Page 36 of Ruthlessly Mated (Shared Mates #2)

C onroy

The sound of the cell being unlocked is slight, but impossible to ignore when you sleep with an ear pricked.

I turn over, and to my absolute surprise, I see Tailor standing there. For a moment, I am almost certain I am losing my mind, either still asleep, or seeing a ghost, but then he steps inside and lifts his voice just slightly above a whisper.

“Are the two of you coming?”

“Tailor! You’re dead?”

“Not that I noticed. I thought you were dead, though. Vamp said you were.”

The vampire lied. Of course he lied. He is entirely untrustworthy. He is an evil, manipulative beast. Kita picked up the lying part. I have to hope that the rest did not rub off on her.

He might not be dead, but there is blood all over Tailor’s chest. He’s wearing tattered pants that must have belonged to some other unfortunate dungeon inhabitant at some point in the past. He has been hurt. He has been hurt terribly.

“What happened to you after we were picked up?”

“He took me into a room and he told me you were dead. Then he beat the shit out of me and told me I wouldn’t get to breed Kita because he didn’t like my genes. Then he left. Then I picked the lock, because it’s as old as he is, and I came to find Kita.”

“Is he really this inept?”

“He’s not stupid. He’s arrogant. Which makes him a little stupid. We need to get out of here,” Kita whispers, having woken up beside me. “Follow me. I know this place like the back of my hand. Or, like I would know the back of my hand if it was a prison from which I had escaped many times.”

Escaping the vampire’s lair is relatively easy. Kita is right. He is arrogant, and that makes him make the same mistake we did. He assumes he’s got us trapped even though we’re already escaping.

This feels a little too easy. A little too slick. We head out of the mansion via the servant’s entrance and head around to…

Beep.

Alexander is standing outside on his driveway with a stopwatch in his hand.

“Three hours. A little longer than I imagined,” Alexander says. “You’re going to have to work a lot faster than that to retrieve the relic. I suggest, when you retrieve the relic, you don’t stop to have sex and nap first.”

“What the hell is wrong with you?” Kita curses at him.

“I have been dead for over a thousand years,” he says, as if that is an explanation.

Judging by Kita’s reaction, it is about as close to an explanation as any of us are going to get. He has been dead a long time, and he does things like this to amuse himself. It’s all a sick little test, a fucked-up game.

“Right. Okay. Why did you tell this one that the other one was dead?”

“I wanted to see if he had the mental and emotional fortitude to continue on in the face of death. He did.”

He’s toying with us. He’s a sick eternal creature and he is bored and we are his playthings.

“What are you doing? Why are you doing this? You could be doing anything. Anywhere. You have more money than god. You’ve dragged us all over an ocean, thousands of miles from home,” Kita says.

“This is our home. This is your home. It has been your home for a very long time, until you decided to steal my most precious thing and take it away.”

“Your maker’s heart isn’t your most precious thing.”

“No. You’re right. It’s not,” Alexander says, his tone intense.

There’s a long pause. “Don’t say you’re talking about me,” she says. “Don’t you fucking dare pretend you care, you manipulative fucking…”

The vampire moves faster than any of us ever could, catching her by the throat and holding her aloft.

“Choose your next words very carefully,” he whispers. “Your blood is richer than it has ever been. You are ripe for the consuming.”

I could lunge forward, try to save her physically, but there is no point. The vampire’s strength is legendary. He could rip her into pieces before I could reach him.

Instead of rushing in, I watch. A good predator studies his prey.

The vampire is not human. An obvious conclusion to come to, but the depths of it often remain unplumbed.

The feeling, the sensibilities, the existence, the heart, the soul, they’re all missing.

He can play these little games and seem somewhat person-ish from time to time, but really all he is, is a walking hunger.

He seeks to consume. That is it.

He needs to fill himself with the essence of others.

We have to stop considering him a mortal enemy. We have to treat him like a force of nature with a veneer of consciousness.

He needs to feed. On blood, on fear, on joy—on life.

That is why he is keeping Kita around. I have never encountered anybody as full of life as Kita. She burns with it.

