“What a vision the pair of you make!” A round of feminine giggles, then, “I should snap a photo to show my hive. Smile!”
A rectangular device was produced. A flash.
And the ladies laughed, the joke utterly lost on me.
Warm lips at my ear breathed, “Because of the myth that vampires cannot be photographed.”
“Oh, like how people think we don’t have reflections?” Had I just said we?
I wasn’t like these things.
Embracing me, another kiss to my hair, Vladislov spoke over the fading laughter. “My bride means no offense. Not that any of you have permission to peek, but her experiences with her kind have been unpleasant. Pearl doesn’t know what great company we can be.”
“Pearl,” Fhulendu, dark-skinned, heavy braid, beautiful to the point I wanted to cry, said, “sometime, I’ll tell you about my early years. They too had been unpleasant, so believe me when I say I understand. We all do—well, maybe not those purebloods born to this life. But for many who were changed, especially in the old world, it was a challenging period of our existence.”
“Well said.” Maya smiled, running a hand down the arm of the woman at her side.
And they seemed so nice I didn’t know what to make of it.
They felt real. So real I wished I might see what they looked like under their pretty skins. Were they pitch like Vladislov? Did they crackle with fire? Wings? Claws? Fangs dripping venom?
Did their touch burn?
“Only mine will burn you, my soul.”
Shivering from the feel of cool lips brushing my ear, I failed to resist when he took the hand dangling limp at my side, lifting my arm so I might cup the cheek of the creature at my back.
I felt a face freshly shaved, the sharp angles of high cheekbones.
I felt my eyes grow wide when he turned his head to press a hot kiss to my palm.
And then I began to cry, because I would not be fooled. Not by Lucifer, or Vladislov, or Darius, bright lights, crystal, beauty that was little more than a husk to conceal real monsters from a world that made no sense.
Breaking down into hiccupping sobs, unreasonably mortified, I was turned, my painted face pressed to the white, starched shirt of my keeper. Ruined by cake mascara and lips painted with rouge.
I sobbed, I clung, and knew I had drank far too much wine too quickly.
My teeth ached; the part of me that had always brought me shame tried to elongate. The part of me, I’d been told, that would not regenerate like any other bit of my horrible body. But would grow back over centuries.
My stomach rumbled obnoxiously loud. I was enfolded, yet there were no bat-like wings. My hair was gathered into a fist, my mouth turned up, and a throat slit with a dagger I knew had an ivory handle poured a fountain of perfection on my face.
I drank.
Climbing the figure who bled in my gaping mouth like a monkey. I burrowed my fingers into bronze waves.
Gulping, rocking my hips despite how my mind screamed to stop such things, agelessness poured down my throat.
When I was done crying, nose stuffed and sniveling, I broke suction on skin that had already mended, smeared in black fluid from nose to breast—rivulets from that once gaping wound having run down my throat, staining the modest collar of the priceless gown.
Looking every bit the horrific vampire.
“Did you see that?” Hushed murmurs so soft no human might hear moved like a breeze through the enrapt room. “She drank from his throat.”
“She really is his soul.”
My hair still fisted in the grip of the man I’d just feasted upon with wild abandon, he made me meet his burning eye as he loudly proclaimed, “And she is perfect.”
Before pressing a bloodthirsty kiss to my mouth.
Chapter Five
Pearl
If one could be devoured, have their very soul sucked from their being, the kiss conquering my mouth accomplished such a feat. I was consumed.
Legs already wrapped around his waist, nails already digging into his scalp so I might hold my prey still while I gorged, I was tangled up with no escape.
Prey became predator.
The tongue twisting about mine was anything but gentle. The palm under my rear had grown claws I knew were black as sin and sharp as the nails driven into Christ.
Yet despite razor-sharp fangs, despite talons, despite ferocity and thirst and monstrous passion, I did not bleed. The demon was careful in his assault.
Hard where I was liquid fire.
Dangerous, snarling, savage, and so strong I never stood a whisper of a chance.
He fed on me as I had fed on him. Uncontrolled. Unabashed.
With a mad mind and unquenched hunger.
Was this how lovers kissed?
Did it always destroy one so completely?
Pain would come next. Rending. Penetration that would kill another part of my tattered soul.
Probably here before the room. Probably over and over until I screamed for mercy while the audience laughed, only to wake up in the crypt to find that book and the horrible notes again.
Yet… as savagely as it had begun, it ended.
The force in which he’d pulled his swollen mouth away left mine searching out missing sensation. An action obstructed by his grip on my hair. “I apologize for being so forward.”
What? What nonsense was this?
Men never apologized! They followed women through blizzards and raped them on the street. They locked girls in rooms and caused reckless, horrible harm.
My pupils dilated, the oddest sensation coming over me. Blood drunk and wine saturated, I whispered between pants, “I killed a man when he pushed me down in the snow and tried to shove inside. He might have, I was
