Enslave (7 page)

She cracked her fist across his jaw.

Andreu snarled, evaded her second swing and straddled her. “Stop doing that too.”

“No,” she hissed and he caught her wrist.

He grinned and leaned forwards so he could pin both of her arms to the red pillows.

Her smile was wicked and victorious.

Her knee slammed into his balls.

Andreu choked, white spots winking over his vision, and groaned as he rolled onto his back and curled up to clutch at himself. “Puta.”

She didn’t disappear. She appeared above him, something akin to concern in her incredible eyes, and blinked several times.

“I didn’t mean to hurt you,” she said and he grunted, unable to bring himself to believe that lie. She had known exactly what she was doing and what the end result would be. “Well, you left me little choice!”

He frowned and groaned, trying to lean away from her as she reached out to touch his face. What he really wanted to do was grab her and kick her somewhere it hurt so she knew what he was feeling. He didn’t have the strength though. He was using it all just to keep breathing through the tiny fragment of his windpipe that had remained open after her knee had connected with a part of his body he was quite fond of. A part that he had thought she was fond of too. Pain radiated from his balls, sharp splinters that stabbed him deep into his bones.

She tried to touch him again and he bared his fangs at her. The show of aggression didn’t stop her. She laid her palm on his cheek, her gentleness surprising him, and leaned over him and placed her bloodied lips against his.

Now was not the time for her to get another of the kisses she had apparently come here for.

He tried to break away but her lips began to move over his, soft sweeps that brought his focus away from his aching balls and up to her. Her tongue lightly traced his lips and then slipped between them to brush his. His pain faded, incredible warmth spreading outwards from his mouth and carrying it away. Dios, she tasted so sweet and tempting, and deadly. That word echoed at the back of his mind but he again failed to heed the warning. Her kiss remained gentle and soothing, and her slender hand lightly caressed his cheek at first and then trailed down the length of his body to settle over his balls. His cock got the wrong idea, instantly hardening for her again. Heat travelled the length of his body, tingling sparks that leapt from nerve to nerve, causing every one of them to combust until he felt like liquid fire mixed with a cocktail of drugs and potent blood inside, all dizzy and boneless.

When she finally pulled away from him, it was as though she had never landed a hard knee on his groin or broken his nose.

Andreu lay beneath her, hazy from head to toe, hot right down to his marrow, and unable to muster the strength to move.

Cristo. He couldn’t even tear his gaze away from hers. Her irises swam with iridescent shades of brown through to blue, the gold in them sparkling like the precious metal.

“Are you feeling better?” she whispered and stroked his cheek, the softness in her gaze captivating him.

Andreu nodded. He felt better than he had done in a long time.

The heat faded and cold crept back into his veins.

But it didn’t mean that he was going to let her go.

He lunged for her, a snarl on his lips, and she winked out of existence.

His gaze darted around the room but there was no sign of her.

Varya.

She had looked afraid when she had surrendered her name to him in an attempt to gain her freedom. Andreu crashed back onto the mattress and stared up at the crimson canopy of the ebony four-poster bed. Had she been telling the truth when she had said she only wanted a kiss? Was all this about desire rather than death?

His cock twitched, putting in its opinion. She might have made him hard while he had been asleep, but it had been the desire he felt whenever their eyes locked that had kept him as solid as steel and desperate to get inside her, even after she had kicked him.

He closed his eyes and willed his erection to go away but it refused to fade while thoughts of Varya occupied his mind. Her hand had felt incredibly good on him, her kiss equally as addictive and thrilling, and being between her slender shapely legs, rocking against her heat while they kissed, had been Heaven.

She was the enemy.

No good came of sleeping with an enemy.

His heart piped up, reasoning once again that she’d had a chance to kill him while he slept, and adding that she could have done the deed while he had been lying on the bed clutching himself and trying not to cry like a baby. She had taken away his pain and healed him.

Varya became more of an enigma with each meeting.

Part of him wanted to lie on the bed and wait out the rest of the day in the hope that she might return so they could finish what they had started.

