Page 5 of A Love So Deadly (Kissed by Darkness #1)

Chapter

Four

Lucian

“ T hat wasn’t very smart, Lucian.”

I don’t need the soft vicious edged gloat in Vittoria’s words.

Or is it that I don’t want it but need it? I know I went too fucking far.

Now I want to hunt. Wild and free blood. Blood earned is the sweetest. Drinking from the carefully picked farmed blood makes us nothing more than domesticated cats.

I don’t often give in to that hunting urge. I’ve done it enough. I’ve even rampaged and painted my corner of the world in blood before. I know what it’s like. I know that taste. Just like what I now know what one Elliot Montague tastes like.

The difference between me and the less disciplined of our kind is that I know the best way forward. It’s the way to not just create a world where we can survive but thrive in and that means conquering the baser instincts.

As much as we can.

But I needed to know her taste. Since she wouldn’t drink the spiked drink, I had to glamor her and make her drop the glass instead. That allowed me to drink a few fragrant, delicious drops of her blood.

“You turned my office camera on?” I ask, as I pour two drinks and hold one out to her. I’m both annoyed and amused. “Really?”

She sniffs the drink. “Of course I did. You’d do the same with me.”

I have done the same. “I’m your maker.”

“We’re partners.”

“To a point.” I know this argument, so I’m not bothered by it, only intrigued.

She’s been like this a few times over the many years since turning her.

But only when she’s felt threatened. So I say the same thing to her I always do.

“You could leave any time. Others have. Built their own lives, empires…”

Not empires, never that, but in whatever place they go to, they rule it or die. Depending on how stupid they are, or how greedy or reckless.

The one thing Vittoria is not is stupid. The rest? She tempers it.

She could have branched out, been an ally to me in another city. Fuck she could have taken the position of CEO in another part of the country of the local VMR. But Vittoria’s not interested in running any part of the conglomerate. She doesn’t want to be big fish in any small pond.

Vittoria’s still with me for the precise reasons why I turned her, the precise reasons she stayed true to the human version of her.

She wants the power our partnership brings her. She understands we’re better together. And she doesn’t want anyone ousting her.

No fucking little human could ever do that.

I don’t turn humans anymore.

“Are you telling me to go, Lucian?”

I sip my drink. “No. We’ve had lovers before. We’ll have them again. You might even fall in love.”

Vittoria laughs.

“But,” I say, “unless you allow that to oust yourself from my life, we’ll be fine.”

“And you?”

“What about me?” I ask. “I’ve been in love. It has never changed a thing.”

The look she gives me would whither lesser men.

“With us, I mean.” She doesn’t blink as I speak. “But I don’t plan on doing that again.”

“Not even if it doesn’t change a thing?” Vittoria asks.

I go up to her and study her pale, beautiful face.

Her brilliant red hair shines, silky and smooth.

Men and women have literally killed each other to bask in her light.

They’ve offered their lives just to feel the euphoria Vittoria brings.

She likes sex. She likes to rule over her slaves.

And she’s fickle. She’ll turn on them the moment she’s bored, wipe their minds of all but a flicker of her face.

Cruel. Heartless. Utterly Vittoria.

It’s one of the things I adore about her.

It’s the reason we ended up not working as lovers. Not in the long run, not outside of sheer boredom.

We’re both Doms.

I just prefer control, patience, ropes, denial.

She likes her bidding done and chaos in blood and orgasm. She still has her humans. She finds their faults endlessly fascinating and ultimately, endlessly irritating.

“Not even then.”

“So you say, Lucian. But you hired the blonde.”

“I told you I was hiring someone. This only works if humans come and go from here. We remain in the shadows. The humans go into the light. Where they age and they die, and new humans replace them.”

I think about those blonde curls and cornflower blue eyes. The scent of vanilla and cinnamon and lime. It would be easy to dismiss her as another pretty human who’s smart but complacent.

But I don’t do that.

Elliot Montague wants something. I tasted it in her blood. On her skin.

“It’s annoying,” Vittoria quips.

“You want to be in the limelight?” I ask.

“We were once, and no one thought twice.”

She’s right. This new world makes us more careful; we need to be. “The humans have eyes everywhere. They record everything. I prefer freedom of anonymity.”

“You like her.” She drains her drink. “Or are fascinated. You should have drained her dry, not licked her finger.”

“I need an assistant, a human.” I pour us both another drink. It’s a poor substitute for fresh blood, but it will do. “She’s smart?—”

“Smarter and trickier than you think, and you’re already intrigued enough?—”

“Careful,” I say, cutting her off, “or I’ll start thinking you’re jealous.”

“Of what?” Her eyes flash. “I’m letting you know what I saw. She affected you.”

