Dominion (Book 1 of The Dominion Series) (14 page)

He holds out his hand to me and I just look at it. What does he want to do – shake my hand?

"Take my hand," he says.

"Why?"

"Being here in the bedroom is just too damn distracting. I thought I'd offer my hand just in case your legs are still too weak."

"I can stand," I say, my face hot from the memory of what he's just done to me. I straighten my nightgown and stand up, my legs still a bit weak. Here I am, a physical and emotional wreck from this mind-meld orgasm he's just given me and he looks so damn calm and cool.

"So that's it?" I say, my pride stinging that it was so easy for him to control my body.

"What do you mean?"

"You just touch me and do that to me and we're back to business?" I shake my head, avoiding his eyes because I'm so damn embarrassed. "Is that your idea of sex?"

He pulls me into his arms and sighs once more, pressing me against the wall, one knee between my thighs.

"Oh,
Eve
…" he says and tilts my chin up so I'm forced to look in his eyes. "You have
no
idea." He says nothing for a moment, and I feel all choked up, like he's making fun of my inexperience. "I apologize," he says. "I did it to relieve some of your discomfort that I rashly encouraged."

"How generous of you." I try to look away but he prevents me.

"Eve, I'm not sure I'm ready for this," he says.

"For what?"

"For
us
."

"Well,
that's
a first," I say, my voice wavering. "Usually, I meet a guy and he's all over me and it's me who can't commit. Who takes so long to warm up."

"I'm
warm
, Eve," he says softly, his forehead against mine. "I'm more than warm." He presses his hips against me and I feel his erection. "I'm incendiary. But there are things I need to be sure of. Things I have to do before this can happen…"

I close my eyes, because the feel of his erection against my groin has just reignited my lust once more.

"Don't do that if you're not going to," I say and stop, unable to say the words.

"If I'm not going to what?" he says, his mouth quirked into that damn lopsided grin.

"You
know
."

He leans closer, his lips beside my ear, brushing the skin on my cheek. "If I'm not going to
fuck
you?" he whispers and his words alone nearly make me faint. "I can give you another orgasm if you need me to before I go."

"
No
," I say firmly, and open my eyes, staring into his. "It's too … creepy."

"Creepy?" he says and frowns. "You seemed to have enjoyed the first one."

I shake my head. He can't understand.

"Do you know what it feels like for someone else to have so much power over your body?"

He takes in a deep breath.

"Only too well." After a moment, he sighs and then I think,
damn
, of course he does. How can I be so insensitive?

"I'm sorry that I overwhelm you. I forget how inexperienced you are." He strokes my cheek with the back of his fingers. "I would have wiped your memory of it so you wouldn't be so embarrassed but I can't. What happens between us can't be fixed and so I have to be very careful. Vampires rely so much on the ability to wipe things clean if they screw up, but I can't with you."

"Tell me how to put up mental blocks," I say.

He shakes his head. "No."

"Why not?" I say, frustrated. "So you can just hop into my mind anytime you want and affect my body?"

"Yes."

I turn my head away in frustration, but he takes my chin and turns it back. He's smiling, and his smile turns into a full-out grin, and it's contagious because he's so beautiful in his paleness and black-lashed blue-eyed way, and he's being so honest. I can't help but smile back, my eyes tearing up a bit when I do.

"Oh, Eve…" he says and closes his eyes briefly before bending down and kissing my cheek, his tongue touching my skin and I know he's after my dimples and it makes me both smile even harder and imagine where else he might put his tongue one day – when he's ready for this – for
us
.

Whatever
that
means.

He presses his cheek against mine, exhaling into my ear.

"I have to go –
now –
or I'm afraid I'll never leave."

He takes my hand, leading me to the door. When we reach it, he folds me into his arms and strokes my cheek.

"So lovely," he says and I feel my cheeks warm under his so-intense gaze. "You have to know that I want you so much, Eve. But there are things taking place and before I …" he says and hesitates. "I want to make sure of them first. I can't say anything more. You'll have to trust me that I'm not doing this to play with you. I never intended for this to happen. I let things get out of my control tonight because you read about my past and your too-warm heart and body got the better of me."

"None of what happened to you was your fault," I say, tenderness for him filling me when I remember what happened to him.

He shakes his head quickly.

"I'll be in better control of myself from now on."

"Do you have to control everything?"

"Oh, yes. I exist for one purpose and that's to achieve my endgame. To attain it will require my utmost focus and self-control. I have to keep everything under control."

"Even me?"

"
Especially
you. You more than anything."

I frown, not knowing what that means or if I even like the idea. Or if I really
really
like it – the idea of him having total control over me.

He breathes in deeply and makes that throat noise.

"Really
really
like it, Eve," he says, his smile soft. "Please." He kisses me, his kiss chaste and then I think how different he is from Julien and my mind goes back to the image of Julien standing on the front step just a short while earlier.

He frowns and cups my cheek with his hand.

"You were with him
again
?"

"He followed
me
," I say, trying to find some excuse. "He said he has a security detail on me of his own. I didn’t let him into my apartment."

He shakes his head and then he relives everything that happened between Julien and me.

"He's not going to give up. Eve," he says and holds my gaze, his brow furrowed. "You have to stay away from him. He'll try to get in between us. Try to take you from me."

I frown and two emotions battle inside of me. I like the way he sees me as
his
, despite protesting earlier to Julien about the twins and their possessiveness. At the same time, I
don’t
like it – in my mind. I'm an adult. Not a child. I'm not a possession.

I'm so confused.

He bends down once more and kisses me, harshly, his tongue finding mine, and a surge of his desire fills me and it's mixed with frustration and some fear. I can't help but respond, my body warming in response to his lust.

"Just please, stay away from him." He strokes my cheek with his thumb.

