“Is that what the schedule’s for? Warming the chair between us?”
“She offered. And it suited me.” He rises and pours wine at the sideboard, the way he always does. “You’re upset.”
I look at the chair. I was a few minutes early.
Is this the way it always is?
“I’m not upset.”
“Your hands are in fists, and your wolf just introduced herself to your guard.”
“Why her?” It’s out before I can stop it, and it comes out wrong. It comes out as if it matters. I hear it, and so does he. He turns with the glass in his hand and his face sharpens, and I would give a year of my life to have those two words back.
“Why not her?” he says. “I feed where I please. I do as I please.”
“Then please yourself with someone else.”
“I intend to.” He sets the glass down, precise, then moves toward me. “As well as you.”
The slap lands before I know I’ve thrown it.
The crack fills the room. His head moves an inch with it. My palm burns—his jaw didn’t give at all—and we stand in the ringing quiet while my handprint fades off a face that doesn’t even show it stung. His eyes have gone dark all the way through, and it isn’t the cold dark.
“Fuck you.” I spin to the door.
I get one hand on the wood. Then he’s crossed the room faster than my eyes can track it, and my back meets the door, firm, his hand on the panel beside my head.
His face is close. This near, I can smell her perfume on his collar, and under it is the scent I know is him.
My wolf wants to rub up against him and cover all that sweetness with her own.
“What is it you want, Serenity?” he says.
“To leave.”
“You have the door.” His hand stays on the panel. “Use it.”
I clench my jaw and look down. It gets as far as the middle button of a shirt stretched across his chest. And I know what it looks like beneath the cotton.
“What do you want?” he repeats.
My breath is loud. My heart is louder.
What I want is her perfume off his collar and her sound out of this room and his mouth on my throat with no other throat in his history.
And I will bite through my tongue before I admit it.
He watches me, and I know he knows it. Everything I’ve been holding back is on my face, and this space is too small to hide it in.
“This?” He says it low as he strips the top of my dress down.
One pull, sleeves off my shoulders, bodice to my waist. The cool air tightens my nipples into points.
He looks down at them, and his eyes are darker when they come back to mine.
I should slap him again. My hands grip his shirt instead and haul him in, and his mouth drops to my collarbone and drags along it, open, slow, down the slope of my breast.
“Bastard,” I groan, and of course I don’t mean it because my back is arching as I push my chest toward him.
His mouth closes over my nipple and pulls, tongue working hard and flat, sharp teeth a quiet threat against sensitive skin. My clit zings in response, and my hips thrust forward.
How, dammit?
How could I be so angry and want him so badly, both at the same time?
I get my hands between us and go for his belt.
The buckle rings. I drag the leather through, wrench the button, shove his pants and everything under them off his hips.
His cock springs free, and I take it into my palm, hard and smooth, the head already slick at the tip.
I close my fingers around the shaft and stroke once, feeling the weight, the way the skin moves over the rigid length.
This is going to sting.
And I don’t care. I tighten my grip around the thick girth and pump my fist along it.
A rough groan breaks out of him against my breast. He didn’t plan that one.
“This,” I say, voice hoarse. “This is what I want. Now.” There’s no sense in denying it.
He lifts his head, pupils blown wide, then hikes my skirt to my waist. My underwear tears away in his fist; I hear the seam go.
His hands come under my thighs and lift me.
My back goes flat on the door, my legs closing around him.
The head of his cock finds me soaked, parts my lips, and pushes. He drives in.
The door bangs in its frame.
“Oh, God!” The stretch of him, sudden and huge, cool inside all my heat, my inner walls clamping down hard on every inch.
Exactly what I’ve been waiting for. He goes motionless, buried deep, his face at my neck.
I feel every ridge, the blunt head pressed against the end of me, my wetness coating him already.
“Serenity.” Rough. Not the way I’m used to hearing him.
“Please!” I dig my heels into the backs of his thighs and drag him deeper.
He fucks me against the door. Hard, driving strokes that lift me and land me, the wood banging under every thrust. My walls stretch around him again and again, wet sounds filling the space between us when he pulls back and sinks home.
My nails find his shoulders through the shirt.
His hand closes over my breast, kneading, his thumb rough on my nipple.
I’m climbing fast, too fast, the heat gathering low and tight where his cock is working me, my clit throbbing against the base of him on each downstroke.
Then his lips find my throat, and his teeth rest against the pulse.
I turn my head and give him my neck.
“Yessss…” His breath slides along my throat. His teeth go in.
I scream. A shameless scream. It doesn’t stop him.
The pull of the bite slams into the drag of his cock, thick and hard inside me. Every draw of his mouth lands with a thrust. His hand works my breast in the same beat, three points, one rhythm. I feel the suction low in my belly, the way his tongue presses over the punctures as he swallows.
“Fuck!” I choke out. “Oh! Oh…fuck!”
My walls flutter and grip him tighter. He growls against my skin, hips snapping faster, the head of his cock hammering a spot that no one’s ever reached. My body seizes between him and the door.
“Oh…Oh…yes!” I scream again. The orgasm rips through me without warning, my walls pulsing hard around him, wet flooding out to ease the way as he keeps driving in.
He slams deep, teeth sealed to my pulse, drinking me at the exact moment I’m wringing myself out around him.
His cock jerks inside me, pulsing, cool seed spilling in heavy spurts that coat my insides.
The last of it takes a long time to let go of me, and I can’t get my breath back. He gentles, drawing slower. His tongue passes over the punctures and closes them.
He sets me on my feet.
He steps back, and cool air replaces him everywhere at once. I sag against the door, dress at my waist, legs shaking, thighs sticky with his cum and mine. My hand lifts toward him, toward the mess I’ve made of his shirt, then drops.
He’s already dressing—trousers, belt, buckle—his hands quick and even, no tremor anywhere in them tonight. His face has closed over. What’s left is the man from the first night, courteous and finished.
“Dress,” he says, and I move away from the door and straighten my clothes.
He smooths his shirt, crosses to the door, and opens it into the corridor. The guard is hovering, face carefully neutral.
“Take her back.”
Two words. No inflection. He doesn’t look at me while he says them.
The guard’s hand comes to my elbow, careful. Everyone in this building is careful with me now except the man who just had me against a door. I lift my chin, and I walk, because walking out of rooms on my own feet is the one thing I have left here.
The corridor is cold after the fire. My legs shake the whole length of it. My throat is healed and humming, my body ringing everywhere he was, wet with him. And beyond it all is my wolf, warm and satisfied in a way I can’t explain. I hate it. I hate that she’s happy with that.
He sent me off the same way he sent her off.
Entitled asshole!
Her perfume is in my nose the whole way back.
The fury needs somewhere to go, and I aim it at everyone. Him, for being a dick. Her, for the pity. And me. For giving in…and loving it.
In my room, I peel the dress off and leave it on the floor where it lands.
If the house wants it back, they can send a guard for that too.