by Lara Adrian
She didn’t miss the fact that he’d said his brother was killed, not merely dead. “What happened, Nikolai?”
He blew out a long sigh. “I had an ongoing mutual hatred with a Darkhaven asshole out of the Ukraine. We got into pretty serious hand-to-hand with each other from time to time, out of boredom mostly. Except one night Dmitri hears this dickhead in a tavern talking shit about me and decides to call him on it. Dmitri drew a blade and cut the guy in front of his pals. It was a lucky hit—D sucked with weapons. Anyway, he pissed the bastard off and two minutes later, my brother is lying in a pool of his own blood, his head cleaved off his neck.”
“Oh, my God.” Renata sucked in a sharp breath, feeling sick in her heart. “I’m so sorry, Nikolai.”
“Me too.” He shrugged. “Afterward, I went out and tracked Dmitri’s killer down. I took his head and brought it to my parents as an apology. They turned me away, said it should have been me who was dead, not D. Couldn’t fault them for that. Hell, they were right, after all. So I split and never looked back.”
“I’m sorry, Nikolai.”
She didn’t know what else to say. She had little experience offering comfort, and even if she did, she wasn’t sure he would want it or need it. Like a man suddenly uncomfortable in his own skin, Nikolai grew quiet for a long moment.
He cleared his throat, then he ran a hand over his scalp and rose to his feet. “I should go out and have another look around the lodge. Will you be all right out here for a few minutes?”
“Yeah. I’m fine.”
He stared at her, searching her face. She didn’t know what she wanted him to say to her, but the look in his eyes seemed shuttered. “How are you doing? No sign of reverb yet?”
Renata shrugged. “A little, but not too bad.”
“And your shoulder?”
“Good,” she said, flexing her left arm to show him she wasn’t in any pain. “It feels a lot better now.”
A longer, more awkward silence stretched between them, as if neither one knew whether to bridge it or do the easier thing and let it lengthen. It wasn’t until Nikolai started to part some of the thick vines to leave that Renata reached out to touch him.
“Nikolai … I, urn … I’ve been meaning to thank you,” she said, conscious of the fact that although he had paused, she kept her hand on his arm. “I need to thank you… for giving me your blood earlier today.”
He turned toward her, gave a mild shake of his head. “Gratitude is nice, but I don’t need it. If our situations were reversed, I know you would have done the same thing for me.”
She would have; Renata could say that without the slightest doubt. This man who had been a stranger to her not quite a week ago—this warrior who also happened to be a vampire—was now her most trusted, intimate friend. If she was being honest with herself, she had to acknowledge that Nikolai was far more than that, and had been even before he shared his blood with her. Even before the sex that still made her toes curl just to think about it.
“I’m not sure how to do this…” Renata looked up at him, struggling with the words but needing to say them. “I’m not used to counting on anyone. I don’t know how to be with someone like this. It’s nothing I’ve ever had before, and I just… I feel like everything I thought I knew, all the things that once helped me survive, are deserting me. I’m adrift… I’m terrified.”
Nikolai stroked her cheek, then wrapped her in his embrace. “You’re safe,” he said tenderly beside her ear. “I’ve got you, and I’m going to keep you safe.”
She didn’t realize how badly she needed to hear those words until Nikolai spoke them to her. She didn’t know how badly she could want his arms around her or how deeply she could crave his kiss until Nikolai pulled her closer and brushed his mouth across hers. Renata kissed him with abandon, letting herself drift into the moment because Nikolai was with her, holding her, giving her safe harbor.
His kiss growing more passionate, he eased her down onto her back on the cushioned earth of their shelter. Renata reveled in the feel of his weight atop her, his warm, sure hands caressing her. He delved under her loose T-shirt, smoothing his fingers over her belly and up to her breasts.
He gave her lip a small, teasing stroke of his fangs as he drew back from kissing her. His eyes glowed like embers under the heavy fall of his lids. She didn’t need to see his transformed face to know that he wanted her. The very hard evidence of that pressed insistently against her hip. She ran her hands up his spine and he groaned, his pelvis kicking with a reflexive thrust.
