Page 8 of The Midnight Order (The Thorngray Vampires Duet #1)

Corvin

Everyone else filtered out of the room, allowing me the space to work.

I’m always first.

“Please,” she pleads, “tell me what the hell is going on.”

“We already have,” I tell her, my finger sliding up and down the iPad’s screen of tests I’ve yet to complete.

Her IV is in, and her fluid bag is almost empty. All I need to do is draw from it and get the vials I need.

Her haunting eyes take in my mask more so than any other aspect of me.

“Why are you stuck in a mask?” she asks, and my jaw bulges as I fight back angry words.

“I told you; we’re cursed.”

“Why are you cursed?”

I don’t dignify her question with an answer as I pull vials from the drawer and label them with the associated test I want to run on each, adding a new vial and naming it vampiric lineage before I turn back and lay out the supplies I need beside her.

“What are you going to do to test me? You’re going to take my blood?”

I feel the question doesn’t warrant an answer, as she can clearly see me beginning to do the very thing she’s asked, so I remain silent.

“Please, don’t hurt me.”

This stops me, the syringe hovering over the port as I look up at her. “We’ll never hurt you. Even if you’re not the key, you will leave here unharmed.”

She swallows, but gives me a slight nod.

Everyone has survival instincts, and it seems this woman’s are as sharp as they come as she stares up at the ceiling and away from the needle.

I fill each vial before placing it in a small basket to take with me to the lab.

Before I reach the door, I turn back and look at her.

A tear leaks out of her eye and over her cheek, and I can’t say what comes over me as I watch it trek over the small hairs on her face, parting them like the wind would a branch of leaves. I’m star-struck by her presence.

“I will be back when testing is complete,” I tell her, turning back and opening the door.

“And then I’ll be released?” she asks me.

Before I leave her in the hospital room’s silence, I say, “You’ll be tested by each one of us. Only then will you be free to go.”

“What does that mean?!” she sobs, but the door slams behind me, shutting off her sadness and worry from the world and my ears.

When Asher strides into my lab, freshly showered and in nothing but sweatpants, I’m hours deep into analyzing her blood.

“How goes it, Doc?” he teases, sidling up behind me and rubbing his hands over my sides.

I hiss at the feel, needing the contact more than I realized. “Please, I’m working.”

“You’re always working,” he whines, running his nose the length of my throat as he nips my ear lobe. “If I didn’t come into this lab and fuck you, I’d never get to touch you.”

“Ash,” I whisper, losing the battle waged between the work before me and his touch that’s sliding down my abdomen.

“Corvin,” he whispers, and his breath fanned against my ear, nearly does me in.

“We have to focus. We’re testing a woman. Now is not the time for?—”

His hand grips my erection through my scrub pants, tugging a few times as he chuckles at my silence.

“Now isn’t the time for what? What was it you were going to say?”

I turn in his arms, finding his lips with mine as he unties my scrub pants and slides them down my hips.

My aching length springs free, and his hand strokes it, slowly at first, and then fevered when I’m pleading with moans in between kisses for more.

“Asher,” I breathe as he finally breaks away from my lips and drops to his knees.

With a devious look upward, he slides me into his mouth, and I lose myself, my hands flying into his hair, gripping for purchase.

He moans as if my cock is the flavor of everything he craves, and I moan louder.

“Oh fuck,” I lament when he adds a hand, stroking me as he sucks me.

My eyes are peppered with stars as my body burns with the fire he’s creating.

Our bond runs deep, and he moans as pleasure slinks through me and subsequently, through him, too.

I shove him off me, and before I know it, I’m on my back on the exam table, scrub bottoms gone, his dick buried deep in my ass as he strokes me.

Our kiss is fevered as we race toward the one thing that constantly reminds us that even without the key, we still have one another.

The other two weren’t so lucky in all this, especially when it was our fault that this happened to the four of us.

Something he and I have lived with for decades.

At first, I pulled away from him, knowing it was wrong of us to have this connection when we took so much from the other two.

Then, I couldn’t resist any longer.

He’s the other half of my soul, and I’ll never be able to be rid of him.

“You always feel so good, my love,” he grunts, and I can’t help it when my fangs descend with a hiss that splits out of me.

His thrusts are shallow as he nips my lip, tasting my blood as he claims me with each drive.

“Please,” I beg, not knowing what I’m truly pleading for.

I’m hungry, but for what?

Blood?

To come?

To be free?

All of it, I presume.

I’ll always long for each one.

“God,” he groans, pressing deeper inside me as I lose the battle with one craving and sink my fangs into his neck, feeling the very moment his vein gives way and spills into my mouth like a river of metallic liquid flooding a bank.

