Chapter Two
Xander
“There are two kinds of pain in this world. The pain that hurts, the pain that alters.”
- Denzel Washington
London, England,
Petrovs’ Headquarters…
Complacency should have been one of the deadly sins. Pride, greed, wrath, envy, lust, gluttony, and sloth, all quite lethal, but then so was complacency. At least someone should have warned me. Someone, somewhere, should have told us almost immortals how lethal that character flaw was.
To be honest, even if someone had warned me, I probably would have ignored them. Any dramatic, important, or impactful event in our family’s lives I was usually the one to see it first. I saw and felt everything first. It was as pure to me as my ability to heal. I would experience their joy, their pain, their triumph long before they did. I was good at it, and I loved that my family came to me for advice, for guidance.
And they should.
I saw it all in technicolor, surround sound, clarity. Our enemies didn’t have a chance against us because they could never sneak up on us. I saw the event sometimes months before it actually happened. I might not have such lethal gifts as my brothers. I couldn’t telekinetically throw massive objects around like Drako, and I couldn’t sever arteries to the brain or nuke a body like Luka, but I could at least see danger coming and get the fuck out of Dodge when it did.
That was the thing with being able to see into the future. It made you relax. Made you take shit for granted. Made you complacent!
To make matters worse, my brothers and I had an impenetrable energy shield that protected us. So not only did we have lethal powers, but we were also almost indestructible.
I had taken the support, security, and the unconditional love I received from my family as absolute facts of my existence. I was safe from all the truly horrible things that happened to humans. I was a superhuman, a hybrid vampire—a dhampir. I should have been safe, but I wasn’t safe.
Not from the usual pain and disappointment of the human existence and certainly not from the pure hatred of my family’s enemies. I was complacent.
Yeah, that word again.
Over a century ago, one week of debauchery and drunkenness, in a place I had no business being, left me more vulnerable than I’d ever thought I could be. It was supposed to be impossible for our kind to get drunk. In fact, we were immune to modern medicine or drugs. Somehow, this time was different. I should have been more alert. Or at least telepathically told my family what was happening. But the novelty of it, the unchartered feeling of nothingness and giddiness, had me wanting to explore. Too soon I became too drunk and drugged out of my mind to even defend myself when it happened. Too fucked in the head to even form a coherent thought, much less telepathically communicate with my family.
I was a disgrace. Not worthy of the name Petrov. Not worthy of that legacy of fierce, strong men.
Initially, I was tortured with every manner of magick, demonic spells, and immortal power that my captors could conjure. When that didn’t work, I was taken to a strange place, shackled and contained on a table in a room, a vault, built apparently to contain someone like me. I had no dhampir powers other than my impenetrable energy shield that protected my body. And once they pierced that, I was vulnerable to not just their paranormal weapons, but worse, I was also vulnerable to human weapons.
Then the real fun began.
The sadistic torture and pain no being should ever endure became something my mind couldn’t withstand, even if my body continued to self-heal. Something they didn’t seem to understand, because my body should not have been able to do that in their vault. I had no more screams, no cries, no responses to give.
I could have tried to reach out to my family. Hell, they wanted me to reach them, even took me out of the vault to allow me to. Those motherfuckers thought that they could take on my brothers. But my brothers were more powerful than me. They were stronger. No way would they have been caught so effortlessly. I couldn’t call them. I couldn’t let them see my shame, my disgrace. So, I endured whatever sadistic shit those assholes dished out. I deserved it.
Toward the end, when they did the unthinkable, I had no fight left, no will to live.
As usual, whenever I thought about that time in my life, my mind immediately shied away from that final, excruciating pain. Because no matter how much I pretended that I felt nothing, it was far from the truth. I had felt too much, and it had irrevocably altered me.
I reluctantly tuned back into the conversation, or should I say argument, my brothers, Luka and Drako, were having with our father, Alexi.
“You need to tell him, Papa.” That was from Drako. He and Luka had been trying for the past hour to get Papa to tell me where to find my mate.
“Yes, Papa, you need to tell him,” Luka insisted. “You know damn well that Xander needs this more than ever now.” Luka, in his usual, older brother and head of the family role, took charge.
I observed and listened to it all through a veil of indifference that I embraced wholeheartedly. I preferred the concise, unchanging structure of my emotions. I knew that it started as a way for me to cope with what was happening to me during the assault, but it had since become a habit and a necessity.
My feelings, if you could call them that, toward my family were somewhat complicated. Yes, I loved and cared for them and would lay down my life for them, but those “feelings” were more duty than true emotions now. They were emotions, but emotions muted and cordoned off. It was that abstract view of an object through smudged glass or a muffled voice through the thick walls from another room. That was what I was now. Going through the motions of life, eating, sleeping, fucking, participating in shit my family made me do, but nothing impinged on my armor of cold indifference. I liked it that way. No one could hurt me. Emotionally or physically.
The only thing I needed right now was for my family to get the hell out of my office. But I knew that wasn’t going to happen any time soon.
