“I see you, Sin,” he whispered. “I see you.”
He didn’t know if she heard, but before she could recover from the half-dozen climaxes he’d given her, Con stood, scooped her into his arms, and sank his fangs into her throat. She gasped, a sweet feminine sound that nearly took him to his knees again. He mounted the stairs two at a time, stalked to the bedroom, and eased them both onto the bed. At some point, she’d grabbed one of her daggers, and he wondered if she thought she needed protection from him… or if being armed was a habit that had risen out of living a dangerous life.
Gently, he extracted the blade from her hand, which still left her with her primary weapon—her gift. She didn’t protest, though she did note exactly where he had set the dagger on the nightstand.
Using his thigh to separate her legs, he sank between them. His shaft slipped between her swollen folds, and instantly, she locked her legs around his waist, urging him, tempting him. He didn’t tease. Her spicy blood mingled with the taste of her orgasms, feeding his desire.
His stomach and buttocks tightened as he concentrated on maintaining control, on sliding into her slowly instead of slamming home and fucking her into the mattress like instinct demanded of him. He’d taken things slow to this point, and he wasn’t going to stop now.
Not yet.
Her hot core clamped around him, sucking him deep and shredding his control. His body hummed with lust and new energy as her blood filled him. Deep inside, the connection with her intensified. He felt drugged, wanting… needing… more. It was as if every swallow made him hungrier instead of sated. Oh, this was bad, very bad…
Sin’s dermoire lit up, and her warmth joined the hum in his veins. “Almost, Con,” she breathed. “It’s almost gone.”
He had to stop. He was about two swallows from no return. She must have sensed his reluctance, because she fisted his hair and held him.
“This time, we finish it.”
Last time, he’d had the willpower to pull away, but then, he hadn’t been buried deep inside her. Now, he was helpless, a slave to the pull of her blood. He swallowed, again and again, knowing he’d crossed a line.
“It’s done,” she gasped. “The virus… it’s… gone.”
He barely heard her. Ecstasy had taken over, had engulfed him in a vortex he couldn’t escape. More… he needed more.
Sin cried out as pleasure swamped her. That was the danger of this addiction… The victim would feel nothing but euphoria and orgasms as they were drained to death.
Gods, no!
Con roared as he ripped his fangs from her throat. His entire body convulsed, and instant craving began again. He swiped his tongue over the punctures, savoring the last taste he could ever have of Sin.
Anger, frustration, and lust combined into a massively caustic mood, but somehow he managed to take it easy instead of pumping into her with punishing thrusts. But maybe in a way the gentle rhythm was the punishment. Forcing her to accept kindness might actually be cruel. It definitely wasn’t what she wanted.
“Harder,” she moaned, and he intentionally pulled back, holding her on the very edge.
“Am I your first?” he whispered, some deep, selfish part of him wanting to know for sure, wanted to hear her say that he was the only male who had ever made the act about more than tab A into slot B.
She threw her head back, exposing her long, graceful neck and making her hair spill like black silk across the red satin duvet. “Con—”
“Tell me.” He ground against her, took her breast into his mouth, and suckled until she whimpered. “Am. I. Your. First?”
“Yes.” That one barely audible word was loaded with a lifetime of emotion: regret, anger, sorrow. For a moment, he thought she was going to break down, but then her fingers raked down his back and ass, and he shuddered at the pleasure. “Now, please…”
He should have felt victorious, but instead, he felt like a bastard. Furious at himself, at her, at the entire world, he broke loose, hammered into her, and the result was electric. A shout tore from his throat, and he blew apart into a million pieces. Sin joined him, the effect of his seed splashing inside her instantaneous and magnificent. She shattered, her body clenching, her core milking him so hard he came again.
When it was over, when his senses came back online, he realized that beneath him, she’d stiffened. He inhaled, needing to know where her emotions were, and yeah, mingled with the heady scent of sex was an acrid note of anger.
