"I'm here to remind you of something."
Of what, of what? Pleasure rippled through him, almost like amusement. But his tone was bored. "Hmm. Remind me?" Why was his voice hoarse?
Ah, from my shocked yells to the rafters.
She snatched up his discarded pants from the floor. "When you do recount my clumsy attempts to Saroya, be sure to mention the part where I rode you like a lazy horse and made you cream-jeans faster than a fifteen-year-old schoolboy squeezin' a tit for the first time." She flung his pants into the shower. "You might wanna get these cleaned." She turned on her heel and sauntered out of the room.
He stared after her. Cream-jeans? Lazy horse?
Unbidden, his lips curled into a grin.
After washing off and changing into the most modest of the sleepwear choices-a long, white silk nightgown-Ellie crossed to her bed.
When she eased into it, she sighed at the softness that greeted her.
Never knew sheets could feel like this. Here she lay, clad in silk, nestled in the finest linens she'd ever imagined, basking in the sizable bed-even though it lay on the floor.
She was being kept in a paradise of a prison, by a red-eyed jailer who doubled as a walking sexual fantasy.
A jailer who'd awakened something in her tonight, something Ellie instinctively feared she wouldn't experience with others.
Just as she began fretting, wondering how she was going to live without the ecstasy she'd discovered with Lothaire, she remembered she likely wasn't going to live at all.
Rubber-band snap. Snap. SNAP!
Finally, she calmed, her whirring mind slowing. Just as she was dozing off, a dizzying sense of vertigo hit her; when she opened her eyes, she was standing in his room. Traced me again?
"Entertain me," he commanded, taking a seat at his desk. He was shirtless, barefooted. His damp hair hung carelessly over his forehead. So gorgeous, too gorgeous.
"Entertain." She rubbed her eyes. "That wasn't part of the job description."
"I believe the job description was for you to do whatever I command. Besides, you're clearly dressing for the job you want and not the job you have, and my Bride will entertain me after we spend."
"Dance, monkey, dance. That it? Lothaire, I'm exhausted."
"Do pizdy. Don't f**king care. Sit. Speak with me."
She hesitated to return to that settee, but eventually sank down with a huff.
"I find I have questions about you. Amazing, considering it's . . . you. But I can't control my curiosity."
"What do you want to know?"
"Why are you still a virgin?"
She didn't want to tell him the real reason, that she'd feared getting pregnant with some high school boy, feared having to abandon her long-held dreams-of a fulfilling career, a doting husband, and lastly, when she was ready for them, kids.
So instead, she said, "I guess Saroya somehow resisted your charms all those times you went off killing together."
"I've never gone off killing with her."
"She just went out by herself and murdered? Why?"
He shrugged. "She used to take sustenance from the act. Now I guess it's habit."
"That doesn't make sense."
"Suppose you no longer needed to eat to live, but you could eat. Wouldn't you miss the taste of food, the ritual of meals?"
He had a point. Ellie loved to eat.
"You didn't answer my question," he said. "Did no prison guard try to deflower you?"
"Most of them were decent."
"But not all? Did any of them . . . touch you?" His expression darkened, his fangs seeming to grow.
He's going round the bend again. And when his eyes grew vacant, her senses went on red alert.
"Slow your f**king heart!"
She cried, "Maybe I could slow my f**king heart if you'd stop f**king yelling at me!"
"I hold your fate in my hands, yet you show me disrespect at every turn."
"You haven't earned my respect."
"It could be today that I dream of the ring. Then you'll be gone forever."
She crossed her arms over her chest. "You love holding that sword over my neck. Are you trying to make me go crazy like you? Make me check out mentally before I do physically?"
"Is it a possibility?" he asked in all seriousness. At least he'd calmed down a fraction.
"How much more do you think I can take?"
"You'll take whatever I give you-"
"And I'll like it?" She rolled her eyes. "Do you torture everyone like this?"
He grew still as a statue, his voice dripping with menace as he said, "You don't know the meaning of torture."
"You do? Have you only dished it out or been on the receiving end?"
"Both."
She wished she wasn't curious about him. But . . . "How were you tortured?"
"Take the worst agony you can possibly imagine, multiply it by a thousand, then suffer that every second for six hundred years. And that was merely one among many times."
"Six centuries?" He's exaggerating. He has to be. "Is that why you're crazy?"
"Partly. Also because of the memories."
"Did you see mine when you slept last?"
"So far, no recollections of coal dust, leaking roofs, or the pungent aroma of myriad critters sizzling in old cooking lard."
He made it sound so awful-but what she wouldn't give to be back there right now! "You watched me more than you'd let on."
"I had to learn about you, investigating your belongings, spying on your shuddersome family."
She gasped. "You were in my home?"
"I have a home. You lived in a conveyance."
"It's bought and paid for. No one can ever make us leave." Unlike the land it was parked on.
The Va-Co representative Saroya had killed had been sniffing around Peirce Mountain for a reason. Deep down, it was laden with coal. Va-Co had begun putting pressure on the family to sell. When that hadn't worked, they'd gone after the mortgage bank.
Though Ruth and Ephraim and the rest of the family had been cobbling together payments, it was only a matter of time before they defaulted on their loan.
"You are so proud," Lothaire murmured, his tone perplexed. "And I cannot comprehend why."
She choked back a retort. Cool it, Ellie. Get information. "Tell me what Saroya's like."
"Vicious, contemptuous, fearless. She's a queen whom other queens would bow down to."
Ellie quirked a brow. "A vicious female who doesn't mind you spending so much time alone with the beautiful Hag?"