Her name was a throaty moan as he trailed his mouth past her chin and down the length of her neck. He pushed her shirt up and Renata arched her back to greet his lips as he descended on her bare breasts and the smooth plane of her stomach. She was lost in the pleasure of his kiss. Aching for the feel of his skin against hers.
With deft fingers, he unfastened her jeans and slid them down her thighs. His mouth followed his progress, searing her from hip to ankle as he pulled her legs free and pushed her clothing aside. She cried out as he then bent between her thighs and suckled her, his tongue and fangs bringing on a rush of exquisite torment.
“Oh, God,” she gasped, hips rising up off the ground as he buried his mouth in her sex.
She didn’t know how he managed it so quickly, but a moment later he was naked too. He loomed over her, something more than human, more than simply male, and everything female in Renata trembled with desire. She opened her legs to him, greedy to feel him inside her, filling the emptiness with his strength and heat.
“Please,” she moaned, panting with need.
He didn’t make her ask him twice.
Moving to cover her, Nikolai wedged his knees between her legs and spread her wide beneath him. The head of his cock nudged into the slick cleft of her body, then plunged, long and slow and deep.
His growl as he sank down into her was fierce, a roll of thunder that echoed in her bones and in her blood. He pumped slowly, taking his time at first, even though it was clear that patience was torture. Renata could feel the intensity of his hunger for her, the depth of his pleasure as her body sheathed him, head to balls.
“You feel so good,” he murmured, sucking in a hiss as he withdrew then filled her again, deeper than before. He thrust hard, shuddering with the effort. “Jesus, Renata… you feel so fucking good.”
She linked her ankles around his backside as he fell into a more urgent tempo. “Harder,” she whispered, wanting to feel him pound away her fears, a hammer to smash through all her guilt and pain and emptiness. “Oh, God, Nikolai… fuck me harder.”
His answering snarl sounded as eager as it was wild. Slipping his arm beneath her, he tilted her to meet his strokes, driving into her with all the fury she so desperately needed. He swept down on her mouth for a fevered kiss, catching her cry as her climax roared up on her like a storm. Renata quaked and shuddered, clawing at him as he continued to pump, every muscle in his back and shoulders going as hard as granite.
“Ah, Christ,” he ground out between his teeth and fangs, his hips banging against her fast and furious, a reckless rhythm that felt so good. So right.
His coarse shout of release was echoed by her own as Renata came again, clinging to him as she lost herself to this delicious new sense of abandon.
She truly was adrift, but in this moment she felt no fear. She was safe with this wild, reckless man—she truly believed that. She trusted Nikolai with her body and with her life. As she lay there with him in an intimate tangle, it wasn’t so difficult to imagine that she could trust him with her heart as well.
That she might, in fact, be falling in love with him.
The knocking was insistent—a frantic beat on the solid oak door of Andreas Reichen’s Darkhaven in Berlin.
“Andreas, please! Are you there? It’s Helene. I must see you!”
At just after 4 A.M., only a short while before the sun would first peek over the horizon, only a few stragglers in the household remained awake. The rest of R
eichen’s kin—nearly a dozen in all, young Breed males and mated couples with small children, some of them newborn infants—had already gone to bed for the day.
“Andreas? Anyone?” Another panicked series of knocks, followed by a terrified-sounding cry. “Hello! Someone, please… let me in!”
Inside the mansion, a young male came out of the kitchen where he’d been warming a cup of milk for his Breedmate who awaited him upstairs in the nursery, where she was tending their fussy baby son. He knew the human female who was at the door. Most of the Darkhaven knew her, and Andreas had made it clear that Helene was always welcome in his home. That she had come unannounced at such a late hour, and while Andreas was away on private business for two nights, was unusual.
Even more unusual was the fact that the typically in-control businesswoman was so obviously afraid.
