Chapter 32 New Prey #2
“Listen, Magda.” Serban said into my head, snapping me back to attention.
Not risking speaking aloud for fear of someone overhearing, he continued to communicate with me silently.
“Listen to the speed of his heartbeat. It's faint now.
If you take more—it wouldn't take much—his heart will stop.
Don't risk taking more.” Serban leaned down again and licked the man's neck, and I saw the four piercings close, slowly at first, and then faster, until not a single mark remained.
Serban looked into the man's eyes, which had stayed open during the encounter. Through his connection to me, he patiently urged me to try the same, to put thoughts into the drunk man's head, soothing, gentle but firm, and to ask the man to speak if he understood my instructions.
The man nodded dumbly, and repeated in a low whisper what I'd said to him. “I walked home from the inn. I had too much to drink. I saw no one.”
‘What is your name?” Serban said silently to the man.
“Albert,” the man responded.
“Go home to your wife, Albert.” Serban whispered.
Albert, with an unsteady gait and a faint smile, meandered his way down the lane.
Serban looked at me, his dark eyes glittering with something like pride. “Well done.” He said softly, and then looked away from me and started into the dark night.
We retraced our path to the horses, his silence between us heavy. When we mounted, he turned back toward me, eyes narrowing. “How do you feel?” he asked.
How did I feel? Alive. More alive than I'd felt at any point in my miserable life—save the night Anca was born—and that realization cut deep, a dagger of guilt burning low in my gut. The trembling hesitation that had seized me the night before in the forest was gone.
Perhaps Serban's mercy—Albert still lived—had made tonight's lesson easier.
But the power I'd summoned to cloud Albert's mind, that same intoxicating trance I'd felt under Serban's hands the first time three years ago, now flowed through me.
It was heady, powerful. Arousal threaded through every moment, the hands of a dozen invisible lovers caressing every inch of my skin, first at the moment I scented Albert's blood in the cold dark, then again when I snaked my thoughts into Albert's mind and controlled him.
Serban still sat astride his horse, waiting for my answer. But I suspected every thought crowding my mind had already found its way to him—and that this was what he truly wanted to know: whether I fully understood what I had become.
I nodded, uncertain at first, then steadier as the pulse of something new took hold in me. I raised my chin to meet his eyes. The movement sent my hood sliding back, my hair cascading down my shoulders.
“I feel strong.” It was the simplest truth I had.
Serban said nothing, but I thought I saw a small smile tug at the corner of his mouth before he turned his horse and kicked him forward into the night.
After our return, a young boy waited in the stables. Fifteen at most, all bones and long limbs, his head bent low. He wouldn't look at me. Fear? Deference? I couldn't tell. But the tilt of his lashes, the color of his thick, unruly hair—warm, deep-brown—stirred a sorrowful memory—Dani at that age.
“That will be all tonight, Nicolae,” Serban said, passing him the reins of both mounts. The boy nodded silently and dipped his head, his boots crunching on the gravel as he walked the horses back to their stalls.
I must have lingered on tender Nicolae a moment too long, because Serban's hand clamped around my wrist. He dragged me behind him through the servant's entrance of the keep and didn't stop until we reached my chamber. He flung the door open, pushed me inside, and shut it hard behind us.
I could have pulled away—should have—but instead I clung to him.
My arms wound around his holding my wrist, drawing it tight between my breasts, seeking the pressure, the friction.
The excitement still thrummed through me, my body alive and unrelenting, the ache between my thighs, the place wet and swollen, pulsing with the memory of the ride home and the rhythm of the saddle beneath me.
Serban's expression hardened—anger, discomfort, something like pity flickering behind his eyes.
“I can smell it on you, Magda,” he said sharply.
“Feeding from a human awakens everything—sight, sound, scent, touch.
It floods the body with hunger and pleasure both.
It's disorienting, I know.” He pushed me back, gently but firmly, disentangling his arm awkwardly from me.
“In time, you'll learn to tell the difference between that hunger and what is truly desire.”
He was right. I could smell it too—my own arousal, hot, thick, and sweet.
But knowing the cause didn't lessen the ache.
I whimpered in frustration, arching my back, a cat in heat, every nerve alive beneath my skin.
The old Magda would have been appalled at the way I was acting, but who I was now knew no shame.
The hunger had nowhere to go, curling tighter inside me until I could hardly breathe.
I raised a hand absently and squeezed one of my breasts, my lips parting at the sensation.
A wanton moan escaped my lips and Serban's eyes went wide, consumed by blackness.
The flicker of change in his face—hesitation, awareness—made the air thicken.
I was still a woman, and this, this allure, was the only power the world had ever granted me.
And I would wield it, even if it damned me further.
I used my newfound speed to push Serban against the door, catching him off guard.
One hand held his neck the way Ivar's men had held mine against the tree, and my other went to his crotch.
His cock was thick and hard, and I felt the phantom pleasure imagining it inside me.
His face closed off, any sympathy gone. The shove came quick and hard, sending me stumbling until I hit the floor. My pride, not my body, took the blow. I looked up at him, breathless, waiting for softness that never came. His stare was winter-cold.
“Testing your limits tonight, are you?” His tone was bleak. He turned and left the room. The hollow echo of his key in the lock reverberated through my skull.
The sweet scent of my desire still lingered in the room, but with it, a hint of another scent mingled with mine. Musky, earthy smoke mingled with my honeyed spice. I knew without a doubt what the foreign scent was.
Despite his denial, desire answered in him as fiercely as it did in me.