All this chaos, the messing with us, burning the port, it was all about getting him fed. He’s starving for something he can’t make for himself. He finds energy in pain, in chaos, and in the energies of those who are naturally pure.

“Why do you need the heart back so badly?” I distract him with a question.

“It is not that I need it back so much as it should not be out in the world,” Alexander says. “You see, your mate has an unerring instinct for doing things that will lead to chaos.”

“I have noticed.”

He and I smile, for a brief moment united by our mutual attempts to control the uncontrollable.

“It is not actually the heart of my maker,” he says. “I was not made. I was incarnated here, fully formed. I was never born, and I will never die.”

“That is a bold claim.”

He pulls up his shirt, exposing his belly. For a moment, I assume it is some kind of dramatic gesture, but then I realize he is showing me an absence. He has a belly. But no belly button. No umbilical cord ever connected him to a mother.

The slow chill that creeps down my spine at this reveal makes me feel a way I have never felt before.

This is true horror, seeing something so incredibly unnatural, something that does not at all fit within the circle of life.

Alexander is not just a twisted old vampire.

He is the origin of all vampiric hunger; he is a thing, not a person.

“I believe you,” I croak out.

“What you need to understand, wolf of flesh and blood, is that my maker’s heart is not a relic, or a memento, or a well-preserved body part.”

“It’s not?” Kita pipes up with the question.

“No,” Alexander says, with barely contained annoyance. “It is closer to a weapon. It is an item of power.”

“A weapon?” I repeat the word.

“A weapon?” Kita echoes me in turn.

“It is capable of exploding with the force of a thousand suns. That is why it was held in the chamber you stole it from. The chamber was designed to keep it in stasis—alive. But encased in concrete and explosives? The last of the lifeblood will leach out of it. It will die, and when it does, there will be nothing but a crater where the city once stood.”

“And your maker will never incarnate again. Because it is his heart,” Kita says, far too cheerfully not to be deliberately annoying. I do not know what she gets out of tormenting this creature. Maybe it is just the satisfaction of striking back against the tyrant in some small way.

“My maker will never incarnate again because my maker does not exist,” Alexander snarls. “You understand that this is not actually a body part, right? It is a dark object, not something that ever resided in a human body.”

“Then why did you always call it your maker’s heart?” Kita is really pushing for information that cannot possibly matter in any way.

“Because it comes from the same place I came from. It is an entity of pure malevolent darkness, and it is mine to guard, not yours to drive around the countryside like you’re on a roadshow of antiquities!”

Tailor sidles up alongside me. “Do you think any of this is true?” He murmurs the question to me under his breath, but vampire hearing is so good he might as well have saved his time and just screamed it out.

“It might be explosive. No way to know. He lies.”

“I do,” Alexander says. “I lie. But don’t forget, I also kill.”

We appear to be stuck. Alexander is not just playing with us, he is training us like animals.

He is alternately punishing and rewarding us, he is keeping us at his mercy, and when he lets us go, it will be because he thinks we are going to do what he wants.

So why not just give him what he wants now.

“What do you want us to do?”

“I want you to go to the city and retrieve the heart. Then you will give it to me.”

“Okay, well, if you want to get the city open, the first thing you will need to do is back down from the siege. You’re panicking the city folk.”

“I can pull my forces back for a time, or I can send them into the city the next time night falls and have you retrieve the truck containing the heart while my forces feed. They are getting quite hungry.”

“We are on the wrong side of the ocean for all of this,” Kita says, still partially dangling from his grasp because he didn’t make the mistake of putting her all the way down.

“I’ll fly you over.”

“In a plane, or will you get a thousand bats to carry us over the waters?”

“Smart ass brat whelp,” Alexander says. “You will continue to suffer for this.”

I can practically see the energy flowing from her to him. Every time she gives him her cocky little attitude, he seems to gleam brighter. I never thought of being a misbehaved terror as being the equivalent of a battery for a vampire, but here we are.

He puts her down. Carefully. He could simply drop her if he wanted to, but of course he doesn’t. He wants to keep her intact so he can keep enjoying her. I breathe a sigh of relief. Tailor, Damon, and I might be disposable, but she is protected.