Chapter 20 – Kalista
Chapter Twenty
Kalista
“Thank you,” I told him softly. “You’ve gotten me home safely and I still have a few hours to sleep before work, so you can leave now.”
Tristan stared back at me coolly. “Are you forgetting what we discussed tonight?”
“Look, Tristan, it’s been a long day and even longer night. All I want to do now is take a hot shower and go to bed.”
“And I will do nothing to delay your immediate needs,” he said silkily. “All your needs, even the ones you are trying to pretend that you don’t desperately want addressed.”
“I don’t have the patience for dealing with any more bullshit tonight,” I told him impatiently and moved toward the hall leading to my bedroom.
“I’m not leaving you alone in here, piccola tigre ,” he told me softly. “Go take your shower and go to bed. I will be here when you wake up.”
I waved my palm dismissively. I was determined to get away from him before he realized how much I needed him. His blood. His essence. His body. Somehow, I’d become addicted to everything Tristan. I told them earlier of my daily craving for blood, when it had been once a week before I met Tristan. What I didn’t tell them was that my craving was for Tristan’s blood. In fact, every moment that we’re apart, I not only miss him but I feel an emptiness, a thirst, a hunger that gnaws at me. No water or food can even start to satisfy me.
I spent the entire day at work fighting the demands of my body to go to Tristan. By the end of my shift, I was literally climbing the walls with the desperation to call Tristan. Since nightfall, I felt him in my head and knew that I only had to call to him and he would come to me.
Unfortunately, I got the text from my sister to help them. Since then, I had been ignoring the debilitating thirst that I didn’t understand or even knew how to address.
It stunned me that as soon as I entered the club, I sensed Tristan’s presence. My feet couldn’t take me to the upstairs VIP section fast enough. As soon as I was in the same room as Tristan, the gnawing thirst and hunger, although not completely gone, became manageable.
The only thing that had momentarily shifted my focus away from thinking of how much I wanted Tristan was seeing Alexi’s sons, Luka especially. I had been so shocked at seeing him for the first time in person. Of course, I had seen photos of them, but those photos hadn’t done him justice. He was the spitting image of Alexi. And even after five years, I never expected to feel Alexi’s loss as if it was just yesterday.
And how crazy was it that Tristan is Alexi’s son too. My head has been spinning with the many revelations of the past few hours. If I’m being honest, the fact that Tristan is a “criminal” has gone way down on my list of objections to being with him. I simply wanted him too much now. And I was running out of reasons as to why I couldn’t be in the immortal world with him.
As I stood under the warm sprays of the shower, that hunger and thirst assailed me again. Knowing that Tristan was so close, scenting him, and feeling his proximity made me feel feral. This time not only did the thirst for his blood gnaw at my stomach, but it felt as if I had a fistful of sand in my throat. This time my hunger and desire for Tristan had my nipples and clit taut to the point of pain, and my essence liberally coated my inner thighs. I wanted him with a desperation that had me trembling and weak with need.
Instead of using my loofah to wash and soap my body, I used soapy palms to caress every inch of my skin that I could reach. If I lingered over my breasts, the flat planes of my stomach, the curve of my hips, my bottom, and finally to where I ached most, between my legs, that’s my business. However, every touch, every caress only stoked my need and did nothing to satisfy me. I cupped one of my breasts, squeezing and kneading the soft globe and plucking at the pebbled tip as I slowly slid my other hand first over the soft skin of my stomach and then lower between my thighs. There I could scissor two fingers in my dewy folds and then blissfully over my engorged flesh at the heart of my sex.
I don’t know how long I tortured myself, my palm alternating from one breast to the next, caressing, kneading, plucking, and then my fingers gliding and stroking over my sleek, sensitive flesh, bringing me so close to the edge of such intense need that I could barely think straight.
I became so desperate for a release I started imagining that it was Tristan’s hands on me, but my imagination was nothing compared to the real thing. I felt the feel of the rough skin of his large palm on my bottom as he pulled me toward him until the front of my body was flush against his. With his palm on my ass and another gripping my thigh, he lifted me to better align my body to his much larger frame.
I helplessly wrapped my arms around his neck and my legs around his waist for purchase.
“How did…” I didn’t have the brainpower to finish my question.
“Your thoughts were loud enough to wake the dead,” he teased in a gravelly voice even as he tenderly kissed the warm skin of my neck then my cheek before settling softly on my lips.
I could barely make sense of his words because he was breathtakingly beautiful, and I felt every inch of his massive, sculptured frame pressed against me. His rugged bulk made me feel incredibly feminine and soft.
He was sheer masculine perfection. And I loved every second of being held by him, being touched by him, and just being able to breathe his scent in.
