As the blood seeped into her system, strength flooded her. Her tension and the tenderness in her throat eased until she could breathe easier. When his blood stopped flowing, he removed his wrist from her mouth and bit into it again.
This time, Callie eagerly brought it back to her mouth.
Chapter Thirty-Seven
Yannis watched his computer screen as he studied the feed from the cameras he’d placed inside the building. Rising, he walked over to the window, and making sure to keep himself out of the sun, he pulled down a slat on one of the blinds and peered outside.
The black SUV remained in the driveway diagonally across the street and a few houses down from where he stood. A matching SUV had pulled up to idle at the sidewalk. A man sat behind the wheel, but he’d hit a button to open the back door. It was raised and waiting.
His cameras revealed the hallway outside the woman’s apartment, but because he couldn’t enter her place, he had no way to see what was going on inside. However, he saw the human enter while his brother was outside, and he’d seen Lucien bounding up the stairs minutes later.
Another pussy who followed Ronan’s misguided lead trailed his brother. Another arrived soon after.
Now they were all up there, and he couldn’t see what was happening. Retreating to the couch, he studied the cameras as he tapped his foot and tried to decide if he should send in one of his spies.
He had them all up and down the street as he’d spent the past few weeks getting to know the neighbors. Many of them found him charming and handsome, and all those he’d encountered had come under his control. He would have preferred to kill them, but he realized he might need their help. He was glad he’d maintained his restraint; it would pay off.
He debated calling the little old lady who liked to walk her dog a couple of dozen times a day. Even as he considered it, she appeared on one of the screens with her decrepit looking miniature poodle.
The woman and the dog looked like they would keel over at any second. When the dog stopped to shit on the sidewalk, his nose wrinkled as she bent to pick it up with a blue bag that she slipped into her fanny pack.
“Fucking humans,” he muttered.
He didn’t bother to call and tell her to listen to everything and report back to him. The nosey, old bitch would do that without him having to tell her.
The other two vampires appeared on the screen as they stepped back into the hall. One of them carried a bundle wrapped in a blanket over his shoulder. Yannis had seen enough dead bodies in his lifetime to know the human was within those blankets.
“Tsk, tsk, big brother,” he murmured. “You’re no better than I.”
And it was Lucien who killed the human; he did not doubt it. Something happened in that apartment with the human, and his brother killed him.
It would be easy to get Lucien to join them if they had the woman, but Yannis didn’t intend for Lucien to survive this. He’d wanted him dead for centuries, and now that he had the opportunity, he would make sure it happened.
But first, his brother would watch him kill the woman. He didn’t know when his hatred for his brother started. It had always been there, a festering thing that burned deep inside him; it had been for his entire family.
He’d happily slaughtered his bitch of a mother who paid as much attention to him as she would a speck of dirt, his goody-two-shoes sister, and his overbearing, abusive father. His only regret was that his self-righteous brother survived.
He’d lost track of Lucien while he was trying to heal from his injuries. He would not make the same mistake now that he’d found him again.
He chuckled as he returned to the window, pulled down a slat in the blind, and watched the vamp emerge to place the body into the back of the waiting SUV. He closed the door, slapped a hand against the window, and the vehicle pulled away from the curb.
The little old woman stopped to gape at him, but the vamp didn’t pay her any attention. When the vamp turned, Yannis glimpsed a tattoo on his neck. Something niggled at the back of his mind when he realized it was a sword, but he couldn’t quite put his finger on what it was.
Then the vamp disappeared into the building, and Yannis retreated to his cameras to watch as the man returned to the third floor. Yannis strove to recall what he’d heard about that tattoo, but the memory eluded him.
The other vamp was waiting for him in the doorway. They said something to each other, but it was so soft, the cameras didn’t pick it up before they entered the apartment again.
Yannis settled on the couch and hit a few keys to bring up another screen. He typed a message and sent it.
He’d spent nearly a month in this place, waiting for his big brother to arrive. He’d almost given up hope, but here Lucien was.
He’d taken a gamble his brother would return to the woman’s home; the others had given up hope and moved on, but he remained steadfast in his belief Lucien would return. And he would return because of the woman.
There was a reason his brother fought through the starvation enshrouding him and the vampires surrounding him to save the woman. Most of the others believed Lucien took her to feed on her and kill her, but Yannis knew the truth.
Lucien took her because he wanted her.
And while he had killed many of the things he wanted over the years, his brother was not the same. The woman meant something to him, but Yannis wasn’t sure exactly what that was until they arrived here.
He’d watched them in their vehicle, laughing, touching, and kissing. She was still human, but she was Lucien’s mate. He suspected it when Lucien pulled together enough to break free of his prison, but he did not doubt it now. She was the reason Lucien escaped, and her death would be the reason he fell apart.
After all these years, Yannis would finally get another chance to destroy his brother. He would not fail to slaughter the sanctimonious prick this time.
Sitting back on the couch, he lifted the arm of the woman sitting beside him and bit into it. She was little more than a motionless feedbag now. He didn’t get a rush from her pain when he bit her anymore. And now that he had his brother in his sight, he no longer had any use for her.
He’d brought many humans in and fed from them since arriving here, but he’d kept this one alive. The pretty woman had listened to his story about a broken vehicle, invited him into her home, and fallen prey to him.
He enjoyed torturing her in the beginning, and he’d really enjoyed folding her boyfriend in half and shoving him into their basement freezer while savoring her screams, but their time together was over. She was no longer any fun, and he would soon be leaving here to hunt his brother.
He felt it when her life slipped away, and he tossed aside her wrist as he settled back on the couch to continue watching. He couldn’t track them once they left here, but he had others to do that for him.
He’d have to get to them before they returned to their home. He, along with many others, would love to know the location of Ronan and his followers, but he couldn’t risk not being able to get at Lucien once they returned home.
No, if he was going to kill his brother, he had to make sure it happened before Lucien locked his pretty piece of ass away.
He’d have to be careful; he had no idea if the bitch with the sword was with them, but if she was, he could kill two birds with one stone. Where Derrick failed to procure the sword, he would succeed.