The rest of him said to get up, wake the others, and tell them that their succubus problem hadn’t gone away.

Antoine wouldn’t be pleased.

Andreu reluctantly dragged himself out of bed and slung on his black boxers, trousers and black shirt. He didn’t bother with socks. By the time he had finished dressing, his erection was gone and his mind was finally on business again. He padded across the hardwood floor to the panelled mahogany door and opened it.

Payne lay slumped in the red velvet armchair, head tipped back, snoring.

Andreu kicked the chair over, sending him crashing towards the carpet. To the elite vampire’s credit, he was on his feet before he even touched the floor and was facing him, fangs and claws sharp, ready to attack. When he saw it was Andreu, he frowned and yawned, and then rubbed the sleep from his slate-grey eyes.

“What?” Payne righted the chair.

“Some guard dog you are. I could have been killed in there.”

“She came back?” Payne’s voice was loud in the black-walled corridor and his gaze zipped to Andreu’s bloodied face. “Shit. Sorry. She hit you?”

“She hit on me and then hit me.” Andreu left the rest of his seductive encounter with her out and knocked on the door slightly up the hall from his. He wiped the back of his hand across his upper lip and nose to clear the blood away. “Something isn’t right. I don’t think she means me any harm.”

“Then she wants something from you.” Payne came to lean against the wall behind him.

“She said she wanted a kiss. Something about not being able to get the taste of me out of her head.” Andreu still wasn’t sure whether to take that as a good sign and a compliment, or a bad one and something to be concerned about. Was he tasty in a sense that she might want to keep him alive so she could kiss him some more, or tasty in the sense that he was a meal at a Michelin starred restaurant and she wanted to devour him?

She had healed him, and he was still alive, so he clung to the hope that death by sex wasn’t on the cards.

“Maybe I should just fuck her.”

“What?” Payne spluttered from behind him. Javier echoed him as he opened the door in front of Andreu.

“I mean, if she wants a taste of me, why don’t I just give her one that she will never forget and then she’ll leave us alone.”

“She’s a succubus. You would need to be incredibly powerful to survive sex with her.” Payne sounded deadly serious.

Andreu glanced over his shoulder at the tall blond male. He looked it too. Maybe death by sex would be on the cards if he tried to satisfy whatever urge kept bringing her back into his life.

“I take it we need to wake Antoine?” Javier drew his black bathrobe closed around himself and smiled back into his room. “I will not be long.”

Guilt settled in Andreu’s stomach at Lilah’s soft and affectionate answer. He had never really bothered to get to know her in the weeks he had been at the theatre. They had barely said more than a handful of words to each other and it wasn’t for lack of trying on her part. She had struck up dozens of conversations that he had cut short with one-word answers. Now she had sent her mate on his way with a brief declaration that she would be fine and to be with his brother. They didn’t know whether Varya posed a threat to everyone at the theatre. She was taking a risk by letting her mate leave her alone, even for a short while.

Javier closed the door and started down the hall towards Antoine’s apartment. They passed Snow’s door and Andreu was thankful that he wasn’t going to wake the aristocrat vampire. From what Andreu had heard, Snow needed a lot of rest in order to retain some sense of control over his darker urges. Andreu didn’t want to be on the receiving end of one of those dark violent moments because he had awoken him.

Antoine opened his door, brown hair ruffled and wild, dressed in only his trousers.

Andreu had never seen such horrific scars as the ones that cut across and distorted some of the muscles of Antoine’s bare torso. He tried not to stare but the sight of them had him gaping. Whatever Antoine had been through, it had ravaged his body to the point where he had been unable to heal fully. Andreu had taken his fair share of blows in his time as a warrior, sword wounds that had hit bone, but had always healed, leaving only faint scars on otherwise perfect skin. Antoine looked as though someone had tried to flay his flesh right off his bones and had almost succeeded.

Antoine’s eyes bore into him and Andreu managed to drag his gaze up to meet them. The red edging them warned that his staring wasn’t appreciated and that he would be wise to find something else to fix his attention on before he ended up just as mutilated and scarred.