He tormented the sensitive skin of my breasts and bottom. His fingers plucked at the pebbled tips of my breasts while his other hand squeezed and kneaded the taut flesh of my ass.
I reveled in his touch but reveled most of all in the feel of his massive body dwarfing and pressing into mine. His thick cock was nestled between us from my hip, along my stomach, and reaching almost to my chest, with the hard column pulsing and lengthening even more as Tristan captured my lips in a drugging kiss of white-hot lust.
The first taste of him after the torturous hours of separation thirst had me exploding in release within seconds. Even as I convulsed and spasmed in ecstasy, my moans of pleasure lost in our kiss, he lifted me, pinned me to the cool tiled wall, spread my thighs, and thrust up into me with one bruising stroke.
I released his lips to suck in a harsh, shocked breath. Our combined passion narrowed my world to the intoxicating vortex of our mutual bliss.
He trailed his lips down the warm cavity of my neck and to the swells of my breasts, light feather kisses that sent sizzling fissions of desire through every cell in my body, even as he held my hips and pulled me on and off his cock. And then he pulled a beaded nipple into his mouth, and each tag of his lips sent a searing coil of lust to my clit and deep into my pelvis.
He released my nipple with a pop before trailing his lips back to the warm cavity of my neck, and then he latched his fangs into the soft skin at the junction of my neck and shoulder.
“Oh God!” The feel of him filling my core so completely, the hard penetration of his fangs, his pleasure and my pleasure sent an electrifying current of desire tunneling throughout my body and short-circuited my damn mind.
He sucked from my neck, even as he swiveled his hips and drove into me in a ruthless invasion that had me keening and moaning in devastating ecstasy.
Our bond pulsed with our mutual pleasure. Tristan’s pleasure was mine, and my absolute enjoyment was his. I could even taste how Tristan considered my blood a delicious decadence on his tongue.
Nirvana . The husky whisper in my mind sounded distinctly like Tristan.
My grip around his neck tightened as I lifted myself higher against the wall, changing the angle of his cock as he sank deeper and deeper into me with every brutal thrust of his hips. I matched his rhythm and tightened my inner walls around him like a vise. His lusty grunts and growls echoed around us as he pistoned in and out of me at a frenzied speed, delivering pleasure so intense that my entire body shattered in a hard trembling release.
The suction of his lips on my neck intensified, and he increased the swivel of his hips, powering into me even in the throes of my climax.
Another orgasm toppled the last, and then another ricocheted and rolled one after another through me.
He continued driving into me, over and over again.
I convulsed even more, trembled even harder. It was too much, too intense, as a cataclysmic release incinerated every cell and melted every bone in my body, sending me into a thick fog of such bliss that I lost consciousness to the abyss.
It was the sunlight piercing through the slits of the drapes covering my bedroom windows that woke me next. My senses immediately reached out for Tristan, but he was nowhere in my apartment. I sensed my usual bodyguards of two wolves, there since my first night with Tristan, lurking outside my apartment building.
My thirst for Tristan registered then, and while it was mild now, I knew that in a few hours it would become unbearable.
I must have fed last night was my next thought. And then I had the memory of Tristan drying my skin with a large towel, lying naked on my bed, and pulling me to lie on top of him.
God, he had been so comfortable. Big, warm, and so male.
Why had he been warm to me? A vampire’s skin is usually cool, right? In the many times that I’d touched Alexi, his skin was cold to the touch, but not Tristan’s, not to me. Maybe that was a mate thing.
So many memories from last night flooded my mind. Sensual, passionate memories.
Memories of Tristan spreading my thighs over his hips so that I could straddle him, and him impaling me onto his thick, hard length as he stroked smoothly, deeply inside of me from the bottom up. He then rocked into me gently as he pierced his wrist with his fangs and placed the open bleeding vein to my lips so that I could drink, and I drank greedily.
The sweet, metallic taste of his blood on my tongue was pure nirvana, and as intoxicating as the most potent wine.
He aligned his lips to the curve of my shoulder and neck, sank his fangs into my tender skin again, and drank even as he continued stroking gently in and out of me.
That blend of pleasure-pain had been excruciatingly erotic and intense. This was lovemaking at its most exquisite, but it was no less potent than our voracious fucking of before. Our release overwhelmed us both, until I felt him deep into my bones and in every cell of my body. I had melted on top of him in a wet puddle of goo.
As I rolled out of bed and padded to the bathroom, I felt different, but I couldn’t quite place what it was. I had no time to dwell on what was happening with me, though. I had too much to do this morning, calling my mother being one of those chores.
