Chapter 4
FOUR
Luis liked to think he was slow to anger. He was tightly controlled — perhaps too tightly, if one asked his mothers — and it was an asset in his line of business. If no one could fluster him, no one could get the best of him. If no one could read him, then no one could beat him.
It’d served him well in business and even better as a Dom.
But for the first time since he’d set his sights on winning Francesca, that meticulously maintained charade slipped.
Stalking across the plush carpet, Luis’s voice cracked like a whip through the room. “Absolutely fucking not!”
For just a moment, she shrank. Her slim shoulders curled and her eyes went wide in a look he knew well — the panic of a sub who likes to please getting in trouble.
And then, like a switch flipped, she thrust her chin in the air. That look shuttered. “I’m sorry, but since when do you get to tell me what to do?”
“Since now,” he growled, closing the distance between them. “Get your shit. We’re leaving.”
An incredulous laugh burst from her. “You think because we’ve talked a few times and kissed once, you get to tell me what to do? You’ve lost your damn mind.”
Her defiance actually had a calming effect. Luis knew how to deal with bratty behavior. It helped him find his footing again, allowing him to summon his control once more.
Brushing the underside of her chin with the pad of his middle finger, he asked in a softer voice, “Do you know who I am, Frankie?”
He could see it took everything in her not to shrink back. “No. You’ve never told me.”
“And you never asked around?”
She looked away again, hiding her expressive eyes. “No. I was told not to. And I… I didn’t want to invade your privacy.”
The first time they met, he knew she had no idea who he was. A woman who knew the Amauris would’ve reacted differently when she stumbled upon him, hung-over in his living room. Whether she batted her eyelashes or ran out screaming was a toss-up.
The fact that she did neither spoke of a fact much more troubling than the family’s reputation possibly being not quite as terrifying as it should be.
It meant she was fresh. New blood in United Washington. Untried, uneducated, and unaware of the world she’d been lured into by the slimy fuck who borrowed more money than he ever intended to repay.
Luis liked to think that he had a supernatural sense for innocence, and it saturated the very breath in her lungs.
It’d all started there. With that feeling, and that scent, and the way she arched a brow at him so fearlessly when she asked, “So, are you going to let me mop or what?”
It’d been a treat, for a time, to talk to someone who didn’t know who he was or what he was capable of.
He looked forward to it, and had begun to drop into his penthouse whenever she was scheduled to clean it.
Having someone be so comfortable around him was rare outside of the family.
He’d been loath to ruin it by telling her even his first name, but a part of him had been silently bracing for the day she’d find out on her own.
When it never came up, he assumed she either hadn’t been warned sufficiently about the dangers of associating with him or that she just didn’t care.
Now he knew it was neither. She was just… innocent.
Gently pinching her chin, he told her, “You’re going home. Now.”
Tearing her chin out of his hand, she used one wickedly pointed elbow to get around him. Bare feet stomping across the floor, she snatched the doorknob and gestured sharply toward the sitting room.
“Out.”
Astonished, Luis could only stand there. “What?”
“Get out,” she commanded, unbothered.
“Why?” It was a ridiculous question, but all he could manage under the circumstances. He’d never had someone so beautiful and so very his kick him out of a bedroom before. It was a novel and deeply upsetting experience.
Speaking in a strange voice he could only describe as managing, she began, “I’m going to need you to listen very carefully now.
I don’t know who you are. I don’t care who you are.
I only care about the contestants downstairs, and since you aren’t one of them, I don’t have to even begin to entertain this entitled, condescending, superior, vampire bullshit. ”
Oh, he thought with a low, pleasurable groan. She’s got claws.
His eyes narrowed. “Do you have any idea what kind of people you’re dealing with? They aren’t good.”
She arched a brow. “Their money is.”
Jaw clenching, he took a moment to try and keep his grip on that recently regained control.
Vampires were naturally possessive. It was a survival strategy to jealously guard the wellspring of life that was their mates, their anchors. Even someone they were passingly interested in often became the focus of that intensity, which Dahlia had dryly called resource guarding behavior.
“You know,” she’d teased, “like a dog who won’t let you near a food bowl.”
He’d experienced passing fits of it in the past, but nothing like what he felt when he thought of this exquisite, misguided creature throwing herself in front of the monsters downstairs.
