Enslave (3 page)

He raked long fingers over the spikes of his hair and then let his hand fall to his side. His head snapped up and he smiled straight at her, his dark eyes flashing with sparks of blue and gold.

Varya gasped and disappeared.

Her panic cost her. She ended up in an unfamiliar area of the theatre and had lost her quarry in the process. 

“Bastard,” she muttered. It was just like his kind to take pleasure from scaring hers. She fumbled around in the small dark room.

It smelled like a store cupboard. The sharp tang of cleaning products stung her delicate nose and she grimaced at the tacky feel of the bottles beneath her questing fingers. A cool flat panel brought hope of escape and her heart lifted. She shifted her hands downwards, searching for the knob. Her fingers closed around the cold metal and she twisted it and pushed the door open. It banged against something that grunted.

Varya poked her head around the door, the bright room shimmering in her vision, and then down at what she had hit.

A nude male. Human and delirious. She recognised him as one of the men from the stage.

She grinned. Maybe tonight wouldn’t be so bad after all. She could have a quick snack to replenish her strength so her glamour held and then she could find the vampire.

Vampires moved around the room, dressing and talking, some of them sitting in front of mirrors surrounded by softly glowing bulbs and others moving between the showers and a row of lockers that lined one wall. Varya recognised a few of the vampires from the show, in particular a tall broad male with close-cropped hair that revealed scars on his scalp. The females in the audience had been most enamoured with him. His aura shone burgundy and deepest blue, colours of confidence and contentment. He would make a good feed, but charming him would prove difficult since he was already so deeply in love with himself.

Varya crouched beside the sleepy human thrall instead. He was handsome enough, although a little bloodstained and hurt.

She cast a quick glance around to make sure no one was watching him and then pressed her lips to his. He moaned and she kissed him, tasting all the pleasure he had experienced in the past hour on stage. Gods. He was an intoxicating cocktail. She delved her tongue between his lips, hungry for more, desperate to get a taste of everything he had felt. Pleasure so intense that it still rocked him now drifted in his veins like a drug, keeping him out of his head. Varya drank it down in her kiss, feeling stronger with each sweep of her lips over his. Her head spun.

“Why is that human acting like a goldfish?” a female said and Varya quickly peeled her lips from the man’s and froze, turning fearful eyes on the vampire who had spoken.

It was not the woman from the stage. This one was a diminutive brunette wrapped tightly in a crimson robe that was too long for her.

“Something is here,” the huge shaven-headed male said and Varya cursed him. She hadn’t expected him to be old enough to sense her.

She pressed her mouth to the human male’s, gifting him with strength and some of her own healing power, and then stood. The wounds on his chest closed and he shot to his feet. The room erupted into pandemonium and Varya slipped out of the door and into a double-height black-walled room.

Stairs led upwards.

Varya focused, trying to sense where her vampire had gone even as part of her, the more sensible side that had always listened to her tutors and always reminded her what they had said in their lessons, told her to get her backside out of the theatre and never come back.

She would, just not yet.

Once she had seen the vampire again and had let him see her, she would leave. She couldn’t go yet. She had to see if that strange sensation came upon her again and upon him. She needed to know if the shadows he wore obscured his true feelings.

She needed a taste.

A taste would tell her whether he held passion in his veins and whether it matched the fire that had shone in his eyes, or whether she was mistaken and he was black and empty right down to his soul.

The limited radius of her senses made tracking him difficult. He wasn’t nearby. Where had he gone?

Energy from her stolen kiss pulsed in her veins, leaving her feeling slightly hazy. Not the best of conditions for hunting while evading. The strength she had taken from the human gave her a much-needed power boost that rendered her invisible to most of the vampires in the theatre, but there were three who would easily detect her, and unfortunately they were three of the vampires who were searching for her.

The white-haired beast, the one with the icy eyes and a female constantly on his arm, and the blue-aura-carrying bastard.

When she had first sensed the bastard’s presence when passing the theatre, she had expected to find him enjoying the show and the excitement of its audience. It was why she had dared to enter the theatre. She had figured it would be safe for her because it was safe for him.

