Page 28 of The Reveal (Bloodlore #1)

That night, I storm down to the school at sunset, not sure exactly what I think I’m going to prove. What I know—or feel deeply, anyway—is that I have to make it clear to him that I’m not going to be bullied.

Not by douchey minions who try to run me off the road.

Certainly not without comment.

Ariel is finishing up that class of his again—or maybe it’s vampire military training, what do I know—but he makes me wait. He inclines his head and indicates that I should sit down on those benches again, so I do.

Entirely too aware that I’m the only person in the room with a pulse.

I figure everyone else is equally aware. This, by the way, only makes my heart beat faster. Louder.

Like a fucking kettledrum.

“You really have a way with invitations, don’t you,” I throw at him when he finally makes his way over to me, once the grand room is cleared again.

It’s not that I’m not appropriately overawed by him, because I am.

But since he could kill me at any moment and likely will, why go out in a grovel?

I glare at him instead. “First you make it clear you can find me in my home. Then you have your goon squad come for me on the road.”

“I’m sorry I can’t live up to your family’s high standard of gentility,” he replies in that offhandedly scathing way of his.

I don’t miss that this is a roundabout reference to my brother, who hangs over this interaction and this school and me like a dense fog.

One of his perfect brows rises. “But to be clear, I’ll expect you here every night at sundown, Winter. No need for invitations.”

He does not say, Consider this an order. But I hear it all the same.

“And if I decline?” I ask, and I have to push the words out. As if they know better than to show themselves.

But Ariel only laughs.

And I’d love nothing more than to say that I see the error of my ways and keep my hands to myself in the presence of a creature so overwhelming and dangerous, who might not be actively compelling me but certainly isn’t trying all that hard to keep me at arm’s length, either.

A creature who knows where my brother is when I don’t.

But I fail at this. Spectacularly and pretty much immediately.

Because when he finishes laughing, Ariel simply kneels down before me where I sit on the bench, puts his hard hands on my thighs, and bends his head between my legs.

Then bites me, through my clothes—though not through my skin.

I come so hard I think I might have passed out, or at least toppled over, if he wasn’t holding me still.

By the time I manage to find my way back into my own body again, he’s moved on, peeling off the long-sleeve T-shirt I’m wearing and the cargo pants too.

And while I’m still panting and sobbing from that first wild explosion of heat, he settles down between my legs once again.

This time there’s no barrier between his mouth and all that soft heat that was making my pussy ache, and he licks his way in all over again.

Somewhere in the middle of it all, as he works that stern, cruel, gloriously demanding mouth of his over my clit and sucks just a little too hard—so the sensation sears through me, pleasure and near-pain and too much of both—I open my eyes.

I look down the length of my own body, and I can see the dirty, erotic sight of him crouched over me, those muscled shoulders of his working as he moves my body where he wants it. His grip on my ass is sure, holding me open and digging in just enough to make the sensation that much more intense.

I can see the top of his head and the long line of his perfectly shaped back, with hints of that phoenix covering it. I shudder, hard, because I forgot about the phoenix on my own body. The tattoo I really don’t want him to know I have and yet forgot to hide when he stripped off my clothes.

In fact, I actually helped him get me naked.

Ariel looks up, and once again it’s like he knows what I’m thinking, because his smile comes again, slow. Something like wicked. Then he reaches up a hand and places it directly over my tattoo like a scalding-hot brand.

As if he is linking us without saying a word.

I feel that like another bite, and shudder into it.

He bends himself back to his task, and before I tip my head back and surrender to the storm of it all, the sensation, and the mad fire, I look in the mirror.

And see only me.

Writhing on the edge of another gut punch of that same, impossible ecstasy.

But this doesn’t shame me. It makes me come even harder than before, my legs wrapped around his face.

And when I come back to earth, I tell myself that he’s doing that vampire thing again. That I have no choice. That I never have.

Though there’s something in me that knows I’m a liar.

Still, I assure myself that’s the only reason I follow the urging of what feels like another song inside of me as I kneel down before him and finally run my hands up his powerful thighs.

I look up at him and find his severe and beautiful face another kind of chorus, lighting me up while his silver eyes gleam.

I reach in and pull out that enormous cock that I only writhed on once and dedicate the next few hours to learning how to take him in my mouth.

Not an easy task when he is so big. And so ... resolute .

I learn other things too. That he tastes like snow and flame, that he is thick and long and hard like marble.

And something about the heat he causes in me leaves me trembling on the edge of another orgasm as I play with him, learning what he likes, learning how to move, learning how to tilt my head just so .

So I can take even more of him.