“I take it we had a visitor?” Antoine held his gaze and Andreu nodded. Antoine stepped back to allow everyone to file into his apartment. “Clearly this problem is not going to go away by itself.”

Sera sat in the middle of their four-poster bed, the dark red sheets wrapped around her and her long blonde hair twisted into a messy knot at the back of her head. She gave a little wave in Andreu’s direction, revealing a smudge of purple on her palm. Andreu’s gaze flickered to the black wall of the apartment to his right. There was a matching purple splotch there. Beside it were splotches of crimson, forest green and a deep shade of blue. Clearly, Sera was still in the process of changing Antoine and had moved into the decorating phase of her dastardly plan. Andreu could never understand why females couldn’t just accept males as they came. They always had to change something about them.

“Your succubus came back for another fix?” she said on a smile that brightened her deep green eyes and he guessed that of all the colours she wanted to use to redecorate Antoine’s apartment, the winner would be the one that matched her eyes. Antoine was so sickeningly in love with her that he would choose the colour that reminded him of his beauty.

Andreu shrugged. “It would appear I am addictive.”

“There has to be a reason she’s risking everything to reach you.” Payne closed the door and joined Antoine and Javier where they stood near the chest of drawers on the left of the room.

Antoine poured them each a glass of blood and handed one to Andreu first. He took it with a nod of gratitude and sipped it. Antoine frowned.

“You are not hungry? Did she not take energy from you?”

Andreu lowered the glass. “She did, but she can give it back too.”

Everyone stared at him.

Payne broke the heavy silence. “She gave you her energy?”

“I take it that’s not normal behaviour either?” Andreu frowned now. Varya had said that he vexed her. She was beginning to vex him too. He wanted to know the truth behind the reason for her visits. It couldn’t just be because she wanted to kiss him. There was more to it than that.

“No. Succubi don’t help their victims. Did she take too much energy and gave some back to keep you alive?” Payne again and Andreu had never seen him looking so serious.

“She broke my nose and kicked me in the balls, and then gave me some of her energy.”

“Are you alright?” Javier touched his arm and peered at his nose. “It seems fixed.”

Andreu sipped his glass of blood. “I told you, she fixed it. She said she didn’t want to hurt me. She just wanted to get free.”

Payne’s expression darkened. “Free?”

“She couldn’t disappear for some reason.” Andreu decided to give them the short version with all the wicked details omitted because every male in the room would think him insane if he confessed that he had come tantalisingly close to penetrating her and he still couldn’t shake the taste of her. “She spat in my face so I released one of her wrists, punched me, and fought me. When she kicked me, I let go of her and then she healed me and disappeared.”

“When you let go of her.” There was weight to those words as Payne stared at him, a heaviness that sank through Andreu and left him feeling as though he had missed something important.

Payne set his glass of blood down and frowned across the room at him, his gaze focused and intense, as though he was trying to see something in Andreu. No. Payne wasn’t looking at him. He was looking around him. Andreu looked at both of his shoulders and then tried to see behind himself. What was Payne looking for?

Payne stepped towards him, gaze locked on his now. “No one can contain a succubus, Andreu. Are you sure it was only when you let go of her that she could leave?”

“One hundred percent. She begged me to let her go.” And what a bastard he had been to lie to her and keep her trapped. He hadn’t wanted to release her though, had known on some level that she would disappear if he did.

“And what did you do?” The blue and gold flecks in Payne’s grey eyes seemed to brighten.

Varya’s eyes had done something similar when she had been looking at him, her face soft and beautiful, entrancing.

“I told her to give me her name and I would think about it. She gave it to me and I didn’t let her go. That’s when she spat in my face.” And what a delightful moment that had been, a precursor to a broken nose and bruised balls.

Payne rocked backwards as though he had punched him. “She gave you her name?”

It was said with so much disbelief that a flicker of how she had said it and her expression at the time surfaced in Andreu’s mind and lodged there, playing on repeat. She had been reluctant to surrender her name but had done so to gain her freedom, only he hadn’t given it to her. He had tricked her and it had hurt her.