She definitely hadn’t expected him to know the vampires and now be a part of the group hunting her. Did he work for the theatre? How her clan would laugh at her if she told them that! They would think she had been imagining things.

Varya focused on her surroundings. The icy-eyed male had gone upstairs. His aura left a brilliant red trail that said he had found a more pressing matter that required his attention. His female. Varya shivered with the thought of them together. He was a powerful male, old and dark, and the female had a wicked edge to her eyes sometimes when she looked at her male. The two of them coupling would probably make what had happened tonight on stage look like a Disney movie, all cute and sweet. That was a performance she wanted to see for herself.

Varya licked her lips, tasting the human on them, and yanked her focus back to her hunt. She didn’t want to play voyeur any more tonight. She wanted to find her own plaything.

The beast prowled past her, flicking a glance in her direction, and she ducked behind a wall at the bottom of the stairs, pressing herself flat against it and holding her breath.

“I know you’re here,” he snarled, voice thick and dark, laced with venom. Her heart did a fluttering flip in her chest and her legs trembled in a bad way. “When I find you, I will kill you… slowly.”

The grim note of amusement in his final word said he would come good on that threat and he would enjoy it too. Varya swallowed. She had no desire to become this man’s ragdoll. He didn’t need to threaten her aloud for her to know that her demise at his hands would indeed be bloody, painful, and nothing short of Hell.

It would make Hell look like Heaven.

He growled and stalked closer.

A door opened and closed.

Her senses popped and the hairs on the back of her neck prickled, sending a shiver dancing down her spine.

“Found anything?” That deep masculine voice was pure honey, accented in a way that was ambrosia to her ears and had her melting against the wall.

Gods. He sounded more delicious than she could ever have prepared herself for. She closed her eyes and willed him to speak again.

“Nothing,” the beast growled and huffed, snorting like a wild dragon. “I will find it, and rip it limb from limb.”

“Antoine wants it alive, whatever it is. We’re not allowed to kill it, Snow.”

It? That stung. He had set eyes on her, had clearly felt the same intense jolt that had rocked her, yet he was calling her an ‘it’.

She had half a mind to step out from her hiding place and confront him, but her self-preservation instincts ran too deeply for her to ignore them and do anything so foolish. She pressed the back of her head against the wall.

“It is in here somewhere.” The one called Snow moved again and she tracked him with her senses, fearing he would find her. Snow. A strange name for one so impure and evil.

“I have this. Check in with Payne and Javier. Tell them we know where it is. Payne said he knew a way of flushing it out.”

Oh, Hell, he wouldn’t. If Payne was the bastard she thought he was, she wasn’t going to wait for him to show up. Snow grunted and the door opened and closed again.

“I know you’re in here, so you might as well just show yourself, whatever you are. You understand, Chica?” Her vampire’s sexy voice rumbled through her, making her shivery and hazy, and his words took a few seconds to register.

She did understand. He wanted her out in the open and visible to him so he could go ahead and take her into custody for the one he had called Antoine.

She wouldn’t let him take her in, refused to let anyone capture and enslave her, but she did want to see him again, and with Snow gone to fetch the bastard and the one she suspected was this man’s brother, she only had a limited window in which to do that, get her taste, and get out.

Varya stepped out from behind the wall.

The vampire stood in the middle of the double-height black-walled room, his deep blue eyes scanning the area around him. He was searching for her still. She let her glamour slip just enough that she would grow stronger on his acute senses but not enough that he would see her.

His gaze shot straight to her.

Interesting.

He had found a way to pinpoint her. Is that what he had been doing when he had stared at her for those long minutes after she had made herself invisible in the private box? Putting her to memory and training his senses to make them accustomed to her so she couldn’t hide from him.

Devious son of a bitch.

His aura darkened even as his eyes brightened, his pupils enlarging to show a trace of desire.

“Reveal yourself.” Those words rolled off his tongue in a sultry bass voice created by the gods for setting women’s hearts aflame.