Awash with concern for what may have happened to Andreas’s human companion, the Darkhaven male set down the cup of steaming milk and raced across the marble floor of the vestibule, his bathrobe flying behind him like a sail.
“I’m coming,” he called, raising his voice to be heard over Helene’s ceaseless knocking and tear-choked pleas for help on the other side of the door. His fingers flew over the keypad of the mansion’s security system. “One moment! I’ll be right there, Helene. Everything’s going to be fine.”
When the electronic light blinked to indicate the sensors were disabled, he threw the dead bolts and opened the door.
“Oh, thank God!” Helene rushed toward him, her makeup in ruins, wet black trails running down her cheeks. She was pale and trembling, her usually shrewd eyes seeming somehow vacant as she made a quick visual search of the foyer. “Andreas… where is he?”
“Gone to Hamburg on private business until tomorrow night. But you are welcome here.” He stepped back to give her space to enter the mansion. “Come in, Helene. Andreas wouldn’t want me to turn you away.”
“No,” she said somewhat dully. “I know he would never turn me away.”
She came into the foyer and seemed instantly calmer.
“They knew he would never turn me away…”
It was at that moment the young Darkhaven male noticed that Helene was not alone. Behind her, rushing in now before he could do so much as cry out in alarm, was a team of heavily armed Enforcement Agents dressed from head to toe in black.
He swung his head around to look at Helene in disbelief. In abject horror.
“Why?” he asked, but the answer was there in her empty eyes.
Someone had gotten a hold of her. Someone very powerful.
Someone who had turned Helene into a Minion.
The thought no sooner registered before the first shot hit him. He heard more rounds being fired, heard the screams of his family as the Darkhaven awoke to terror.
But then another bullet slammed into his skull, and his world and everything in it went silent and black.
CHAPTER
Twenty-five
Nikolai sat inside the shade of the vine shelter and watched a single nimbus of sunlight shine through the leaves and into Renata’s dark hair while she slept. Ultraviolet light was toxic to his kind—lethal after about half an hour’s sustained exposure—but he couldn’t work up the desire to patch the small hole in the vegetation and snuff out the errant ray. Instead, for the past several minutes, he’d been sitting next to Renata and watching, admittedly, much too intrigued, as the light soaked into her ebony hair, infusing the silky strands with a dozen different shades of copper, bronze, and burgundy.
What the hell was wrong with him?
He was sitting there staring at her hair, for crissake. Not just staring, but staring with total rapt fascination. To Niko, that seemed to indicate one of two equally disturbing facts: Either he should seriously consider looking into night courses with Vidal Sassoon, or he was a complete goner when it came to this female.
Goner as in gone for good, ruined for any other.
Somewhere, somehow, he had let himself fall in love with her.
Which explained why he couldn’t keep his hands—and other parts—off her. It also explained why he’d spent the entire night, with the exception of his quick trip into the lodge before daybreak—lying beside Renata, holding her in his arms.
And if he’d needed any explanation for why his chest had felt so constricted and heavy when she broke down crying last night, or why he’d felt compelled to share with her his guilt over the loss of Dmitri all those years ago, he supposed that being in love with her would do it.
As much as he had wanted to convince her that she was safe with him, Nikolai felt safe with her too. He trusted her wholeheartedly. Would kill to protect her, would die for her without a second’s doubt if it came down to it. She may not have been a part of his life for very long now, but he was hard-pressed to imagine not having her in it.
Ah, fuck.
He really had fallen in love with Renata.
“Just fucking brilliant,” he muttered, then winced when she stirred at the sound of his voice.
She opened her eyes, smiled when she saw him sitting there. “Hi.”
“Morning,” he said, casually reaching above her head to knit the vines closed and seal out the last of the sunlight.
He found her slow, cadlike stretch even more fascinating than her hair. She was wearing the cotton oxford he’d ruined last night, half the buttons scattered on the ground of the shelter. The big shirt was split open down the front, barely covering her nakedness. No complaints from him.
“How are you feeling?”
