“I’ve never done it like this before—just picked them up at a bar.”
“I suspect there’s a lot you’ve never done before as a vampire, even though you own Dimitri’s memories … and not all of it is bad. I will show you.” He gave her a sexy smile, one so intensely erotic that she had to look away from him toward their targets.
“I’ve always gone for those in the midst of a commission of a crime—followed a robber or stopped a purse snatching or derailed a rape. I guess I just didn’t trust myself beyond that right away.”
“And yet you aspired to more. To reach the levels of the human masters, yes?”
She nodded. “But how did you know?”
“Everything you want resonates through every artery of your line down to the remotest capillary of it. This is how we know you still exist versus that time when your nights will become embers—and may that be an eternity from now, dear Tanya.” He took up her hand and pressed a tender kiss to the back of it. “Our job is to know what you want and how you want it, if we are yours.”
Tanya swallowed hard, feeling a pull to this man that she hadn’t expected.
He threw down a wad of bills on the bar to pay for their untouched drinks and then held out his hand again to her. She accepted it, quietly taking in the feel of his broad, slightly callused palm and long fingers, and then stood.
Sated, they left the bodies in the limousine that had chauffeured the businessmen to the restaurant, with a stunned driver none the wiser. Anastas dabbed the corner of her mouth with his thumb, wiping away a tiny trickle of blood.
“Are you all right with what just happened?”
Tanya nodded. “They were bad men to the core … fleecing hardworking souls out of millions.”
“Much worse than a poor junkie sticking up a convenience store, yes?”
“Yeah.”
“You don’t sound convinced.”
“I’m doing math in my head, is all.”
He stopped walking and looked at her. “Mathematics?”
“Anastas, how many bodies do you have on you after being around for hundreds of years?”
She stopped and turned to look at him when he didn’t answer. “That’s my point, man.”
“It is unavoidable, unless you have human minions who donate.”
“They do at the blood clubs.”
“And now you’re talking suicide to go there, unless your forces are extremely formidable—which at present, they aren’t.”
“Here’s a safe bet,” Tanya said with a casual shrug. “The masters dine on whatever they want and wouldn’t have to show up at a blood club. They have private gorging orgies in their lairs and don’t risk unnecessary exposure.”
“But their made men and women would.”
“Right,” she replied quickly. “Now you’re catching on. So, what better way to even the odds but to blow away a bunch of bottom feeders like the ones that just came after me?”
Anastas walked away from her in the opposite direction. “Now you are mad. I see how Dimitri was tricked. He thought he was dealing with a sane and beautiful woman only to be deceived!”
“No, think about it,” Tanya said, jogging to catch up with him. “If I hit the local blood clubs, wouldn’t that not only cull the other local masters’ ranks to be about equal to mine, but would also let them know not to send any of their thugs my way trying to pull a bullshit coup? Not to mention, it would get a helluva lot of vampires off the streets and allow us to walk into a blood club with some solid street cred under our belts.”
“And I supposed we’d just go in guns blazing?”
“No,” she said, laughing, and keeping up with Anastas’s long strides. “If you haven’t noticed, regular bullets don’t work, and I don’t have humans that can load my clips with silver or hallowed-earth-packed shells.”
He stopped walking and turned to stare at her. “Hand-to-hand combat so outnumbered is pure suicide.”
“Puh-lease,” she scoffed, and began walking again. “That’s old-school. How about blowing a gas line beneath a building or something simple like that? Working for the mob boys did teach me a thing or two. Besides, the other masters have been sending their hit men out to smoke me ever since the night I died. I need to let them know two can play that game. So, are you in or what?”
“You
“I’ve been called worse,” she murmured. “Much worse.”
“And if I go along with this insanity?”
“What’s in it for you?” She smiled.
“No. That is not my entire question.… Well, perhaps it is, but it was poorly phrased.”
She placed a palm gently at the center of his chest and watched him swallow hard. “My bad.”
“This will not wipe out the species, Tanya. As long as we’re left, as long as one is left, there will always be Vampyre. It is like a virus, just like polio still exists, the bubonic plague still exists. Evil still exists no matter how many dirty bankers and politicians—”
Her deep kiss stopped his words just as his full mouth and total embrace stopped her breath. “We can let tomorrow take care of itself and save blowing up a few blood clubs for another night.”
“If you claim me, I will help you write this book.”
He’d obviously gone into her mind searching for whatever pleased her, and that he’d even bothered to do so carved out a very special place for him within her eerily still heart. There was something impossible to resist in being wanted dead or alive.
She touched his cheek with trembling fingers. “You think too much, Anastas Baranov.”
Only inches from her face he stared into her eyes. “No, Tanya … search and you will see that my mind is blank only for you now.”
He was right to insist that they go down into the vault. Daylight surely would have caught them unaware. But as far as she was concerned, she’d already burst into flames. His touch was like hot embers, delicious long-awaited torture. Each kiss brought delirium, and yet he cried out as she planted more against his chest.
Slowly knowledge seeped into her brain; it was the reverb of her caresses echoing off his touch, trading pleasure back and forth down to the cellular level. His French kiss between her thighs left her weeping; warm, rough palms cradling the delicate skin of tightened nipples left her panting. Passion fusion. It was all too insane. Bodies fitted together as though welded. Sweat and sweet, pungent love essence was the lubricant that slicked all boundaries and made them move together like greased gears.
His hair in her fists, she watched him arch beneath her and give her his throat. The temptation was too great to bear; the deep knowledge rising within her, impossible to ignore. In a blinding flash of pleasure, he was marked as hers. Claimed and wanted, dead or alive. She bit him and came so hard that she was afraid she’d drain him dry.
Anastas’s wail rent the air as his fists wound themselves in the crimson satin sheets while ejaculation spasms tore through him. Her name became a broken mantra panted out in two syllables as the tremors ebbed. She lifted her mouth from his throat and dabbed her blood-wet lips with the back of her hand. Tears filled his eyes and then he suddenly gathered her up, sheets and all, hugging her tightly and rocking her hard.
“Never have I been claimed,” he said in a harsh whisper that fractured against her neck.
“Nor have I,” she whispered back, fighting a sob. “I’ve never been here before either.”
Tanya waited patiently as one by one, mind-stunned humans found an inexplicable need to exit the massive warehouse building. Pulsing music made the night air throb red. Some took a smoke across the street, staring out blankly at the water. Some walked around aimlessly trying to hail a nonexistent cab. A few claimed to be hungry for pizza and fare not served at the bar, and they squabbled with the huge vampire bouncers guarding the exit doors.
“You know after this there’s no turning back,” Anastas said grimly, staring across the street from the shadows.