His aura showed no sign of the conceit that the male performer backstage had worn. This vampire was far more handsome, worthy of a little male pride in his aura, but it remained black and unreadable.

Varya lifted her glamour and shimmered into being just two metres in front of him. Out of arm’s reach. If he tried to lunge for her, she would disappear in a flash. She wasn’t sure where in the theatre she would end up, but any place was better than locked in the grasp of a man who wanted to hand her over to his master.

His pupils widened, edging further into the deep sea blue of his irises, and his nostrils flared.

“What are you?” he said and exhaled a soft curse when their eyes met.

That same blood-heating jolt she had felt on first locking gazes with him rocked her again and she had to take a step backwards to steady herself. Her hunger came upon her so swiftly that it almost knocked her flat on her backside and it must have shown in her eyes because the vampire changed. His irises burned as red as the flames of Hell and his pupils narrowed and stretched, becoming cat-like.

He snarled, sensual lips peeling back off enormous fangs.

A flicker of red punctured the black of his aura.

Passion?

Varya stood her ground, legs trembling and belly heating with desire in the face of the explosive combination of his anger and arousal. She didn’t understand why she couldn’t read his aura or what it meant, and she didn’t care.

She wanted a taste.

Before he could launch an attack on her, she teleported herself right into the danger zone, not settling for even a few inches between them. Her body pressed into the delicious hard contours of his and she looped her arms around his neck, buried her fingers into his thick brown hair and dragged his mouth down to hers.

A white-hot bolt struck her right down to her soul and she gasped.

He echoed it and grabbed her waist hard, pulling her roughly against him as his mouth claimed hers.

Varya’s head spun. She had died and gone to Heaven, a place beyond the reach of all fae. This man was her Heaven.

His mouth mastered hers, forcing her into submission, tongue plundering and leaving her breathless, until she felt as though he was the one feeding on the energy that crackled between them, not her. Her hands slipped to his strong shoulders, feeling the hard muscles beneath his soft black clothing, and she frowned, the taste of him so divine that she didn’t want to give him up. There was no reason this man should be forbidden. Gods. Every one of her clan should be searching for their own shadowed male.

She could live forever on the taste of him.

He turned and shot across the room with her, slamming her violently against the wall, his body delicious steel against hers as he pinned her. Varya leapt up and wrapped her legs around his waist, hooking her feet together and dragging him closer to her, until not a single molecule of air existed between their bodies. He snarled into her mouth and ran his hands up her calves, past her over-knee stockings, and teasingly light along the underside of her thighs. His palms grazed her buttocks beneath her skirt, sending a hot shiver bolting over her skin, and then he clutched her backside, squeezing it as he kissed her. The feel of his strong hands palming her bottom, fingertips pressing in so hard she was sure he would bruise her, increased the inferno raging out of control inside her. She let slip a moan of pure pleasure, unable to hold it in. This man had been made for her. The way he dominated her, his passion and roughness, not to mention how damned hot he looked, everything about him called to her, excited her, and she was powerless to resist.

Varya melted into him and turned up the heat at the same time, matching his ferocity stroke for stroke as her tongue duelled with his and she raked her nails over his scalp. He snarled into her mouth, a hungry feral sound that sent another shiver of pleasure skating over her skin, and rocked his hips into hers. Oh my. Her heart fluttered and heat pooled in her panties. The feel of the hard hot length pressing divinely against the apex of her thighs had her writhing in his arms, mimicking his rocking and meeting him grind for thrust. He groaned and tightened his grip on her, holding her hips immobile, and pressed his hard cock against her. His breathing came out in rough ragged gasps between kisses. Not just his breathing. She panted too, breathless, but she couldn’t stop. Did he feel as desperate as she did, as though this kiss was as vital as air? No. More vital. She felt as though she would die if he stopped. It was intoxicating, drugging, addicting, and incredible. Lost in the fathomless depths of the passion that blazed between them, pleasure so consuming that she swore she had never experienced anything like it before, Varya couldn’t stop herself from stealing some of his intense energy through their kiss.