Chapter 30
Kate found herself in the heart of Bucharest’s underground club scene without any clear memory of how she-’d gotten there.
The music pounded through her like a physical force.
Strobe lights painted the writhing crowd in flashes of neon, and the air was thick with the scent of human sweat, alcohol, and something darker that made her fangs ache.
This wasn’t her scene. Kate Morgan didn’t do underground clubs, didn’t dance to music that sounded like machinery having a seizure, didn’t lose herself in crowds of strangers grinding against each other in the dark.
But tonight, she was giggling.
The sound bubbled up from her throat without permission, light and airy and completely at odds with the predator she’d become. Her body moved to the music with a fluidity that felt foreign, her hips swaying, her arms raised above her head as she danced with abandon.
That’s right, little Pet. Dance for me.
Aleksander’s voice whispered through her, and Kate felt her smile widen. She spun in place, her hair whipping around her face, and laughed with pure, inexplicable joy.
She was having fun. She was happy. She was exactly where she wanted to be.
The rational part of her mind screamed warnings that she couldn’t quite hear over the music and the compulsion singing in her blood.
Come deeper, my dear. Come find me.
Kate pushed through the crowd, her enhanced strength making the press of human bodies feel like moving through water.
The club seemed to go on forever, level after level descending into the earth like Dante’s vision of hell.
Each floor was darker than the last, the music more primal, the crowd more dangerous.
Kate passed vampires she didn’t recognize, their pale faces turning to watch her with interest and something that might have resembled pity.
Finally, in what felt like the very bowels of the building, she found him.
Aleksander sat in what could only be described as a throne, an ornate chair positioned on a raised platform that overlooked the dance floor below.
He was beautiful. He was terrible.
He was her maker, and he was smiling.
“There’s my good girl,” he said, his voice carrying easily over the music. “I was beginning to think you’d gotten lost.”
Kate felt her feet carrying her toward the platform. She dropped to all fours and crawled up the steps, settling onto his lap without hesitation. Her head nestled against his shoulder.
“That’s better,” Aleksander murmured, his hand stroking her hair. “You see how much happier you are when you stop fighting what you are?”
“Kate.”
The voice cut through the compulsion like a blade. Kate looked up to see not just Devon, but Sophia, Antoine, Luc, and the remaining members of their strike team standing at the edge of the dance floor. Their faces were grim, weapons ready.
Devon stood at their head, his face a mask of controlled fury, his hands clenched into fists at his sides.
“Devon!” Kate exclaimed with genuine delight. “You found me! Isn’t this wonderful?”
Devon’s jaw tightened, but his voice remained steady. “Let her go, Aleksander.”
“Let her go?” Aleksander laughed, the sound rich and amused. “But she came to me willingly. Didn’t you, my dear?”
“I did,” Kate agreed happily, snuggling closer to him. “I don’t know why I was fighting it before. This feels so much better.”
Devon’s eyes met hers, and for a moment she saw something flicker there. Not just anger, but pain. Deep, soul-crushing pain at seeing her like this, at watching her respond to another’s touch with pleasure and contentment.
Behind him, six vampires detached themselves from the crowd, moving to flank the platform. They were the loyalists from the castle, the ones from the illusion.
Sophia gave a subtle hand signal, a flicker of her fingers that was all but invisible in the strobing lights. It was enough. In a coordinated blur of motion, her team engaged Aleksander’s six loyalists. The dance floor, moments before a sea of writhing human bodies, became a killing ground.
Luc, ever the brawler, met the charge of a hulking brute of a vampire, their bodies colliding with a sound like two cars crashing.
The force of the impact sent them both staggering back, but Luc was quicker to recover.
He used the bigger creature’s momentum against him, ducking under a wild swing and driving a silver knife into his kidney.
The loyalist roared in pain, and Luc followed up with a vicious elbow to the face that shattered his nose and sent him stumbling into the panicked crowd.
Antoine, by contrast, fought with the deadly grace of a duelist. His thin, rapier-like blade was a blur of silver as he faced a female loyalist with a feral snarl and claws like razors.
He moved with a precise elegance, parrying a wild swing that would have decapitated a lesser fighter.
The blade found her heart, and she crumpled to the floor before she even had time to register her own death.
Sophia herself was a whirlwind of controlled fury. She fought with two curved daggers, her movements a deadly dance as she took on two loyalists at once.