I returned my focus to the prospectus on my black oak desk in front of me. One of my talents, which we’d learned centuries ago, was that I had an uncanny ability to pick winning business ventures. Yeah, I had more brains than brawn. Which was ironic because I was bigger, more muscular than my brothers and Papa.
The financial viability of a business was a better focal point for me. Cold hard facts didn’t require emotions. And that was a good thing because I had no emotions to give.
“That’s not how this works,” Papa said, his exasperation at Luka’s and Drako’s persistence clearly evident. “You met your mates when fate dictated that you should. Yes, I knew where they were long before you met them. Years before you met them.”
I noted the increased agitation and scowls from both Luka and Drako. They got pissed every time the subject came up that Papa had kept their mates, Luna and Danika, from them.
“I tried leading you to them, and that never worked, not even when I put you in the same city and even in the same damn building.” Papa gave each of them a pointed look, not at all contrite about what he’d done. “Luka, you were in New York when Luna first went to the university. I arranged for her to come to our offices for an orchestrated interview for a part-time job with you. However, you decided at the last minute to take a flight to Moscow and missed her. Our recruiting officer screwed up, and Luna refused our offer to come work for us and instead worked as a waitress in an upscale Italian restaurant.” Papa sighed. “You met her four years later because you refused to even touch foot in the United States until then.”
“Or you could have told me about my mate, and I would have been with her four years earlier!” Luka growled,
“Bullshit!” Papa muttered. “Even when you met your mate, you refused her. It took me kidnapping her and forcing the two of you into the same room with no escape before you gave in.”
“I would have come around,” Luka dismissed.
“No, you wouldn’t have,” I interjected coolly without looking up from the prospectus that I had decided to invest in. I pressed a few buttons on my computer to send instructions to our acquisition team.
“You don’t know that.” I felt Luka’s frowning gaze on me to accompany his disgruntled words.
“Luka might not have wanted to connect with his mate, but I certainly did.” Drako was still giving Papa a hard time for not telling him where to find his mate years after he found her. “You knew I wanted to find my mate. Hell, I was out looking for her!”
“I explained all of this already.” Papa simply didn’t give Drako the satisfaction of getting into it with him. Papa had arranged Drako’s marriage to his mate, but Drako refused to attend the wedding. He met his mate years later because of his stubbornness. I knew that no matter how worried my father was about what was happening to me, he believed absolutely in the power of fate deciding our destiny.
In fact, everyone in the family was worried about me. I got it. They didn’t know what had happened to me almost a century ago and didn’t understand why I wouldn’t tell them. They didn’t know about my weeks of torture because, even after so many years, I still couldn’t talk about it. Shame was my constant bedfellow.
No way did I want my fated-mate to suffer the wasteland that my life had become or become a hunted target of the Petrov enemies. It was bad enough that Anya had to suffer our enemies.
One of Papa’s turned vampires, Adam Dressler, was a constant pain in our asses. He and his band of misfits, immortals that included the High Priest of the witches, Warren Tennerson, were continuously trying to eliminate my family from the face of the earth.
We had captured Warren last year but were betrayed by one of the werewolves from our personal guard of twelve men. Now Adam and Warren were out there plotting God knew what in their never-ending quest to terminate us, and they were acquiring more soldiers to aid them.
After my ordeal, my body healed, but my mind never did. I had been desperate to connect with someone. Desperate to reclaim some semblance of humanity, I had taken Anya, a powerful vampire, as my mate. I knew that our family had been cursed to only reproduce with our fated-mate. Obviously, I hadn’t been concerned about that and had mated Anya anyway. After all, even without the curse, a female vampire could not reproduce. I thought nothing could make it clearer to my family that I didn’t want to bring an innocent child into this fucked-up world. So, it would stand to reason that I wasn’t interested in a mate who could reproduce.
My choice in mate was also complicated by the fact that Anya used to be one of Luka’s lovers.
I didn’t care.
Anya was beautiful, funny, and cultured. She never required I change or show emotion. She accepted me the way I was. And at the time, that was what I wanted. What I needed. Yes, I got that she betrayed me. Betrayed my family. However, I betrayed her first.
I had coldly sought to deflect what had happened to me. To bury those painful and tortured days of captivity. My family was so focused on Anya and me being that beautiful golden couple, and that I was mating Luka’s ex, that they didn’t question my personality change. My motives.
I mated her purely to hide what I had become. I mated her to hide what those bastards had done to me. And I succeeded. My family had been so stunned at my not only mating someone who was not my fated-mate but also a former lover of my brother’s that they had been blind to the damaged wreckage that I had been reduced to. I had simply mimicked the emotions of others around me, and no one was the wiser. Since Anya’s death or more accurately, since Luna ripped Anya’s throat out when Anya tried to kill her, I’d dropped the pretense, and my family seemed to be in a constant flux of trying to “cure” me.
No one in the family held any remorse for Anya’s death, least of all Luna, who would probably exhume her body and kill her ass again if Anya had been human.