Blood sharing between vampires is usually forbidden because of how high it takes us; how delirious it can make us. In the golden age of vampires, blood sharing caused war and wiped entire covens off the map.

Once you start, it’s difficult to stop.

Another vampire’s blood, especially your mate’s blood, tastes like the most euphoric thing.

Although I’ve had plenty of practice, I sometimes overdo it.

“Drink me down. Good boy,” Asher hisses, and I feel the moment my cock swells between us as I come undone, breaking my lips from his throat as blood squirts out of it at the loss of my fangs, keeping it closed.

“That’s it, take me deeper. Fuck…” Ash grunts, pressing inside me with a last thrust as he comes and shudders.

“Come here,” I whisper, pulling him back down to me as I lick over his neck, closing the wound.

He shivers before pulling back mere inches to look down at me.

“I needed that,” I tell him, knowing he’ll feel bad for the amount of cleaning I’ll have to do because of the blood splattered everywhere in the lab.

“I know you did. I’ve been in here for a while, watching you.”

“This one’s different,” I tell him.

His eyes look sad as he searches my face. “Is she? I don’t think we should get our hopes up.”

“I don’t want to get your hopes up, but I truly feel like she’s different.”

“Different enough to be the key?”

I shake my head, grappling for what words to give him. Asher is a loose cannon on his best day, and giving him false hope is the most ignorant thing I could do, but if I truly believe her to be so…

“I don’t know yet,” I answer, lying to keep him in check.

When he pulls out of me, we both hiss.

Standing, we share a smile as we both clean off and look around the room.

“I know you have to get back to work, but don’t stay in here all night. Come to bed soon, yeah?” he whispers, hovering close to my face as I close my eyes and let the feel of our centuries-old love wash over me.

“I will, love.”

Our lips meld together in a kiss that could get too heated if we drag it out any further.

He pulls back the moment I’m about to toss him back down on the exam table with a grin on his face.

“I’ll see you soon.”

“Soon,” I coo.

It takes me a while to clean the lab and get back to work, and all the while, I’m thinking of Asher. Too much to even focus.

I close the lab down for the night around two a.m., only stopping in the hospital room on the other side to check on the human girl for a minute before heading to bed, where I know Asher is waiting.

She eyes me as I walk in with glass of water with a straw, holding it to her lips.

We’ll need to feed her tomorrow. Humans are fickle little creatures who require a lot of upkeep.

It’s why we’ve always hoped the townsfolk we turned or past vampires that wandered through the city would be the key to undoing the curse.

She sips the water as I sit on a small stool on wheels beside her, looking over every facet of her beauty.

“Thank you,” she says, clearing her throat as she looks back up at the ceiling.

“You’re welcome. Are you comfortable?”

She shakes her head, a look of disbelief coloring her features as she turns her glare back on me. “I’m tied to a table. What do you think?”

“Right,” I mutter. “We have to take precautions. If I unbind you, you’ll run.”

I’ve witnessed her speed, too. She’s fast for a human.

I felt drawn to the window one day, only to find a small woman looking up at Thorngray from the gravel road in front of it.

She didn’t see me, but I saw her.

“Yes, I would. It’s a normal response as a hostage.”

I notice a redness in her inner eye that prompts my training as a doctor to take hold. I roll my stool toward her, grasping her face in both hands as I stare into her eyes, examining them both.

“Did you have this red splotch before we took you?” I ask her.

I notice her breathing has changed, but I presume it’s fear causing the shift, and I ignore it.

“What splotch?”

Turning, I grab a metal tray and hold it up in front of her.

She turns her eye to look into it. “No. That wasn’t there before you assholes took me.”

I fight a grin, taking back the tray and placing it on the counter.

“Has anyone else been in here? Any of the others?”

She shrugs. “I fell asleep for a while. I only woke again right before you came in.”

The splotch could be anything, and it’ll likely be gone in a couple of days, but it has me curious how it got there.

I don’t know why I’m so preoccupied with it.

“Well, try to get some rest.”

I stand and flick the lights back off.

“Can I use the restroom?” she calls through the dark room, and I swallow as I weigh the options of letting her loose.

The others just defecated on themselves, and we’d clean it up. Never have we treated one of them properly, but never has one of them asked for it, either.

“You’ll need to be quick, and it would be in your best interest not to try anything. I’m much quicker and stronger than you,” I tell her as I unbind each of her limbs.

“Vampires, right…” she murmurs as if she still doesn’t believe what we are for a second.

When I open the door to the bathroom in the hall for her, she ducks under my arm and takes off in a loud run, crashing through the hall and down the stairs loudly enough to wake the dead buried on the property.

“Oh, for fuck’s sake,” I say as Jasper steps into the hall and eyes me as I sprint past.