Then he's gone. I'm standing alone at my door, my body still so in need of release even if my mind is now so confused over these brothers. I go right to my bed and snuggle under my covers, and very slowly and very deliberately remember the feel of his body on mine, his mouth on mine as I bring myself relief and it's not satisfying, but it has to be enough until he is ready.

Whatever the hell that means…

CHAPTER NINE

"If I know what love is, it is because of you."

Herman Hesse

I wake in the middle of the night and can't fall back to sleep. My sleep is still all out of whack and so I get up and make a pot of decaf blackberry tea and take the manuscript – or what's left of it – and sit wrapped in a blanket on my couch.

I wonder what Michel's torn out of this document – what was it that he felt was so bad he didn't want me to read it? Was it worse than the chapter I did read?

I turn the pages to where I left off last night. Michel had just consented to be turned and drank the blood he needed to become a vampire – with Julien's help.

The next page starts a new chapter. The picture at the top of the page is an image made of the original and is of a black-cowled Death rising up out of the midst of a fiery pit. Beside Death, angels weep, their tears dripping down their faces. The title of the page is
Lacrimosa
– Day of Tears.

The words at the top of the page are of those from the funeral mass, part of the
Dies Irae
, first in Latin and the translated to English:

Lacrimosa dies illa (
Ah! That day of tears and mourning!)

Sounds like the content will be intense. I sip my tea and hope what's in this section isn't too graphic, but read on anyway.

"The subjugation of Michel,"
reads the translation, "
provides Marguerite with endless amusement."

Michel's subjugation…

I feel like a filthy voyeur taking pleasure in reading the intimate and tragic details of his life and death – and resurrection. Still I read on, surprised that Michel's left this part in.

"By turning Michel so soon after my father's death, she denied him the right to attend our father's funeral mass and so he is forced to return to the Basilica that evening where he kneels alone with his grief at the front of the sanctuary while monks chant Agnus Dei – Lamb of God.

Agnus Dei, qui tollis peccata mundi, miserere nobis. Lamb of God, you who take away the sins of the world, have mercy upon us.

I fear there is no mercy for either of us. I refuse to kneel beside him as he wishes me to, having forsaken the Church when it sided with the King of France against my father.

But standing here in the shadows, listening to the chanting, I feel such a great loss. It's not my father I miss – he was an old drunkard who beat Michel and me mercilessly, treating both of us as a burden to be borne rather than sons to father. I miss the Church – I miss Mass and the connection I felt to a God I now have trouble believing in. Strangely, Michel mourns our father, whom he betrayed for his beloved Church. Perhaps neither of us perceived what we were losing when we chose sides.

Now, we've lost it all.

Michel cannot take up his position as Bishop of Carcassonne, and has had to relinquish his vows, so the Bishophood has passed to another loyal servant. I had to compel the Deacon to allow us into the Basilica and the monks to chant so that Michel could say his goodbyes to our father's corpse as it lies in the sanctuary. It was the least I could do for him considering the hell Marguerite has put him through.

Just an hour before we arrived, she compelled him to pleasure her while on his knees, dressed in full vestments. Just to torment him even more, she fastened a thick leather belt around his neck attached to a strap that she used to lead him around, crawling on his knees behind her. She enjoys making me watch my brother's debasement, determined to break him, turn him into a slave and Bacchanalian but my brother is man who had been certain of his vocation since he was just seventeen and resists with all his heart. He's had only one lover – his first, and only – the sweet raven-haired Danielle with hazel eyes whom we both loved and he won. Marguerite is determined to make up for the years that he was celibate, and it is only his vampire nature that prevents him from falling dead from exhaustion.

Despite it all, he wears his vestments, perhaps as a way to keep alive his belief that in spite the debauchery and domination Marguerite subjects him to, he is still a priest, beloved of God, called to the Church, and that his suffering on this earth will ensure he is welcomed into Heaven.

But he is as undead and damned as the rest of us.

After my father is buried, we say our goodbyes to Carcassonne and our father's residence and leave, following the Crusaders as they make their way across the Languedoc in search of heretics to burn and estates to rob.

It is two years before we return to the region, but to a vampire, two years is like a week to a mortal. Two years of traveling across France finds us in a small village outside of Toulouse where the fighting is fresh and there's ripe picking among the fallen and few to ask questions when bodies turn up drained of their blood. Battlefields are notorious and the weapons leave terrific wounds that bleed freely. Exsanguinated corpses are all too common.

Marguerite is still the same, and she has finally won. Michel is now her servant in body and I fear, soul. He no longer fights her. Indeed, he seeks her out of his own free will, casting away his vows with abandon, her sexual slave, almost enjoying his humiliation and pain.

It isn't just his sexual enslavement that she takes delight in, but the complete control she exerts over his life and how much she disrupted it. Here we are, knight and priest, her servants, waiting on her every word. I wonder if all Sires are this imperious. If I were to make a vampire, I wouldn't treat her this way. I would share with her the wonders of immortality, but Marguerite seems only to delight in having power over us, in killing mortals as if they were stock animal.

For the past two years, she has delighted in seeing Michel humiliated as she forces him to perform every manner of sexual act with her or women she has compelled to be his partners. She has even subjected him to the most severe of tortures, whipping him while he stands naked, unable to move due to physical restraints or through using her own powers. Our only consolation was that we had each other, and indeed, our mutual tragedy has drawn us together more closely than since we were young boys and I took on the role as his protector from our father.

The inquisition is in Toulouse to investigate claims of Waldensian witchery, and so the three of us have to be very careful not to raise suspicions. We have enough wealth from our dead father's inheritance to live in elegance. Money for bribes is plentiful and so we relax and enjoy ourselves as much as is possible.