"Yes." She arched up to greet his thrust, her steady gaze beseeching. "Yes."
With a feral snarl curling up from his throat, Nikolai bared his fangs and descended on her.
The sweet taste of Renata's blood surging into his mouth leveled him as totally as a roundhouse kick to the gut. Ah, Christ... now he knew. How many times had he busted the other warriors' asses about being mated and finding one female who would make them blind to any other? Easily hundreds of times. Thousands, probably.
What a clueless ass he'd been.
Now he knew. Renata owned him, even before he'd given himself to her with his bite. He was on his knees before this female, and he'd gladly stay there for the rest of his life.
Niko drank deeper, drowning in the pleasure of the bond they were forging through their mingled blood and through the heated rhythm of their joined bodies. His teeth still holding her beneath him as he took his last taste of her, Nikolai came again, harder this time, a staggering release that slammed into him like a freight train. He held on to her, shuddering with intense satisfaction. Although he could have sipped from her vein all night, Nikolai forced himself to move away, sealing her wounds with a loving sweep of his tongue.
He stared down at her, his gaze brigt on her skin. "I love you," he rasped, needing her to hear it and to believe it. He wanted her to remember it later tonight, after they reached Fabien's location up north and Nikolai explained to her why he'd felt the need to lie to her today. He kissed her chin, her cheek, her brow. "I love you, Renata."
She smiled up at him drowsily. "Mmm...I really like the sound of that."
"Then I'll have to make sure you hear it a lot."
"Okay," she murmured, her fingers playing in the sweat-dampened hair at his nape. "That was incredible, by the way. Is it always going to be that good?"
He groaned. "I have a feeling it might only get better."
She laughed, and the vibration made his sex rouse to life again. "If you keep this up, I'm going to have to go back inside and take another shower."
He gave her a meaningful grind of his pelvis, driving his erection deeper. "Oh, I can keep it up. Don't worry, that's never going to be a problem when you're around."
"You'd better be careful, or I might hold you to that."
Niko chuckled despite his heavy mood. "Sweetheart, you can hold me any way you like."
He kissed her again, and growled with delight as she wrapped her legs around him and rolled him onto his back to begin a slow, torturous ride.
Chapter Twenty-seven
There had been a time in Andreas Reichen's almost three hundred years of walking this Earth when death had rained down upon him like a deluge. Once, when a senseless, brutal wave of slaughter had visited his otherwise peaceful domain.
Back then, in the humid summer of 1809, it had been a pack of Rogue vampires that had forced their way inside this very Darkhaven to rape and kill several of his kin. The attack had been a random thing, the mansion and its residents merely unfortunate enough to be standing in the path of the blood-addicted gang of Rogues. They'd battered their way past the unprotected doors and windows, feeding and killing too many innocents...yet there had been survivors. The Rogues had wreaked their terror and moved on like the pestilence they were, eventually being hunted and destroyed by a member of the Order who'd come to Reichen's aid. The carnage back then had been unbearable, but it hadn't been complete.
What faced Reichen upon his return home this evening had been a calculated attack. Not a brute-force entry, but treachery. An enemy welcomed inside like a friend. And the slaughter that had occurred here this time - probably in the small hours of morning, just before the sun rose - had been a total annihilation.
No one had been spared.
Not even the youngest souls in the residence.
With an awful silence permeating the air like a disease, Reichen walked through the blood and destruction as one of the dead himself. His footsteps tracked sticky scarlet stains across the marble of the vestibule and foyer, past his young nephew, who'd been so pleased to name Reichen godparent to his infant son just weeks ago. The ginger-haired new father sprawled by the door had been the first to die, Reichen guessed, unable to look at the lifeless face that stared unseeing to the bullet-riddled staircase leading to the Darkhaven's sleeping quarters on the upper floors.
More death waited in the hallway outside the library, where another male had been cut down in midstep. Still more lives extinguished near the stairwell to the cellar, one of Reichen's cousins and his Breedmate, both of them dead while trying to escape the gunfire.
He didn't see the body of the boy until he almost stumbled over it - a tow-haired vampire child who'd evidently attempted to hide in one of the cabinets of the sideboard in the dining room. His assailants had dragged him out and shot him like a dog on the antique Persian rug.
"Good Christ," Reichen choked, sagging to his knees and lifting the boy's limp hand to his mouth to stifle his hoarse cry. "For the love of God...why? Why them and not me!"
"He said you would know why."
Reichen closed his eyes at the wooden sound of Helene's voice. She spoke too slowly, the syllables too flat...toneless.
Heartless.
He didn't need to turn around to face her to know that her eyes would seem oddly dull to him now. Dull because all of her warmth - all of her humanity - had been recently bled out of her.
She was no longer his lover, nor his friend. She was Minion.
"Who turned you?" he asked, letting go of the dead boy's hand. "Who do you belong to now?"
"You should know, Andreas. You sent me to him, after all."