Chapter 6 Orfeo #2
The second floor, once a stately cigar lounge with a baby grand piano and imported lamps and plush seating dotted around glass tables, looks like shit.
Abandoned, dirty, dusty. All the furniture has been removed except for a single velvet, high-backed armchair and a brocade chaise lounge. Someone has brought me a ladder and paint.
How the fuck am I going to paint a fresco onto the ceiling in two days?
My dinner waits for me, draped across an armchair, tapping frantically at her phone.
When she sees me, she drops the device to her chest and grins.
I believe her name is Kat. Alfo takes care of bringing in willing participants for us, but I’m not an idiot—I know the deal that landed her here is one she regrets.
Between us, there’s nothing other than a foul exchange.
Money for her body; blood for orgasms; small talk for the vague sense that someone gives a shit about us.
Kat smiles, pressing her tongue into the corner of her mouth. Her caramel-blonde hair is twisted away from her face in a chignon. Her features are stunning, but I’m not interested. Not like that.
“You’re late.”
“I know, amore.” I shrug off my jacket, then unbutton my shirt and leave it draped over the chaise. “Busy night.”
“Poor baby,” she coos.
I undo my belt. “I built the walls of my own prison.”
She laughs. “You’re such a poet.”
I lift her easily from the chair and settle back down with her in my lap. I push a loose strand of hair away from her face. “Let’s not talk tonight, okay?”
She makes a soft sound in the back of her throat, curling her arms around my neck. “No talking.” Her heart rate doubles. “I promise.”
I let Kat take the lead. She presses her plush lips to the corner of my mouth, moving in a slow line toward my ear, easing my head back against the chair. I slide my hands around her narrow waist. She’s a bit thin for me, in a way that makes me feel worried she’s not eating enough.
I’m not sure why I care. I know other vampires certainly don’t.
She’s a nice enough girl, with hungry eyes and a neck scarred with little white puncture marks. She likes our world, finds it interesting.
I should be a hunter; I should crave the smell of fear in her sweat. But maybe this is part of our specific type of vampirism. It’s the excitement in her that makes my hunger grow from a dull ache to a razor-sharp pain.
I feel myself growing hard from the gentle pressure of her ass against me.
Her movements are slow, and I appreciate the way she moves around me like she cares.
Kat straddles my lap, pulling a groan from both of us as her heart rate spikes, thumping visibly in her throat.
She sweeps her tongue down my neck, over my Adam’s apple.
Her pulse point is inches from my mouth.
Its thudding overwhelms me, rushes through my ears like the swell of the ocean.
All of the points of connection between us feel like pure electricity.
“Bella,” I whisper, tightening my grip on her ass. “Come sei bella.”
Her heart rate skyrockets. She drags her tongue back up over the column of my neck, mewing like a desperate animal. She presses her sex down hard into me.
“Please,” she whispers.
At her provocation, I sink my teeth into her neck. I don’t need too much blood, just enough to make my head stop swimming. And it does, almost instantly. Her hot, sweet nectar rushes into my mouth, drenching my tongue and throat. It’s like sucking honey straight from the comb.
Kat lets out a deeper moan, shock and pleasure ripping through her body, building like an orgasm until she’s shaking and shivering in my arms. If a vampire’s kiss didn’t feel good, we would have died off by now.
But her pleasure is a mirage. My hunger is nothing more than an ache, a pain.
I don’t remember what it’s like to feel both arousal and affection at the same time anymore. There are only glimpses—like scent memories. Here one moment, gone another. Like the curve of Diantha’s waist, flaring into her hips. Or the flicker of pleasure in her eyes as she took a bite of pasta.
Or the desperate way her eyes trained on me when she came back into her body, scared and confused.
I suck harder at the gentle curve of Kat’s throat. I bury my fingers in her hair, pulling her chignon loose. I devour her for just a moment longer, the image of Diantha’s long, dark hair burned into my mind.
Pressed into me like a brand.
Why? Why is the memory of that woman clinging to me?
Why can’t I shake her scent from my mind?
Worse yet, I would do anything to experience it again.
I disconnect from Kat’s neck and seal the wound with a tender stroke of my tongue, and she collapses against my chest, shivering and writhing against me in the aftershocks of pleasure. I don’t lift my arms to hold her.
As Kat’s mouth travels down over my stomach, I try with everything I have to remember the last time Vittoria and I made love. To conjure the sense memories of the last time her mouth met mine.
I lost Vittoria fifty years ago, and now I know she’s gone from Earth.
Taken by age, possibly, or disease. Or maybe by the lifestyle we lived together as two wild humans.
I wonder if, in her final moments, I came back into her mind.
As a human, my nose was slightly larger, crooked at the bridge.
My front tooth was chipped from a bad motorino fall.
I had a thick and deep white scar through my eyebrow that is now much less defined, only slightly raised.
How many years ago was it that she’d been told that I’d died from a lethal combination of drugs, alcohol, and hubris?
And that Orfeo is dead. Her Orfeo.
She would have never recognized this shadow self that I’ve left behind.