Breathing didn’t do much good. Neither did running his fingers through his hair. He still ended up marching toward her, grabbing the door, swinging it shut, and looming over her until her spine hit the wood.
“How much?”
She blinked. “What?”
“How much do you want from me to agree to leave right now?”
She balked. “You’re not serious.”
Luis did a rapid calculation in his mind. If Easton was selling entry tickets to the Games at one hundred thousand a pop and the standard contract promised a minimum of thirty percent of the fees, plus whatever stipend was included…
“Three hundred thousand,” he offered, heart pounding. It felt like he was running a race, or perhaps standing at the edge of a cliff. Either way, he needed to move or risk losing a prize unlike any other.
The money didn’t mean anything to him. Gods knew he had more than enough to spare. His mission didn’t mean shit, either. To a vampire, blood was life. It came above all things — money, pride, even safety. To want a mate, an anchor, was to want to live.
And he wanted her more than he’d ever wanted anything in his life.
Not just because she smelled good. He wanted her because when she looked up at him like that, something wild in him screamed mine.
A flush crept up to darken her cheeks. “You really think you can buy me?”
“Five,” he immediately shot back.
Her eyes widened, but the reaction was shut down almost instantly. “This isn’t a negotiation,” she flatly informed him. “This is me kicking you out.”
“My money is just as good as theirs, and it comes with a lot fewer strings,” he growled.
It wasn’t entirely true, of course. His strings were just… different. More pleasurable, certainly. And made of silk, to safeguard her delicate skin.
Stretching up onto her tiptoes, she crowded in close to his face to hiss, “I wouldn’t take your money if my fucking life depended on it.”
“You wanted me yesterday,” he growled.
Gods, she was fearless when she lifted her upper lip like that. As if she had fangs to show off, and as if it didn’t make him want her more. “Circumstances change. Yesterday I liked you. Today I hate you.”
He grappled with the slipping threads of his patience to grit out, “You don’t hate me.”
Francesca’s warm brown eyes gleamed with malice when she replied, “I do. And more importantly, I already signed the contract.”
“With Easton.” His voice came out hard with bone-deep displeasure.
“Who owes you money, apparently,” she helpfully supplied. “Which he’ll get tonight. A win for everyone, don’t you think?”
He hadn’t felt much of anything toward Easton before then. Mild annoyance at most. Now, a deep, ugly feeling seeped through his chest at the thought of the other vampire using Francesca to pay his debts.
It didn’t matter that the Blood Games came with a sacred set of rules, of which consent was the most important.
Vampires who’d tried to ignore the rules or circumvent them were punished in the harshest possible way, or else the entire society, which was built on the hard-earned trust of anchors sharing their blood, would crumble.
To participate, Francesca had to be fully informed and amenable to whatever terms had been presented to her.
But he doubted there was any way to fully explain the danger to an outsider like her. She probably thought that after the term of her contract was through, she’d be able to walk away.
But once you entered the syndicate, the only way to escape it was death.
Palms sliding down the door to cage her in, he lowered his head so he could speak directly into her ear. “You’ve never been with a vampire before.”
A shaky breath left her. “You don’t know that.”
“I do,” he shot back. “Because if you had, you wouldn’t be here. No self-respecting vampire in the whole fucking world would let you walk away.”
The heat radiating off her was enough to make him want to rip the tuxedo from his body and rub himself all over her. And the way her scent spiked when he pressed his lips into that silken spot between cheek and earlobe… Luis swallowed a groan.
“If you go through with this, I can promise you that whoever wins your contract won’t give you up,” he warned her, lips skimming over the blush-warmed rise of her cheekbone.
Her breath quickened. The faint sound of her nails digging into the wood behind her made his cock stand at attention. He wanted those blunt little claws in his back. Urgently.
“It’s purely a blood exchange,” she argued, though the strength in her voice had gone rather squeaky. “No biting or— or anything else.”
Luis scoffed. The tip of his nose brushed hers as he drew closer to that ruby-red mouth. “You think that’ll save you?” He tsked. “I can tell you now, it won’t.”
“Why?”
“Because if you won’t leave with me right now, that means I have to win you,” he answered, lips hovering above her own. “And I don’t give up my prizes, kitten.”