In a normal voice, Maximus said, “Stop it, Leila! You’re only hurting yourself.” In that too-soft whisper, he said, “You’re doing it wrong. You can’t pull free that way, but if you use enough force, you can break your bones and then slide your arms from the restraints. Once your hands are free, you can unlock the rest of them.”
I stiffened, finally allowing myself to hope that Maximus was still on our side. Unlike faking a rape so I wouldn’t hate him, he had no ulterior reason to tell me how to free myself unless he really was doing everything he could for Vlad and me, even under these awful circumstances.
My rush of gratitude turned to more severe embarrassment at the rhythmic way he began to move. Then he groaned gutturally and his free hand squeezed its way from my breast to my ass and back again. Instinctively, I jerked hard against my restraints, but he flattened me against the wall before kissing my neck with a hunger that didn’t quite feel feigned.
“Not now,” he growled low. “Later, when Vlad comes. You’ll need to be free to protect yourself from the guards. They’re ordered to kill you at the first sign of attack.”
I froze for a second, hope giving way to a surge of excitement. Had Maximus told Vlad where we were?
My head began to bang against the stone wall as he moved faster, his groans sounding more urgent.
“I’m sorry,” he whispered raggedly. “If I don’t make it look real, Szilagyi will brutalize you himself later. I can’t let that happen, for your sake as well as Vlad’s.”
Relief and gratitude mixed with shame and awkwardness, forming a toxic emotional brew. If my arms were free, I would have hugged Maximus for risking his life to save me from such an awful fate. At the same time, I couldn’t stop myself from thrashing in futile attempts to get away from him. He gripped my free thigh hard enough to hurt, but I realized that the way he had my limb positioned also kept the camera from viewing an angle that would reveal this was all an act.
Then he shattered my new hopes by whispering, “I’m watched too closely to reach Vlad to tell him where we are. You need to link to him and let him know that you’re underneath the old Sukhumi train station in Abkhazia.”
I turned my head to give him a stunned glare. Did he forget something important, like how my abilities were smothered even before he’d made sure that I had been skinned?
“Doesn’t this feel even a little good, baby?” he said loud enough for our eavesdroppers, then began to move faster. This might not be real, but it was so graphic and intimate that I couldn’t even look at him anymore. If I was still human, my pelvic area would need an ice pack after being repeatedly beaten by a certain blunt object, taped down or no.
“Szilagyi doesn’t know it, but he sliced Vlad’s aura off when he took your skin.” A whisper that seemed to sear me when I realized its implications. “And you don’t need to touch anything to link to Vlad. You can reach him through your dreams. He taunted me with that when he held me prisoner.”
I couldn’t stop the tear that slid past my tightly clenched eyelids. I’d thought that Maximus had talked Szilagyi into skinning me to keep me from using my abilities. Instead, he’d done it to reactivate them. Maybe, I didn’t need anything more than what I already had to save myself.
Even as that hope rose, my vicious inner voice tried to quash it. You haven’t been able to link to anyone since you became a vampire, and Vlad can’t hear your thoughts anymore, so how will you tell him where you are even if you do link to him?
I shoved that nasty little voice back down. Twenty minutes ago, I’d thought I was helpless. Right now, Maximus had reminded me that I wasn’t, all while risking his life in order to not rape me. I didn’t need him to explain how pissed Szilagyi would be if he found out that his new video was only R-rated instead of X, and even if Vlad knew that, he still might kill him for what Maximus was doing to me.
I pushed that thought back. I’d link to Vlad and I’d find a way to make him hear me, period. Maximus had given me my location. All I needed to do was relay it. It had to be possible. Vlad had told me that Mencheres, the vampire that Vlad often referred to as his “honorary” sire, could speak directly into other vampire’s minds, and Mencheres didn’t have the sire/offspring connection to Vlad that I did.
Maximus let out a sharp sound, half groan, half shout, as he shuddered against me. Something moist hit my inner thigh, and beneath his new moan, I heard a rip of tape. Then I felt the sting of it being torn from my own delicate flesh. Not having any hair grow back on my new skin yet was suddenly a good thing.