I’ve always thought of her as Mother, not mom or mummy. If I could have gotten away with calling her Monique, I would have. Alexi had always filled the parent role for me. Just the thought of Alexi had me sucking in a breath of pain so intense that my eyes started to tear up, but I quickly blinked them away. If I didn’t have time to figure out what was different about me, I sure as hell didn’t have time to think about my relationship with Alexi.
I quickly used the loo, washed my hands, then returned to the bedroom to grab my phone.
I called my mother on her cell phone. She picked up after only one ring, which told me that I needed to brace myself for her usual complaints.
“It’s about time you called me,” she whined.
“Good morning, Mother.” I tried to project a conciliatory tone.
“As much as you give me shit about taking money from my men, you don’t apply the same rules for yourself.”
“What are you talking about? And how are Tammy, Kay, and Linc?”
I half listened to my mother as another memory of last night sliced through me. The vivid recall had my nipples tightening and my core pulsing and dampening in seconds. As I had done since I felt his cock in my mouth for the first time, I couldn’t go a night without sucking him off, same as he couldn’t seem to go a night without eating me out.
God, I was dying for the taste of him right now. What the hell was this madness?
“You know precisely what I’m talking about,” she muttered, completely ignoring my query about my siblings. “And given the huge-ass house and acres of land surrounding it, your man has got serious money.”
“Again, what are you talking about? What house?”
My mother laughed hysterically. “Yeah, almost scared me half to death, waking us up in this ginormous bed with no memory of getting here. They even gave me my own maid. Me. My own maid. Just crazy. It is nice though. I’ll give you that. Real posh.”
“Mother, nothing you’re saying is making any sense.”
“It’s because you’re not listening,” she huffed. “Your boyfriend put us on a plane while we were sleeping and brought us to England. I mean, who does that? Neither me nor the kids even remember a plane ride,” she grumbled. “But now that I’ve had time to think, I remember him. I remember who your boyfriend is.”
I wasn’t surprised. Now that I knew who Tristan was, and in the mafia no less, I would have been more surprised if my mother didn’t know him. “Please tell me that he wasn’t one of your clients, Mother.” My voice was raspy with rage suddenly, and I felt capable of ripping my mother’s heart from her body if she had ever touched my mate like that. He was mine, dammit.
She sighed in exasperation. “You really think little of me, don’t you?”
“Mother…” It was my turn to be annoyed.
“Your boyfriend is the man who helped us escape the Camorra when you were a child and paid our debt to them.”
“Our? As I recall, I was a child, and he rescued us because they wanted to turn me into a child prostitute.”
“You know what I mean.”
“Mother, I have to go to work. I’m not understanding what it is you have to complain about. So let me call you back when I leave work tonight.”
“But—”
I hung up on her before she could utter another word. She had really stunned me. I’m not sure how I felt to learn that Tristan had been my savior so many years ago. While I hadn’t even realized it, I had measured every other human male to him and had found them lacking in every way when compared to my savior that day.
As a child, I had seen him as larger than life, a real-life superhero and the most handsome man I had ever seen. Of course, now as an adult, I realize that the features I had given to him as a child had been all wrong. My child mind had given him the features of a Disney prince, the cartoon version of Prince Eric from The Little Mermaid . But my adult Tristan wasn’t a damn Disney prince; he was a prince of darkness: master of the criminal underworld, Dracula 5.0, and a carnal temptation that even a saint wouldn’t be able to resist. And I was no saint.
Okay, so that was just one more delicious thing about Tristan that told me more than anything how much our lives had always been interlinked and predestined. If Tristan ever found out, he would see it as further reasons to cage me in.
With very little time to spare before I had to be into work, I rushed through my usual morning ablutions, including washing, blow drying, and curling my short hair. I scarfed down a bagel and a cup of coffee.
As I stepped out of my apartment, I was stunned by Aidan’s and Cyrus’s presence standing guard outside my apartment door.
“Aren’t you guys supposed to pretend that you’re not following me around like creepy stalkers?” I asked in exasperation. I knew that Tristan was worried about his enemies attacking me but given my powers, his concern seems ridiculous.
“Things with Tristan are a bit volatile right now,” Aidan said soberly. “You should reconsider being out here in the open.”
“I don’t understand the concern,” I said impatiently. “Not only am I a trained SWAT officer but I also have super immortal capabilities.”
“Tristan is concerned that between the other crime families and some international criminal syndicates you’re in even more danger than normal,” Cyrus said quietly.
“My original statement still stands.” I continued to my bike and climbed on.
“Don’t be stubborn about this, lass.” Aidan moved as if he was going to block my bike.