“Xander needs his mate,” Luka insisted, dismissing Papa’s arguments of before.
“Alexandra is better off where she is,” I injected dispassionately, still tapping the keys on my computer.
It was as if everyone stopped breathing after my statement. I looked up then, taking in their stunned expressions with mild interest and placing expressions in my memory banks to use later. I had memorized quite a few expressions from my brothers that I had been able to successfully mimic. Humans didn’t react well to a six-foot-six male with no emotional expression.
“You know who she is?” Drako asked cautiously.
“Yes,” I confirmed coolly. “She is a pediatric surgeon in the United States, living a normal professional human woman’s life. She is healthy and happy where she is.”
My cool narration of Alexandra’s life seemed to have further unnerved Luka and Drako, as they stared back at me as though finding it difficult to comprehend my words.
Papa smiled at me gently, but I recognized the sadness in his eyes. He wasn’t surprised by my narration, but he was upset that I could tell it with no emotion for my mate. He had hoped that when he told me about her that the natural compulsion between mates would force me out of my emotionless wasteland.
Yeah, long before Luka and Drako had thought up their latest “cure,” Papa had already tried that.
I had worked too hard to obtain this state of being. Unfeeling. I needed this to survive. I would not give it up to make my family feel better. I had stopped pretending emotions with them years ago. I guess they were still hoping that I would snap out of it.
I almost sighed, just to give them an emotion, any emotion, even if it was only pretend.
“Alexandra is fine,” I told them again. Dismissive. I got up from my desk, crossed over to the door, and opened it. I looked back at my family, who were still speechless and seemingly in a stupefied paralysis.
“Trust me. Alexandra is better off without me fucking up her life.” Final. I left before they could ask any more questions.
As always, Boggs, who was part of the wolfpack that protected my family and my personal bodyguard, suddenly appeared beside me. He knew what I needed.
He was a descendent of the ancient werewolves, the Lycans who could transform at will, could maintain a half-human, half-werewolf form, were stronger, and would live longer than normal werewolves. They could also flash or teleport themselves, or any object, wherever they wanted. Boggs flashed us into the middle of a warzone. There was always some unrest somewhere in the world.
I needed an outlet, and violence was my drug of choice.
I spent several hours combating the immortals embedded in a war between Allied forces and an invading superpower country. The immortals were using the conflict to senselessly kill humans for sport and food. Ever since my capture and torture, I had needed this. Needed the combat, the violence.
Despite the constant threat that my family was under and the periodic fights we engaged in to combat our enemies, I needed a fight without my family. I needed to feel my own strength, my own competence. I never want to feel the helplessness, the powerlessness, and the pain that my captors had made me feel. In fact, I never want to feel again.
However, I recognized that, as a primal predator, just as my body needed food for sustenance, I had psychological and physical needs as well. A predator’s need for violence and aggression. So, yeah, the deaths of the immortals coming under my blade were always brutal and rarely swift. An immortal didn’t die naturally or from the use of human weapons. Killing an immortal usually required another immortal’s magick or gifts. The fact that my sword could render death to an immortal was no small thing. And the fact that it could didn’t mean that I enjoyed the killings. That label—enjoyed—would have been too much emotion for what I got out of these periodic scrimmages.
Back in Manhattan, I showered—the suit I had been wearing disposed of—and ate a hearty meal of rare steaks and vegetables. Afterwards, I made my way at vampiric speed to the penthouse suite of one of the hotels owned by my family to take care of my need for sex and blood.
This was my usual cycle once a week. And it kept me sane.
Unlike my brothers and Papa,I never saw the need to maintain a harem of women. Not when a simple call to discreet escort services could produce the same thing within minutes and had the added advantages of avoiding the unnecessary invasion of my privacy. It also provided constant variety and involved no messy emotions. Ever since the death of my mate, I had used the various suites in whatever city I was in to take care of my sexual and feeding needs.
My body reacted instantly as soon as I stepped over the threshold of the penthouse suite. My cock was hard, and my fangs dug into my lip in readiness.
Boggs stepped out of the suite to take up his position of guarding me while I was otherwise occupied. The three women within would have already been vetted by Boggs and other members of my staff with appropriate background checks, which included current medical and relationship status. Even though I had only requested them less than thirty minutes ago, I had no doubt that my staff would have done a thorough check.
I walked out and closed the door to the suite two hours later. All three women were still within, comatose and draped naked on different surfaces of the suite: the bed, the vertical rack, and the special harnessed leather sofa with the arm and ankle shackles still fastened on each woman. Like my fighting, I liked my sex clinical, functionary, and violent. Unemotional.
There was no softness or a lover’s tenderness left in me.
The women were never hurt, but they had passed out from the sheer sexual intensity and my vampiric feeding, which turned the experience intensely sensual for them. They would wake in a few hours with no memory of the night, not even of me.
I gave a brief nod to my bodyguards as I left. They would ensure the women left unharmed and confirm that their memories were appropriately altered. They would be compensated for their time and told that they had adequately serviced my bodyguards.