When Maximus moved away, letting the camera get its first unhindered view of us, he was tapeless and erect while I had semen coating my inner thighs and pubis mound. Martin Scorsese couldn’t have directed a more convincing scene.
I knew why Maximus had gone with the “method” approach—anything less would have roused too much suspicion—but this was still traumatizing. I wanted to bathe with boiling water, yet I couldn’t even wipe the smears away.
“Sorry it had to be this way, baby. Next time, it will be better,” Maximus said, ripping the tape away from my mouth and adding it to the pile he’d concealed in his fist.
Next time. Would he need to repeat this ruse to ensure that Szilagyi had enough filthy videos to send to Vlad? I couldn’t suppress a revolted shudder at the thought.
I’d find a way to reach Vlad. I had to. Besides, despair might have made me oblivious to it before, but now, I realized a very important thing about the camera in the corner of my cell.
It had a cord that was plugged into an electrical socket.
Chapter 13
It felt like I broke my brain trying to mentally link to Vlad over the next two days. So far, I might have struck out in my progress with that, but I did have a breakthrough in another area: the stranglehold of the sun.
Dawn still hit me like a boulder to the head, but I awoke earlier each passing day. My willpower was growing from the ugliness of my circumstances, but in the meantime, my body was getting frighteningly weak. Being skinned had made me lose most of the blood I’d had in me at my capture and I hadn’t been given a drop since. Before, I’d listened to the heartbeats here in an effort to figure out how many people were in this hideout. Now, I had to fight not to listen to them because they inflamed my hunger to the point where I could barely concentrate enough to attempt linking to Vlad.
I need blood, I’d mouthed to Maximus during his heavily guarded visit the second day after my not-rape. He hadn’t brought the tripod camera with him for a repeat, thank God, but instead, he came with a bucket and a washcloth. It was beyond humiliating to have him give me a sponge bath with four smirking guards watching, but at least their trading comments about my anatomy kept them from focusing on my mouth, so they didn’t see my wordless message. Maximus did, and his single nod said he’d do the best he could.
Maybe feeding would help me to push past the barriers to my abilities. My link to Vlad had to still be there. We hadn’t just exchanged blood; he’d turned me into a vampire, so every cell in my body must have an intrinsic connection to him. I just needed to reactivate those connections and follow them to their source.
I tried for the rest of the night. When dawn finally hit me with its usual knockout blow, I was still trying.
Vlad’s castle wasn’t burning anymore. That wasn’t the only change since the last time I’d seen it. The sections where it had collapsed had been cleared out, revealing cratered spaces that went down as far as the basement in some places. Huge debris piles were lined up outside what was left of the stone walls. Cranes and bulldozers were lessening those piles by hefting loads into nearby steel shipping containers. The castle had looked almost deserted before, but now it was crawling with people involved in clean-up activity.
The north and east ends of the house looked like a fallen soufflé with how concave they were. The west side had fared better, but it had been reduced to one story. By comparison, the southern side towered over the ruins, all four stories intact and the turret in d
efiant relief against the clear afternoon sky.
That’s where Vlad was, hands clasped behind his back while he looked down on the progress. Mencheres was there, too, seated on a couch next to a computer table. The couch I recognized; the computer area was new. Even if I didn’t remember what the room had looked like before, the metal table didn’t fit with the sumptuous furnishings that, like the turret and the rest of the south wing, had somehow survived Szilagyi’s two-pronged attack.
I didn’t know if this was real or a dream. That didn’t stop me from staring at Vlad with a hunger that eclipsed the one that ravaged me now. I’d tried not to dwell on how much I had missed him, but seeing him destroyed the emotional defense I’d built up. I ached to touch him, yet I couldn’t. The other times I’d linked to Vlad in my sleep, I’d had a ghostly version of a body. This time, I had nothing. Maybe I really was dreaming.