“I’ve been around a woman who’s about to give birth. It’s got everyone’s blood up.”

Suddenly she smiles, and it’s so vicious and cold I know exactly why human men get hard over her. “We could eat her.”

“No,” I say softly, “we can’t. And if anything happens to her, your head will roll. Literally. And then I’ll burn you to ashes.”

Vittoria rolls her eyes at my threat, but I notice she doesn’t approach it again. “We should hunt.”

“We have food in the subbasement.”

“It’s not the same,” she says, going to my desk and flipping open my laptop. Then she points at it. “Make it work.”

I bite down my smile and go over, using my password and thumbprint. “You could learn to use these.”

She hisses low. “I’m hands on.”

“You just don’t want to learn.” But the thing is, she can pull up files. And she does but only when she wants to. That’s the difference. “What’s this?”

“Someone who tried to infiltrate VMR. It’s someone who wanted to get into the other side of the business.”

I look at the screen. “Who does he work for?”

Get into VMR to try and find out secrets and we’ll feed them bullshit for free. Touch the other side…

“No one. Investigative reporter. He’s looking into Vinnie. Came across a visit to VMR that one of Vinnie’s people made.”

I glance at my new hand mirror. It’ll take a bit to restore it, but that new project will have to wait.

“Why did…?” I stop. Because does it really matter? The when and the why don’t. There’s one thing that matters here: someone poking about.

So we need to control that. Our way.

“Maybe we should go hunting tonight after all,” I say.

Vittoria just smiles.

My favorite thing about Tenebris, apart from being one of the most powerful cities in the country is it’s a world where finance, crime, and media crash together. Give New York City the stock market. L.A. Hollywood, Tenebris is special.

It’s big enough to compete with those, and the fact this is where the flagship of VMR is located boosts the power of the place.

Better yet, it’s a place where rain happens more often than not, and falls and winters are long. Summers aren’t too much.

A place like this holds secrets.

But I won’t have news media from somewhere we don’t control being our undoing.

Josh Hutton’s apartment’s easy to find. He’s not home, and we glamor any person we see.

As vampires, humans are easy to find. They always leave scent trails. They try to hide but we can find them, if not by scent, then by the call of blood or the warmth that lights up a space.

The journalist’s place is empty, lacking in all but the faint lingering of his lifeblood.

“Maybe he’s dead,” Vittoria says as she flips through a notebook.

“He isn’t.”

She pauses, looks at me. “Not even you can tell that.”

But I can. At least with some certainty.

I evoke an air of the old world; she embraces this one.

On the outside. Inside, I use whatever tools come with time.

Even in the past, there were down sides to every perk of the times that came along and I made it my business to use them to my advantage, both the good and the bad.

In this day and age, I have no online presence, but we use computers. We have digitized files and the old, dusty sort.

This world studied every molecule and preserves it. But this world isn’t deep. Shiny things and thirty-second-deep dives are in. The humans dissect their musicians and stars. They devour their scandals and worship the altar of shallowness and sound bites.

People like this Hutton are dying breeds clinging stubbornly to life.

As for people like me? The ones who are attracted to the glitter of the light die. I live in plain sight in the dark and shadows. I thrive there. I don’t need to be adored. I never did.

Feared on the other hand…

That could be a downfall. One I discovered had a silver lining in kink and play. In ropes and domination of a different kind.

“I can be reasonably sure. Unless something happened to him on the way home. I looked him up. Now, we need to get to work.”

I scour his computer and remove anything about VMR. He doesn’t know much. But there’s enough to start to link us to Vinnie and Vinnie to his real prize… Anton Baroni, a crime boss I’ve never dealt with.

But it has made this journalist focus on us. On the real power. And he had pretended to be a delivery man who got lost to try to get into the building, and while he didn’t find anything, he clearly, according to his notes, wants to return to VMR.

All because someone who now works for Vinnie was once a bodyguard for a famous girl. One that is being interviewed by one of our talk show hosts soon.

It all falls together. What I see here, what I read on my computer. Vinnie’s man wasn’t even working for Vinnie yet. But he happened to transition a week later from bodyguarding the starlet to body-breaking for Vinnie.

A key scrapes at the lock.

The man steps in. Goodlooking, shaking rain from his coat. It takes a moment too long for him to see us.

When he does, Vittoria has him hand around his throat. Not tight but so he won’t be able to escape.

I stride over as he gasps for air. “You’re going to write new notes, Mr. Hutton. You’re going to remove VMR from all of them,” I say. “We prefer not to be in the limelight.”

I’m close now, mesmerizing him.

“Yes,” he breathes, body relaxing in Vittoria’s hold. His pupils dilate as my command sinks in. “And after that?”

“Dinner,” Vittoria says. “After that, you’ll be dinner.”