Well, you wanted her to feel. Said you’d make it happen. Promised it would happen.
For the first time in his life, he wished he’d broken a promise.
“You son of a bitch,” Sin rasped.
“Yes, I’m a son of a bitch for making you come.”
“That’s not what I’m talking about, and you know it.” She felt naked—well, more than physically, anyway. He’d somehow stripped away some of her emotional shielding, leaving an exposed gash.
Con lifted his head, and she saw something sad in his gaze before he rested his forehead against hers, eyes closed. “Tell me.”
He didn’t have to say anything else. She knew what he wanted. She trembled, and he simply held her, breaking her down with the force of his will and the strength of his embrace. “They… leave me.”
His eyes popped open. “Who leaves you?”
“Everyone,” she whispered. “If I care about them, or if I want them to care about me, they can’t. They leave me.” God, she couldn’t believe she was spilling her guts like that. The emotional laceration he’d made was bleeding out, a steady trickle of words she couldn’t stop.
Smoothly, he rolled them to their sides and his hand stroked her back, coaxing more out of her. “You have Lore.”
“He left me, too.”
“Lore? What happened?” He tucked her face into his chest, the best thing he could have done, because she couldn’t talk while looking at him. When she said nothing, because she couldn’t find the words, he prompted her with a light caress over the base of her throat. “Start with something easy. Like when you were a child.”
She nearly laughed, because that hadn’t been easy at all.
“Come on.” His voice was gruff, commanding, but somehow encouraging. “Tell me about your parents.”
“Oh, that’s a good one.” Sin focused on his sharply defined pecs as she spoke. “My mom was human. And batshit crazy. She fucked a demon she thought she’d summoned, and when she learned she was pregnant, she tried to abort. She couldn’t, and she ended up giving birth to me and Lore.”
“She knew you were demons?”
“Yeah. She seriously believed she’d screwed Satan. Everyone thought she was insane. So after she tried to kill us by abandoning us in the snow as newborns, my grandparents adopted us, named us Sinead and Loren, and locked her up in an asylum.”
“Did you grow up thinking you were human?”
“Yeah.” Sometimes, when the doctors thought her mother’s treatments were working and she was getting better, they’d let Lore and Sin visit. But the visits always turned ugly. “The only time we questioned ourselves was when we got to see our mother, and when no one was around, she’d tell us she wished we were dead. That we were the spawn of the devil.”
Con’s hand froze on her back, and he swore. “That must have hurt.”
She shrugged, but yeah, it had hurt. Lore had handled it pretty well, but Sin would cry for days after the visits. “My grandparents helped us through it.”
“Your grandparents sound like they were good people.”
“They were.” When she tried hard enough, Sin could still smell her grandma’s homemade cookies. Could remember the hugs, the bedtime stories. The secret laughs her grandparents would sometimes share. They’d loved each other so much. They’d never had a lot of money, but the hard times only brought them closer.
“And then my mom escaped from the hospital. Lore and I were eighteen, two days from our nineteenth birthdays and still living with our grandparents when she broke in
and killed them. The only reason she didn’t kill us, too, was that I rolled over just as she was trying to stab me in the heart. The knife went into my shoulder. I screamed, and Lore came from his bedroom to tackle her.”
Con pressed a kiss into her hair, and it was so tender, so intimate, that she sucked in a harsh breath. Con seemed to realize what he’d done, his big body going taut, as if he couldn’t believe his own action. “I’m sorry,” he said roughly, but whether he was sorry about kissing her like that or about her past, she didn’t know.
Either way, it made her uncomfortable. And maybe a little… warm.
“’S’okay. No big.” But her bravado was false, and she wondered if he knew that. The truth was that, at the time, she’d been devastated beyond consolation. She’d gone into some sort of shock that lasted for weeks. If not for Lore forcing her to eat, to live, she might have died. “Lore took care of me. We stayed in the house for a little over a year, and then we found out that everything our mom had said about us was true.”