Until he finally holds my head between his hands and fucks his way deep into the back of my throat, then pours himself into me with a roar that I’m surprised doesn’t shake the building apart.

I learn something then, too. That his come is also cold, and something like addictive. I gulp down every last drop of him while my pussy reacts like I’m the one getting all that attention, clenching up tight into a lush, hot, rolling orgasm that makes me sob around his cock in my mouth.

I’m still shaking and sobbing a little when he picks me up from where I’m kneeling before him. He carries me over behind the counter, where there is a sofa set back against the wall. And he holds me there for a long time, in what I try to tell myself is nothing but a parody of aftercare.

It’s like I can’t control my own body. It makes me think back to that night with Samuel, that rush in the dark and the fumbling with each other’s clothes, tipping back onto the sofa, and then the great hurry toward what I thought was a perfectly satisfying finish.

But that memory is laughable compared to Ariel.

That’s something else to grieve. Ariel is stripping everything from me. My clothes are the least of it. My self-respect. Even my fondest memories.

All of them gone in that rush of ice and fire.

“Where’s my brother?” I ask him when I can speak again.

He studies me, his silver gaze moving over me with a certain intensity that I can’t quite read. “Come back tomorrow” is all he says. “At sunset.”

He says this like he thinks we’re playing a game. He probably is.

As I leave the school later that night, I beat myself up for succumbing to him and that song that lives inside me now and for failing, yet again, to find out the things I need to know.

The things that are the reasons I’m putting up with this, I tell myself in the truck as I head home. Self-righteously, even.

As if I imagine I can thwart the fucking vampire king.

Besides, an asshole voice inside me pipes up, you would have to stop lusting after him to do that. So.

I clench Augie’s medallion in my fist, careen down the dark roads, and loathe myself.

This becomes a nightly pattern.

Every night for a week.

After turning me inside out, Ariel sends me back home without a word about anything but my expected obedience. Tomorrow, Winter. Sunset.

He controls this, not me. I’m very clear on that. Ariel is very deliberately keeping me off balance. Yet knowing that doesn’t change the experience of trying to pick my way through each evening’s minefield.

I try to tell myself that the sex stuff is simply the price I pay for the bits of conversation we have, that I can ponder this way and that once I’m out of his presence.

I try to tell myself that this will lead me to Augie, who he claimed wasn’t dead, so that’s already more information than I had going into this.

But when I’m home, I find myself less eager to look my grandmother in the eye, and not only because of the things she told me.

Or the cards she gave me, which I don’t want to look at and yet seem to see when I close my eyes.

It makes my heart ache and my head hurt—and I already have enough headaches.

Though, these days, when I wake up with horrific images in my head and that piercing, throbbing pain in my temples, I also have a death goddess’s name on my tongue. Vin?a the terrible. Vin?a the foul.

“Vin?a the fucking bitch,” I mutter to myself while scouring the back garden for zombies, who still don’t venture near. “Vin?a the giant pain in my ass.”

I’ve decided that self-loathing is just another form of grief.

But I also decide that I have to stop avoiding my life during the day if I’m going to keep doing these nightly meetings with Ariel.

For the last few days of September, I work my usual hours at the coffee stand like always—but in less of a daze.

I find myself looking forward to this thing in my life that remains entirely straightforward.

Working coffee and dealing with customers, both the human and monster variety, requires that I think about nothing else, and I like that.

It’s a small daily holiday from all the things I’d rather not think about.

Like my grandmother, who, I am forced to accept, really is the powerful oracle the vampire king told me she was.

I’m still sifting through my feelings on that.

She’s also neither as senile as I thought she was all this time nor as consistently shrewd or with-it as she was that first night I came back from meeting Ariel.

On the one hand, it’s good to know that she wasn’t snowing me completely. She isn’t that much of a liar.

On the other hand, she wasn’t not snowing me, either.

This doesn’t change the fact that I need to take care of her. That I would and will no matter what. It just means that everything feels different.

When I’m at the house, I never can tell which of my tenants I’ll encounter. You’d think that I’d develop a sense of their routines, but I don’t. Savi is as mysterious as ever, with her chanting. Maddox slouches about, seemingly boneless, but I couldn’t tell you what she does with her time.

Briar is a mystery. Sometimes I think she reminds me of someone, though I can’t think who. Other times I entertain myself by imagining that her entire cottage is filled with yarn, and she sits inside it knitting herself an endless array of those beanie hats to cover her hair.

But most of the time I’m home, I think of Augie and vow to myself that next time I’ll make Ariel tell me what he’d done with him. Next time I’ll insist .

Next time I’ll do more than betray my own twin with these things I feel for the monster who knows too much about both of us ... over and over again.