Page 5 of Cursebound
It’s easier when I’m alone, when my mark and I are focused on each other. For the gimmick to work, I need Heather to be looking into my eyes, not at an alpha male vampire with the world’s best ass.
I shoot him a pointed look, and he nods, standing gracefully to his feet and retreating into the shadows. Of course, he could have done this himself. With his age and strength, his charms would be off-the-charts effective on a young, inexperienced human like Heather. But I don’t want to be beholden to him in any way, shape, or form. I don’t know him, and I certainly don’t trust him. After tonight, I’m not so sure I trust myself.
“Heather, honey, listen to me,” I say once I have her attention. “You had a bit too much to drink and you fell over. And while you were down, it looks like you might have been bitten by a stray dog, maybe a rat, but there’s no harm done. Everything is going to be all right. You’re going to wake up at home, and you won’t remember what happened. Only that you had a great night out with your friends and there was a bit of a problem on the way home. No need to worry your parents with this, is there?”
“No,” she says in a shaky voice. “Not if everything’s all right. Is everything all right?”
“It is,” I reply firmly, stroking back her hair. “I promise. I won’t let anything bad happen. Everything is fine.”
But as I help her up, hyperaware of the vampire lurking behind me, I wonder about that. Is everything fine?
I am Vecchissime; he is vampire. I should not, by any natural laws, be attracted to him. Yet there’s no denying it—I wanted him more than I’ve ever wanted a man in my whole messed-up life. When he held me there, breathless and bewildered, arm pinned and pussy throbbing, I felt something deeper than I’ve ever experienced. It wasn’t merely lust; it was the knowledge that I had met my match. That he could kill me or keep me safe. Protect me or punish me. I’ve never been the kind of girl to dream of a man’s protection, but part of me now yearns for it.
I get Heather up onto shaky Bambi legs. I am so very tired. The weariness is bone deep. What would it be like to rest? To lie in his arms and know that no harm could come to me?
It would be a mistake, I tell myself, glaring at him as he approaches. A huge mistake.
CHAPTER 3
LUCA
What the actual fuck just happened?
She is sitting in the bar waiting for me, and I am actually considering going in there and having a conversation with her. Through the steamed-up window of the late-night dive, I watch her and imagine dragging her into the nearest alleyway to fuck her. Imagine sucking her sweet blood from her neck as I sink my fangs and cock into her.
She is the goddamn Capelli malocchio. She’s my target, my mark. My victim. Don Vincenzo ordered me halfway across the world to isolate her, and this mission had two possible outcomes—kill or kidnap.
“I don’t mind which, figlio mio,” he drawled from his ridiculous carved-stone throne while a skinny blood addict knelt naked on all fours, sucking him off as she got fucked in the ass by Vincenzo’s human servant, Carlos.
The Don is so used to the alleged pleasures of his decaying flesh that he didn’t stop talking to me when he shot his load in the addict’s mouth. There was a brief pause, a shudder of his features, so quick you’d miss it if you blinked, then back to business.
He waved his hand at Carlos, dismissing them both, and the addict yelped as she was dragged away by her greasy hair, Carlos’s dick still inside her.
Knowing him, he kept fucking her until he was good and done, then made her beg for the blood hit she expected as payment. Like most addicts, blood seekers will do anything for their next high.
“It would help, Boss, if I had more of an idea what was going on,” I said. “Is it a message job, or do I need to keep it clean?”
He stared at me while he tucked his shriveled gray penis back inside his pants, as though daring me to comment. Daring me to show any sign of the disgust that flared inside me.
Vincenzo is over six hundred years old, and it’s a point of pride for him that he doesn’t mind looking it. Me, I think the evil inside him is spilling to the outside, and there’s not a damn thing he can do about it.
“It is not your position to know the why, Luca,” he said, silencing any argument I might have had with the swoop of one long, gnarled fingernail. “Only that she is a loose piece on the game board. There are things occurring that you don’t know about, that you don’t need to know about. Balances are changing. Allegiances shifting. This little malocchio is in the middle of it all, and someone is using her, pulling her strings. She matters to someone who matters to me. So kill her, bring her here, whatever you choose, but neutralize her. You understand me?”
No, I didn’t understand him, and I still don’t. It makes no fucking sense. Why does he want her? What else is going on? He won’t tell me—he enjoys messing with me too much. For a man so powerful, he can be a petty fuck.
Petty or not, Vincenzo is still the head of the Firenze Cosca. Still the most ancient and strongest of the Old World families. And still the creature who dictates the rules of my whole life, no matter how high I rise within the organization. I don’t have a choice. My life was bound to his before I was born, and his control over me means he can stop my heart with a single thought. So yeah, I don’t have a choice. But if I did…
I’d pull his fucking head off his bony shoulders and kick it into hell, that’s what I’d do. I’d set his corpse on fire, then piss on the smoldering ashes.
He’s been off the rails for decades now, but things have gotten worse recently. Sophia, Vincenzo’s adopted daughter and the alpha bitch in the whole administration, was sent to Toronto by Vincenzo himself, leaving him free of the one voice who ever stood up to him. He also banished his council to New Jersey, and I’ve seen more new faces at court in the last four weeks than I have in ten years.
Much like the human Mafia, organizations like ours have survived so long and been so successful because of structure, tradition, and discipline. There’s always a boss. But he should be a boss with a brain. A boss who listens to his people.
Vincenzo stopped listening a long time ago, and these days, the whole court is full of blood addicts, hangers-on, wannabes, scumbags of various different ilk. And us: his capos, his enforcers, his soldiers. His alleged family—a fucking incestuous, competitive, dysfunctional family, but a family all the same.
I don’t know what’s going on or why Vincenzo is more off the rails than usual, but my job is to do as I’m told. Whatever the boss wants. I never used to question that, but here I am. Made of questions. Standing in the rain outside some shithole bar in England, dialing my second-in-command.
“Hey, Boss.” Matteo’s gravelly voice comes down the line. It’s about ten p.m. in Manhattan, and his day will be well in motion.