"The fey and I are not involved."
"Saroya's agreeable to having all those heirs you want?"
"She will give me as many as I desire," he said coolly.
Deflection? "Don't you want to get started on little vampire princes?"
"I can't claim her until she's in an undying body, else harm her with my strength. Remember? Pop."
"So that's the delay." Or was there more? Saroya could still satisfy the vampire. Perhaps the goddess didn't enjoy sexual situations? "I have a hard time imagining that kind of strength."
"There are four things that make a vampire more powerful than his brethren. Bloodlust, a beating heart, Dacian blood, and age. I'm a vampire gone red-eyed with bloodlust, a Dacian with a beating heart. I've lived for millennia, growing stronger over the endless days of my life."
Great. She'd been nabbed by the Hulk of vampires. Then she glanced up. "You're a real Dacian?"
"Ah, that's right-you've been reading after school. My mother was Ivana Daciano, heir to their throne. I am Lothaire Daciano, now the rightful heir."
"But they're thought not to exist."
"Of course they exist. Immortals can be just as bad as humans, thinking that if they can't see something, it must not be."
"Your interest lies in the Horde and the Dacian thrones?" When he inclined his head, she said, "If you're so powerful, your subjects must be hankering for you to be their king."
He made a scoffing sound. "I intend to subjugate one kingdom and lay waste to the other."
"And then what?"
His blond brows knit. "What do you mean?"
"Laying waste, subjugation? There's got to be a reason for doing these things."
"Pure gratification."
"How long will that last? A hundred years? A thousand? Surely you have an ultimate goal?"
He rose, abruptly enraged, all towering intimidation. "I have an Endgame!"
Round the bend. He muttered to himself in Russian, then jerked his head sharply in that way insane people did-as if he'd just seen or experienced something no one else had.
"This 'endgame' is your end goal?" she asked. "Okay, then what is it?"
His gaze drifted as he paced. "Seven little tasks."
"Tell me."
Sounding as if he recited a list, he said, "Find ring. Dispose of Elizabeth's soul. Turn Saroya. Kill Dorada. Take over Horde. Find and kill Serghei. Conquer Daci."
Dispose of my soul. How easily he said that! And who was Serghei? "Vampire, I hate to tell you this, but those tasks are not an end goal."
He swung around to face her. "Hold your tongue, little mortal! Or I'll have it from you."
She fell silent, on edge as he paced/traced.
Long moments later, he snapped, "What the hell were you talking about?"
"An ultimate goal should be the result, not the process of reaching it."
"Perhaps I take pleasure in the process itself."
Ellie said, "Then the ultimate goal is pleasure. The tasks are still the process."
"My ultimate goal is service to a blood vendetta. I work for that alone, have for millennia."
In a small voice, she pointed out, "Still a process."
"Ahhh!" he roared, punching the wall yet again. "Shut the f**k up!"
In as casual a tone as she could fake, she said, "Most people have goals of a fulfilling family life and a rewarding career, with happiness and pleasure resulting."
"And what do you know of happiness?" He calmed, seeming intensely interested in this subject.
"I experienced it for most of my life. And I appreciate it all the more after my recent miseries."
"How could you have been happy in that trailer, forced to hunt for food, having so few possessions?"
She blinked. He wasn't insulting her? Lothaire was genuinely curious about this. "I cherished the good times spent with those I love, and I quickly worked past the bad times. What's done is done. I never dwell on the past."
"That's simplistic."
"It's not a complicated thing," she countered.
"It's an abstract one."
"And yet it can be learned. You can teach yourself to be happy. You said your killing skills were well-honed. What if you put all that effort into finding happiness?"
"Then I wouldn't have survived all these years."
"Maybe you can find it sharing interests with Saroya."
"Leave her out of this."
"She's kind of instrumental. What does she enjoy doing?"
He narrowed his eyes. "Saroya hunts, just as you used to do."
"She does not hunt like I did." The idea made her want to punch a wall! "Did you see me leaving deer carcasses all over the mountain to rot? For no reason? There is no comparison. I would never be wasteful and disrespectful of life like that."
"Touchy subject? Have I found a chink in your armor?"
"Any comparison to her riles me up. We are nothing alike."
"True, you are-"
"Oh, just save it," she interrupted. "I already know I'm her inferior in every way, blah, blah, blah."
He quirked a brow, then continued, "As for sharing interests, Saroya and I will rule together, protecting and educating our offspring."
My offspring! "I can only imagine what a goddess of death would teach her kids."
"You won't sow dissension. Your ploy is transparent."
"It's only a ploy if I'm being dishonest. Otherwise, it's an observation. And I truly do wonder about Saroya's parenting skills, not to mention yours."
He frowned, his demeanor turning contemplative.
"Lothaire, have you never thought what it'd be like to be a father?"
"It would be a risk-although few would dare harm Saroya's offspring. Certainly no vampire enemies of mine would. . . ." He crossed to the balcony and gazed out. As a breeze sifted through his hair, his shoulders tensed. "A mist rises," he said in an odd tone.
She was getting nowhere with him. "Am I done entertaining you, vampire? I'm tired. This inferior mortal needs to rest."
He turned back to her. "You'll sleep in here." At her disbelieving look, he said, "I don't exaggerate the threat to you. I'd hoped to have separate rooms-not because I wished to afford you privacy, but because I didn't want to look at you. Unfortunately, we do not have that luxury."
"Fine." She rose, retrieved a pillow and a blanket from her room, then returned to the settee.