If so, I’d dreamed him into looking more disheveled than I’d ever seen him. His dark hair was matted and his clothes were streaked with so much soot, dirt, and blood, I couldn’t tell what their real color was. A thick layer of hair shadowed his jaw, making it more beard than sensual stubble, and his shoes had pieces of charred flesh stuck to them. Despite this, his posture was regally erect, as if he were garbed in spotless royal robes instead of his filthy attire.
“Come,” Vlad said in Romanian.
Marty walked into the room, causing a wave of joy to crash over me. He’d survived the attack! Thank God! Then, just as quickly, my joy was replaced with concern.
Marty looked almost as bad as Vlad. Both sideburns were gone and he only had a few patches of black hair remaining on his head. His face was also covered in blood, and it took me a moment to realize why.
“This was mailed to one of your people, like the last video,” Marty said, his hoarse voice catching on the next words. “I watched it on the way here. It’s definitely her.”
Vlad held out his hand, but the rest of his body stayed in that perfect, statuesque stillness. I looked at the envelope and the scarlet tears streaking Marty’s cheeks, then a chill of dread went through me. No. Don’t let it be that tape—
“You don’t want to see it,” Marty rasped, confirming my suspicions. “I wish I hadn’t. She’s still alive at the end. That’s all you need to—”
“Give it to me.” Four snarled words that made me recoil from the violence seething from them.
Mencheres didn’t wait for Marty’s response. An invisible force yanked the envelope out of Marty’s hand and floated it over to Vlad. Then Mencheres’s power propelled Marty out of the room. Once that manila envelope touched Vlad, he was a blur of motion, streaking over to the computer table. Then he put the DVD into the laptop and clicked “play.” Now I was praying that this was only a dream. Just in case it wasn’t, I began screaming at him with my thoughts.
Don’t watch it, Vlad! Listen to my voice instead. I know where I am, and all you need to do is listen so I can tell you—
Fire erupted from his hands when the screen filled with the image of me, naked and struggling so fiercely against my restraints that blood ran beneath my clamps. Then it showed Maximus’s naked ass as he walked toward me holding a bottle of lube and several strips of duct tape. I was so upset that Vlad was watching this; it took a few moments to realize that the recording had no sound, which surprised me until I remembered Maximus flicking a button before he took off his clothes. Smart, the sound could have been isolated and amplified until you could hear what he had been whispering to me, and I had no doubt that Szilagyi had watched this before sending it to Vlad.
No wonder Szilagyi hadn’t suspected a thing, I thought, feeling sick as I watched Maximus begin the mime of my rape. Maximus must have been a director in his former life, because he had an uncanny sense of camera angles. Not once did I glimpse the tape he’d applied to me or himself as he rocked and thrust against me as if out of control with lust. I tried to focus on Vlad instead of the graphic images, willing him to hear the words I kept mentally roaring at him.
It’s not real, it’s not real, stop watching it! Listen to me, I’m right here and I know where I am!
Either I really was dreaming or I wasn’t getting through, because not once did Vlad take his eyes off the screen. The video ended with Maximus leaving me manacled to the wall with his semen still coating me in pink smears. Vlad didn’t move and nothing changed in his granite expression, but the flames on his hands grew until they encompassed his entire body. Soon, I couldn’t see him beneath the layers of red, orange, and blue, and when fire kept pouring from him like water gushing out of a geyser, Mencheres rose.
“Vlad,” he began.
A wall of flames hurled the Egyptian vampire across the room. Mencheres didn’t try to talk to Vlad again. He ran, shouting in Romanian and English for everyone else to leave.
Over the next several minutes, I watched in agonized disbelief as the people who’d been working to repair the house ran from the rage-fueled inferno that continued to spill out of Vlad until it covered every inch of the castle. The ones that didn’t move fast enough were thrown to safety by Mencheres’s telekinesis, until it looked like the house was hurtling people away from it while writhing in its death throes. Even the napalm attack hadn’t been this destructive. In a shocking display of power, Vlad’s fire burned until nothing remained except him amidst a sea of flames, crumpled stone, and swirling embers.
