She was looking up into tawny brown eyes. Dark brown hair was carelessly pulled back from his strong-featured face. He was a big man, towering over her like a concerned oak. If she put her slim hand on his jaw, she expected it would look like a child’s in comparison. When he put his hands on her head, cupping her ears, her jaw, it emphasized his size.
Her lashes brushed her cheeks as she looked downward again. The hazy sun painted on her abdomen now shone on a green meadow dotted with white flowers, all of it smeared and dreamlike, like an Impressionist painting. The man with the ring tugged the sheet down as he decorated her mons, the tops of her thighs, expanding the meadow over the terrain of her naked body.
Even in this state her body was trained to respond to a vampire’s touch. An unbidden tear rolled out her right eye, sliding along her temple. The Scot caught it on his thumb, made another reassuring noise. He bent, brushed his lips across her strapped-down forehead. It told her he was this vampire’s servant, for no vampire would ever act with such tender sentiment, especially not in front of Lord Brian. But he didn’t seem like any servant she knew. Stephen was obviously still playing with her mind, her own broken dreams weaving among his vicissitudes like creeper vines in a crumbling castle wall.
“Alanna, tell me what you feel.”
She never refused a vampire’s command, but Lord Brian asked her a question she’d never been asked. She couldn’t remember when she’d stopped thinking about it, or if she’d ever thought about it at all. Service was above ego, above inpidual need and want. There were only the Master’s feelings and needs. Yet she’d spent the past . . . she really didn’t know how long it had been anymore . . . resisting Stephen’s screaming command for her to die, to take her own life. Because Lord Belizar had told her no, Lord Brian had told her no. She refused to be a total failure. Perhaps she did have a will of her own, which meant she’d never been as good a servant as she’d thought.
“Alanna. Tell him how you feel.” The painter was giving her the command now. He pressed down on the wet paint, his thumb making slow, easy passes over her pubic bone, charging the nerves at the tops of her thighs. He gave her the command as if she belonged to him personally. Did he understand that had been the biggest loss to her? For the first time in so many years, she didn’t belong to someone. Cut out of the circle, no longer a part of anything.
“Do I need to tell you twice?”
“No, Master.” When the unplanned response rasped from her lips, the two sets of fingers stilled. Yes, she’d only called Stephen that, but it felt right. Maybe more right than it had with him, ever. That also didn’t make sense, but her mind and soul were broken. Sanity and logic were beyond her grasp.
She was too tired to dissect anything. She didn’t spend much time on such things even on a good day, and this was certainly not a good day.
“I feel . . .” Searching the scarred battlefield of her mind and soul, she latched on to the word that meant the end of her usefulness.
“Abandoned. He’s gone.”
Lord Brian had at last found a chemical combination that blocked the nightmares, but it also blocked Stephen’s access to her. She didn’t understand why they’d bothered to keep her alive after that. She’d proven too weak to resist his dismemberment of her soul, the scrambling of her mind. As long as she was taking those injections, they couldn’t use her to pinpoint his location.
However, during the weeks of her illness and months of recuperation, remarkable changes had occurred. The Vampire Council was now under new leadership. Lady Lyssa, last of the vampire royals, had staged a coup and knocked Lord Belizar from his position as head of the Council. She’d killed the only other made vampire on the Council, Lady Barbra, and installed Lady Daniela from the Australian territories to take her place.
Soon after Alanna had been moved to a regular bed to be fed and assigned a daily exercise regimen to recover atrophied muscle, Lady Lyssa had visited her. Alanna had struggled to leave the bed, go to her knees, but the vampire queen had forbidden it.
“You will preserve your strength.” Those cool jade eyes assessed her state, kept her pinned in place. “I command you to regain your health. I will determine what to do with you shortly.”