I gave him an annoyed glare before pulling on my helmet and then pulling down my visor.
“Kali—” Aidan started, but I was already late for work and didn’t have time to listen to him repeating himself.
I roared out of my parking spot and was headed into work within the next breath.
“ I need you to come to the penthouse. ” A deep baritone voice suddenly filled my mind as I pulled onto the street.
I swerved in a startled fright. The voice was clear as if speaking to me through my Bluetooth, except I had forgotten to activate the Bluetooth device in my helmet. So, I shouldn’t be hearing anything. But of course, I knew Tristan’s voice anywhere.
“How am I hearing you?” I said out loud.
“ Telepathy ,” he responded. “ This is serious, angelo mio. Come to me. ”
“We’ve already covered this ground, Tristan. Nothing has changed and more pointedly, I haven’t changed my mind.” I continued speaking out loud, even though my words seemed loud in my ear. I had no idea how telepathy worked anyway.
“ The circumstances have changed ,” Tristan said brusquely.
“I have to go,” I told him as I approached the precinct.
“ Kali, listen to me .”
“I can’t talk to you now.”
“ Kali …”
I started humming “Lose Control” by Teddy Swims. Hell, I thought that it was more than appropriate to my situation, and it drowned out Tristan’s voice in my head. I couldn’t let him know how hard it was for me to say no to him. Being away from him kept getting harder and harder. And after last night, I knew that I wouldn’t be able to control my need for him for much longer. The yearning to be connected to him always was getting more and more difficult to resist. And now that I’d felt his fangs in my skin, my desire for him had gotten infinitely worse. Not only was I wanting his possession, but I was also thirsty for his blood. He was a craving, an addiction, and a compulsion all rolled into one.
As soon as I rolled into the parking lot, I saw my team leader and the rest of the team hightailing it to our armored tactical truck, while the other SWAT team was also entering their truck.
“What’s going on?” I asked Sergeant Harper.
“Grab your gear,” he demanded. “Wheels up in less than a minute.”
Little did he know, but his attempt to punish me by leaving before I could get back was doomed to fail. I ran into the building at human speed, still faster than most people but I saved my real vampiric speed until I was out of sight of the team.
Why do I feel as if I’m moving faster? I shook off that thought because I just didn’t have time to analyze anything. I made it back to the truck as the last team member was climbing into the truck.
“Damn, that was fast,” Cooper said in amused awe. He loved it when I made Harper look like an idiot for being unreasonable.
“I can’t let you guys have all the fun,” I teased. Being the only woman on a team of six had its challenges, and competitiveness and misogyny were the most predominant of them all.
“Listen up,” Sergeant Harper demanded. He ran through the robbery and hostage situation in the casino pit at one of the largest hotels on the strip. As he gave the intel on what the police were able to uncover so far, I started to appreciate why we were using two teams instead of one.
When we arrived, there were at least fifteen police cars creating barriers for each exit point. As I strapped on my gear in preparation, the usual adrenaline and excitement I always felt gripped my entire focus. How could I ever think of giving this up?
Sergeant Harper called out our team’s positioning and partnering for our entry into the hotel as soon as we arrived at our drop-off site. “Officer Black, you are with me,” he barked.
“What?” Cooper and I said almost in unison.
“You’re trying to take my partner?” Cooper demanded in a teasing manner. But there was no hiding that he was just as shocked as I was by this change because Cooper and I have been partners for the past two years. And a change during such a critical incident like this was not just unusual; it was quite dangerous.
“Cooper, I don’t have time for this shit,” the sergeant muttered. “Everyone get into position. We only have one shot at this.”
There was no time to question him further, but a shiver of unease slid up my spine. Paired off in our teams, we swiftly entered the hotel at our designated entry points. The other SWAT teams were also aligned with us and paired off to enter the hotel as well.
Sergeant Harper indicated that I take lead into the hotel, and again, I was tempted to question him, but I was too anxious to get to the action to care about what was going on with Harper. He was always a bit of a coward anyway. I’m surprised that he even entered the building. He would often take any excuse to remain well away from any real action. So, I wasn’t surprised by him hiding behind my armor and gun.
We moved quickly and stealthily toward the casino pit, which was a good half-mile deep into the building. We rounded a particularly narrow, tight corridor when Harper collided into me. I felt a sharp sting, but it quickly dissipated, and I dismissed it as Harper started apologizing.
“Sorry about that, but we need to move faster,” he mumbled.
I didn’t bother arguing. Instead, I increased my speed. I had barely gone a few steps before I felt incredibly faint, and suddenly, I was falling. “ Tristan! ” I tried to call out, but too soon everything around me turned dark, and I knew no more.