She ducked under a clumsy swing from one, her blade slicing across his hamstring, crippling him. As he went down, she spun, her other dagger finding the throat of the second loyalist with a wet, tearing sound. He gargled on his own black blood, his eyes wide with shock as she kicked him away.
One of her team, a younger vampire, was not so lucky. He was fast, but inexperienced. He managed to take down one of the loyalists, but a second one caught him a moment later from behind, its claws tearing through his back and sending him to the floor in a spray of blood.
He was out of the fight, his life hanging by a thread.
Another of Sophia’s warriors, a stoic female named Elara, fought back-to-back with the fourth member of their team, Rhys.
They were a well-oiled machine, their movements synchronized from decades of fighting together.
Elara used a weighted chain to trip and entangle their opponents, while Rhys moved in for the kill with a heavy, double-edged axe.
It was brutal, efficient, and utterly without mercy.
Through it all, the human crowd screamed and scattered, a panicked herd caught between predators.
The strobe lights painted the carnage in brief, horrific flashes: a spray of blood, the glint of silver, the feral snarl on a vampire’s face.
The chaos of the wider battle was a maelstrom of violence, a stark contrast to the quiet, psychological torture unfolding on the platform above.
For Devon, it all faded into the background, his entire world narrowed to the sight of Kate on another man’s lap, smiling.
“What do you want?” Devon asked, his voice rough, ignoring the war that had broken out around them.
“Straight to business. How refreshingly direct.” Aleksander’s hand moved to Kate’s shirt, his fingers playing with the top button.
“I want what should have been mine from the beginning. Your territories in Eastern Europe. Your holdings in Prague, Budapest, Vienna. Sign them over to me, and perhaps we can talk about terms.”
“Terms?” Devon’s voice held a dangerous edge.
“Well, she’s so much happier now that she’s stopped fighting her nature. Look at her, Devon. Really look at her.” Aleksander’s fingers worked the first button free, then the second. “She’s finally at peace.”
Kate made a soft sound of pleasure as his hand slipped inside her shirt, his cold fingers finding the maker’s mark beneath her breast. When he touched it, she arched against him with a gasp, her body responding to the contact in ways that had nothing to do with her actual desires.
“Stop,” Devon said, his voice barely controlled.
“But she likes it,” Aleksander said, his thumb circling the raised design of the mark. “Don’t you, my dear?”
“Yes,” Kate breathed, her voice thick with unwanted arousal. “Yes, I like it.”
Devon’s hands shook with the effort of not launching himself at Aleksander. “The territories. You want the territories, they’re yours. Just release her from the compulsion.”
“All of them?”
“All of them.”
Aleksander smiled, his hand still moving beneath Kate’s shirt. “And your holdings in the New World?”
“Aleksander—”
“All of it, Devon. Everything you’ve built, everything you’ve earned. Sign it all over to me, and we’ll see about my little Pet here.”
Devon closed his eyes, and Kate could see the war raging behind his expression. Everything he’d worked for, everything he’d built over centuries of careful planning and political maneuvering. His entire empire, handed over to the monster who had violated the woman he loved.
“Done,” Devon said finally. “All of it.”
Aleksander’s smile widened with malicious satisfaction. “Excellent. You see, Kate? He does love you. Enough to give up everything for you.”
He leaned down to whisper in her ear, his voice carrying clearly to Devon. “But love isn’t enough, is it? Not when blood calls to blood.”
“You have what you wanted,” Devon said, his voice deadly calm. “Now let her go.”
Aleksander laughed. “Did you really think I would just give up my greatest creation? She’s mine, Devon. She will always be mine.”
He stood up, his eyes shining with cruel excitement. “I just wanted to find out how much you were willing to give up for your Pet.”
Devon’s smile was sharp enough to cut glass. “Then let’s finish this.”
But Aleksander’s next words stopped Devon cold.
“Kate, honey,” Aleksander said, his voice carrying the full weight of the maker bond, “kill him.”
The compulsion hit Kate like a physical blow, a tidal wave of wrongness that sought to drown the last vestiges of her own will.
Kill him. The order was absolute, a command woven into the very fabric of her new existence. But beneath it, a tiny, fierce spark of defiance flickered.
No. It was a whisper in the storm, a single note of rebellion against a symphony of control.
Not him. Never him.