She seemed to consider it for a second, then glanced over at him with a frown. “I feel really good. I mean, last night was…” She actually blushed, a sweet pink color filling her cheeks. “Last night was incredible, but I thought for sure I’d be laid out flat with reverb by now. I don’t understand … it never hit me at all. I mean, I had a little bit of pain, but based on what happened during the attack at Jack’s place, I should have been in agony most of the night.”
“Has that ever happened before?”
She shook her head. “Never. Every time I use my ability, the reverb follows.”
“But not last night.”
“Not last night,” she said. “I’ve never felt better.”
Niko might have made a lame joke about the miraculous effects of his sexual prowess, but he knew it was a different kind of magic that had pulled Renata through her reverb. “You drank my blood yesterday. That’s what’s different.”
“You think your blood not only helped my shoulder but also helped with this? Is that even possible?”
“It’s definitely a possibility. A Breedmate who regularly drinks a vampire’s blood becomes much stronger than she would be without it. Aging slows to a snail’s pace. Her body’s cells, muscles, and entire metabolism reach peak fitness and health. And yeah, a lot of times a Breed male’s blood will impact her psychic ability too.”
“That’s why Sergei never had me drink from him,” Renata said, her mind already speeding ahead toward the same conclusion Niko had reached. “He made no secret that he liked the fact that my power was limited to small bursts. The couple of times I tried to hit him with it, I could never hold it on him long enough to take him down, and in the end the effort always cost me dearly once the reverb set in.”
“Sergei Yakut was Gen One,” Niko reminded her. “His blood in your system might have made you practically unstoppable.”
Renata scoffed quietly. “Just one more shackle he kept on me. He must have known I would have killed him if I had even the smallest hope that I might succeed.” She fell silent for a minute, idly plucked at a blade of grass on the floor of the makeshift shelter. “I did try to kill him… the day Mira and I fled the lodge together. That was the day he put the hot andiron to my back. He did other things to me that day too.”
Nikolai didn’t have to ask what more she had endured. The scars from the brands that had been seared onto her back were heinous enough, but to think Yakut’s punish
ment went even further… Niko’s blood roiled with outrage. He put his hand over hers. “Jesus, Renata. I’m sorry.”
She glanced up at him, a steady green gaze that wasn’t seeking sympathy. “His only mercy was that he didn’t force Mira to watch everything that was done to me. But Sergei told me that if she or I tried to escape again, or if I ever turned my mind’s power on him even a little, it would be Mira who’d pay in the same ways I had. He promised worse for her, and I knew he meant it… so I stayed. I stayed, and I obeyed him, and every hour of every day I hoped for some miracle that would erase Sergei Yakut from my life.” She paused, reaching up to caress his face. “Then you came and everything changed. I guess in many ways, you are my miracle.”
Nikolai captured her hand and placed a kiss in the heart of her palm. “We’re both fortunate.”
“I’m glad Sergei is dead,” she confessed softly.
“He should have suffered more,” Niko said, not even trying to curb the dark edge of his voice. “But he’s gone.”
Renata nodded. “And now Lex is dead too. Yakut’s guards. All of them.”
“By this hour of the morning, he and the others in the lodge are nothing but ash,” Niko said as he reached up to hook some of her glossy black hair behind her ear. “After you fell asleep last night I went back in and opened all the shutters for the sunlight to do its thing. I also called Boston to give them the numbers in Lex’s cell phone. Gideon’s going to call us with details once he’s run traces on them.”
Another nod, her voice soft with hope. “Okay.”
“While I was in there, I also brought you something I thought you might be missing.”
He leaned over to the stash of weapons and other assorted supplies he’d retrieved and picked up the silk-and-velvet package that belonged to Renata.
“My blades,” she gasped, joy brightening her face as she took the package from his hands. She untied the ribbons that secured it and unrolled the length of velvet that encased the four custom-engraved daggers. “Jack gave these to me…”
“I know. He told me that he had them made for you as a gift. He said he wasn’t sure you’d kept them.”