She’d never forget that night. It was a full moon. Foggy. Creepy. Her right arm had started to burn, and she’d watched in horror as red welts boiled up in her skin. Lore had come home from his job at a factory, and he’d stumbled into the house, his face wrenched in pain, his arm burning like hers.
“Some of the memories are fuzzy.” She traced Con’s ribs with her fingers, needing to put her hands to work because she couldn’t reach her dagger, which she liked to flip out of nervous habit. “But some are crystal clear. We developed our dermoires, and a desperate… need. Lore had it the worst. He fought what was happening to him, and he went into this wild rage.” She shuddered, remembering how his skin had turned red, shot through with black, bulging veins. His eyes, glowing crimson fire, had targeted her for death. “I guess purebred Sems go kind of crazy during their first maturation cycle, and they need lots of sex to get through it. Lore… it was different for him.” At least, it was different while he was inside the house. After he left, she could only guess at what he’d done. “He tore the house apart. I think I only survived because I played dead. I left the house after he did, but I got home before him. It was a couple of days, I think. When he came back…” She took a deep, ragged breath.
“Where have you been?”
“I don’t know. Everywhere. Nowhere.” He looked around the kitchen. “I did this?”
She nodded.
“Sinead, I’m sorry.” He put his face in his hands. “I… killed and… I did terrible things.”
“So did I,” she whispered. Two days spent in Boston’s Irish Slums had left her shaken.
His head came up, and he reached for her. She flinched away from him, not wanting him to touch her filth, but he misunderstood, and his face fell. “I’m so sorry…”
“I—I need to—” She couldn’t finish. She just wanted to climb into bed and pray that when she woke up, this would all have been a nightmare.
She’d gone to bed, and when she got up the next morning, Lore was gone. The note on the table said, “I can’t risk hurting you. I love you.”
“He packed a bag and left. I didn’t see him again for more than three-quarters of a century.”
“Seventy-five years? Jesus. What happened to you?” When she didn’t answer, because her throat had clogged up, Con lifted her face to his and brushed his lips over hers, devastating her and making the lump in her throat even bigger. “You can tell me. Please, Sin.”
She had to swallow several times before her voice would work. Finally, she tucked her face against him and said, “I… told you I left the house for a couple of days right after our weird change, right after Lore hurt me.”
Con stiffened. “He didn’t—”
“No… God, no. He was enraged, insane, but there was nothing sexual.” As Con relaxed, she continued. “Afterward, I needed something, but I didn’t know what.” She clung to Con as if she were drowning. “I was a virgin. I hadn’t felt arousal before. Not like that, anyway. And sex wasn’t something my grandparents ever discussed. All I knew was that, inside, I was on fire. I was cramping and aching, and right away, I was drawn to every man I saw.”
She closed her eyes, hating to go back to the worst time of her life. “I was terrified. I ended up in one of Boston’s Irish slums…” She’d been feverish, in pain. She’d grabbed the hands of several men, begging them for something she didn’t even know how to put into words. She’d been spared the physical transformation Lore had suffered, but no doubt she’d seemed like a crazy person, and one man had struck her hard enough to make her nose bleed. Another had been seduced by the pheromones she’d been putting out, but when he’d tried to take her into an alley, a woman, presumably his wife, had caught them, and Sin had been forced to flee.
She’d finally made it into the seediest part of the slums, which smelled of slaughterhouses and factory smoke, and two young thugs had whisked her behind a corner store and given her what she’d needed.
She’d cried for hours, huddled behind some boxes, confused, afraid, and physically sated but mentally tormented.
“Gods,” Con whispered, and she realized she’d spoken aloud. “That was your introduction to sex?”
“Oh, it wasn’t all bad,” she said, unable to keep the sarcasm out of her voice. “Imagine my shock when they climaxed… and I did, too.” A hot tear squeezed from her eye. She was disgusting. A horrible creature who got off no matter who—or what—fucked her or how much they hurt her.