Chapter 14
Despite Maximus’s repeated cajoling, Szilagyi refused to lift his ban on my starvation. After the “dream” that I strongly suspected was a psychic vision, I’d do anything to strengthen myself enough to make Vlad hear me the next time I was able to link to him. Anything.
Szilagyi had accomplished his goal of driving Vlad into a psychotic rage, since he burned down the house he’d lived in for centuries, not to mention almost killed dozens of his own people in the process. I didn’t know what Vlad would do next, and that terrified me. Since my “dream,” I hadn’t been able to reach him again. No great stretch to figure out why. Linking to people took a lot out of me, and with starvation continuing to deplete my strength, I was like a car that had run out of gas.
That’s why, when I heard Maximus negotiate a non-videoed “conjugal” visit, I knew it must really be a mask for him to sneak me some blood. I hated the thought of repeating the fake assault, but this was the only thing that Szilagyi had agreed to, so it was our only shot. I still wasn’t sure how Maximus would do it. Hide a tube of blood in his pants and pretend that the bulge was just him looking forward to Round Two?
“If you don’t want to be filmed this time, you strip out here and the door stays open and manned by a guard,” I heard Szilagyi order, and my spirits sank. Now what? “Not that I don’t trust you, Maximus,” Szilagyi went on in a friendlier tone, “but women can be very persuasive, especially when you’re in love with one of them.”
“Aww, I knew you were a romantic at heart,” Maximus replied flippantly, then the two of them shared a laugh as though they weren’t discussing an impending rape. Well, I wasn’t really about to be raped, but Szilagyi didn’t know that. Anger at my helplessness burned through me again, fueling my determination to get the blood any way I could. With it, I wouldn’t remain Szilagyi’s little torture trophy for much longer.
“You need a whole roll of that?” Szilagyi asked, his tone taunting now. “Is she that bad of a biter?”
Something small thumped right outside the door. “Just this,” Maximus said. “I don’t mind the bites, but I could do without all the bitching.”
A snort of laughter was Szilagyi’s response, and a few moments later, the stone door opened and Maximus came in. I averted my eyes because, as ordered, he was naked. Then I glanced back at him with a sense of foreboding.
He was totally naked and only holding two small pieces of duct tape. Neither one of them would be enough to cover his necessary assets, let alone mine, too.
“I know, you’ll hate me forever for this,” Maximus said, walking over and p
ressing one of the pieces of tape to my mouth. “But you don’t know how long forever really is. A thousand years later, I’ve got an idea, and let me assure you, Leila, things change.”
Over his broad shoulders, I saw the guard lean in to check out what was happening. Maximus must have sensed him, too, because he turned around, keeping the other piece of tape concealed behind him.
“Szilagyi said to man the door. He didn’t say come inside to oversee, and if I wanted an audience, I would’ve invited everyone,” Maximus said, his tone harder than granite.
The guard muttered an apology and left, though the door stayed wide open.
I kept my eyes glued to that space as Maximus put the single remaining piece of tape on me. Not looking at him when he did that created a false sense of distance, as if I could separate my mind from my body. I couldn’t, of course, and the grimly determined scent emanating from Maximus reminded me that he wasn’t acting of his own free will, either. We were both forced into this awful situation, and for what? Damn Szilagyi! He’d made sure that Maximus couldn’t hide any blood on him, so now we’d have to go through this embarrassing, shameful ruse for nothing.
When Maximus’s hands moved from my most intimate spot to my shoulders and he touched his forehead to mine, a slow sigh seemed to slip from my soul. Neither of us wanted to be here, but right at this moment, I felt . . . oddly safe. For the next several minutes, I knew that no one would hurt me because Maximus wouldn’t let them. When you could be tortured at any moment, the assurance of safety, no matter how brief, was precious, and I had it because of him.
As if he sensed my need amidst my dread over what was to happen next, he stroked my head and my face with light, comforting touches.
“It’s okay,” he murmured, his gray gaze conveying all the support and encouragement that he couldn’t say out loud with our multiple eavesdroppers. Then, in a normal voice, he said, “I’ve wanted this for days, Leila.”