“I don’t give a fuck. She lives. Period.”
Hawke’s brow furrowed. “If you’re worried about them torturing her, I can take her out painlessly and just deliver the body. That keeps—”
I slammed Hawke into the stone, my forearm against his collarbone and my knife at his inked throat. “She lives. If anyone touches her they answer to me, and that includes you. If so much as one hair gets cut, or she loses one drop of blood, I’ll fucking—”
“Oh, fuck me,” Benedict interrupted, gripping my wrist to pull the knife back.
Hawke stared at me with the same blank expression, his eyes as cold as ice. The threat of death never fazed him. Hell, I think he welcomed it, and he’d get it if he even looked in Lyric's direction.
“Alek. He’s not going to touch her,” Benedict promised. “For fuck’s sake, man.” He pulled even harder at my wrist.
Still, I couldn’t let go. Couldn’t let the threat to Lyric out from under my knife.
“She’s safe with me,” Hawke whispered, not out of fear, but to move his throat the least amount possible.
I stepped back, battling the murderous urge that crawled beneath my skin to protect Lyric. “Nothing happens to her.”
“We get it. We really do,” Benedict moved between Hawke and me. “And we know it’s going to be complicated, but we have your back. We’ll protect her as one of our own. We get it, Alek.”
“You get what?” I snapped.
“You fed her. You cared for her. You’re a territorial piece of work at the moment in a full-blown rage at the mention of harm coming to her.” Benedict lifted his eyebrows.
“And?”
Hawke blew out a long, frustrated breath. “She’s your mate.”
My heart stopped.
4
Lyric
“So, some people…volunteer to be bitten?” The question tumbled past my lips before I could stop them. Avianna, Alek’s beyond stunning sister, had come to my room—Alek’s room—over an hour ago. Her bodyguard—as she’d explained—Oliva, stood just outside the door despite her rich brown eyes saying she would’ve preferred to come in and chat.
Avianna’s long black hair was sleek and framed her elegant face, her eyes a ridiculously captivating blue. She glanced up at me from where she had sprawled across Alek’s bed. Her heeled feet were popped up, her chin propped on her delicate, gloved hands. Her lips were blood red, and she smirked.
“Yes,” she said, shifting on the bed to sit up. “The humans who are aware of our world come from the families who were around when the Covenant was made.” She shrugged and crossed one leg over the other. “It’s called the Butcher’s Block,” she said, barely suppressing a smile. “A coexistence has resided between us and them for ages. They volunteer as feeders in exchange for protection and with the unspoken agreement that their offerings protect innocents from unprovoked attacks.”
I swallowed hard, leaning a bit harder against the wardrobe across the room. I hadn’t been able to sit still since she arrived. My heart and mind constantly battled on a second-to-second basis—one side screamed at me that this wasn’t real while calculating how I could possibly escape the grand estate that doubled as a fortress, and the other, more logical side, told me to accept this new fate. Vampires were real. There was a whole other world I knew nothing about. Something deeper, stronger called to me on that side of the argument, the same buried instinct that had me welcoming Avianna inside my chambers without a second thought. The same whisper in the back of my mind that told me I could trust her—a vampire who could easily rip out my throat.
A warm shiver danced over my skin at the thought of another vampire capable of rendering me useless. Alek. The way he’d towered over me in the library, my back nearly pressed against those elegant and ancient stacks. My toes curled in my shoes just thinking about it—about him. His scent, his body so close to mine, the power radiating from every single inch of him.
With each passing second my terror and need to flee had waned and shifted to something more…anticipatory. Maybe it was because he’d fed me his blood which enabled me to feel him even now. He was farther away than my instincts seemed to care for, another battle I couldn’t stop—the undeniable need to know he was safe.
A ridiculous notion, since he literally was the thing that went bump in the night.
I pinched the bridge of my nose, wishing like hell my own mind was as easy to sort as my thesis on ancient secret societies. Alek’s offering of his library filled with rare texts had proved the ultimate distraction for my overcrowded mind as well as the cherry on top of my research. I’d spent hours in there yesterday, carefully pouring through books I’d never crossed in my own studies—journals, first-hand accounts, and more from people and creatures who’d actually survived attacks from or operated inside major secret societies.
Avianna tipped her chin up from where she sat, sniffing the air before she laughed.
“What?” I asked, tilting my head.
“I just explained the Butcher’s Block to you, and you haven’t a trace of fear on your scent.”
I parted my lips, then shut them and shrugged. “I’m all about consent,” I explained. “If these humans willingly agree to feed the vampire population, who am I to judge?”
Avianna’s perfectly trimmed eyebrows rose on her smooth forehead. She pointed a finger at me, her hands draped in black silk gloves that reached her elbows. They matched the knee-length black dress she wore, making her look both otherworldly and drop-dead-gorgeous. “I’ve decided I like you, Lyric,” she said, and I blew out a breath.
“That’s a relief?” I said, but it sounded like a question.
Avianna nodded, pushing off the bed and heading toward me, her high heels clicking on the stone floor. “Of course, I decided I liked you the minute my brother told me you didn’t hesitate to help him the night I was attacked.”
I tucked some stray hair behind my ear, my eyes falling to the floor. Flashes of the following night—when the demon came back for me—burst behind my eyes. The pain, the struggle, and then waking up here. “I wasn’t any help,” I said.
“The King says otherwise,” she said, and then fished her phone from a hidden pocket in the skirts of her dress. Okay, now I was jealous of her wardrobe. She typed out a fast text, then slid it back in her silk pocket. “Alek said you immediately described the culprit and told him which direction to go despite the fact that you’d nearly been trampled by the demon in the first place. That seems like help to me.”
“I guess…Wait, King?” I asked, my mind finally catching up.
Those eyebrows rose again, then something like pity flashed in her blue eyes. “He didn’t tell you?”
“Your brother?” I asked, she nodded. “He hasn’t told me much of anything really.” Besides him being an incredibly powerful vampire with the ability to control objects and minds at will. Oh, and the fact that I couldn’t leave—he’d told me that, too.
“Interesting,” she said, and walked toward the giant steel doors of the room. “Yes, Alek is the King. Our family dates back among royalty, all the way before the revolution. He’s worn the burden of the crown for many centuries now.”