“You can’t fight your nature, Sin. You are what you are.”
“So there’s nothing about yourself that you hate?”
“Yeah,” he ground out. “Yeah, there is. What happened after that? Did you search for your own kind? Or try to?”
“I didn’t know what my kind was, and I never got the chance to find out.” She wiggled her toes against his, such a curiously intimate, random thing to do. Mainly because she’d never, not once, remained in bed with a man like this. Was rubbing toes something normal lovers did? “After Lore left for good that morning, I felt dirty and disgusting, not worthy of staying in my grandparents’ house any longer. I wandered around the city, living like a stray dog. You know, sleeping under bridges and doing tricks for scraps of food.”
She hesitated, measuring his reaction, but all he did was rub her back in soothing circles. Relaxing a little, she continued.
“One day, a man approached me. He was well dressed, spoke with a European accent, and he said he could take care of me. I was starving and desperate, and I went with him. Turned out he was a demon. A slaver. I never even knew what species he was—he was ter’taceo, so he never looked anything but human.” She resumed skimming her fingers over Con’s ribs, counting them idly. “He was nice at first, got me to trust him. And then he started using me. Once we learned the extent of my gift, and of my need for sex, I became his prize assassin.”
Again, she waited for a reaction, but none came.
“He dealt with a lot of demons, and I saved up enough money to pay one of them to do this.” She rubbed her hand over the tattoo on the back of her neck. “It’s enchanted. The demon imbued it with magic to ease my need for sex.”
Con trailed a finger over the pattern, and pleasant tingles followed its path. “I’m sorry it didn’t work.”
She frowned. “It did work. You should have seen me before.”
A mild curse came out on a long exhale, and Con’s touch grew more tender. “What happened next?”
“I was with him for thirty years, and then he sold me to someone else after I tried to escape one too many times. My new master was such a douche. He totally got off on locking me up and denying me sex.”
This time, Con’s curse was loud and nasty. “Why?”
Her stomach churned at the memories, at the helplessness and humiliation. “Punishment. Fun. I don’t know. He’d wait until I was writhing on the floor, begging for relief.” She laughed bitterly. “Thing was, I didn’t care if relief came in the form of sex or a bullet.”
&nb
sp; But what that experience had taught her was that she would never again be at anyone’s mercy when it came to sex. Now that she was free, she would never be owned, especially not by someone who would be the sole provider of the very thing she needed to survive. No one would ever have that much control over her again.
“Where is he?” Frost could have formed on Con’s words. “I’ll tear out his spinal cord and strangle him with it.”
“Aw, that’s sweet.” She snuggled up to him, something she’d never done with anyone, but now wasn’t the time to think too hard on that. “But having him offed was the first thing I did when I took over the assassin den.” She’d paid Lycus well for that job.
Slowly, the tension drained out of Con’s muscles, and he let out a long, shuddering breath. “How did you end up there?”
“The asshole sold me to Detharu—the assassin master I took over for after Idess killed him.”
“If Idess made the kill, why isn’t she in charge of the assassin den?”
Sin squirmed a little before she caught it and forced herself to stillness. “Idess wasn’t cut out for the job, so I volunteered.”
“But did you want it?”
She wiggled her fingers, feeling the weight of the ring. Felt heavier than usual. “It’s a great gig for someone like me.”
She really hadn’t answered the question, but Con didn’t call her on it. “So how did you meet up with Lore again?”
“He joined up with Deth twenty years later. And it was my fault.” She’d gotten herself into some serious trouble with Deth and had been desperate enough to seek Lore out. Bitterness had built up over the years, and in a lot of ways, she’d hoped he’d turn her down, just to give her another reason to hate him for leaving her.
But he’d been willing to do anything to make his abandonment up to her, and he’d agreed to help find a way out of her contract with Deth. Unfortunately, there hadn’t been a way, and he’d signed on as an assassin in order to save her life.