few more, then turned and ran. When she was alone and the boy was gone, she turned to face Vlad. He still stood where he had been before.
“I was foolish and lowered my guard.” His expression softened, but barely. “You seem to inspire that in others.” He held out his hand. “Come with me. You will live as a guest in my home. Every need shall be cared for. You shall not be kept in a cage.”
“Do I have a choice, Count?”
He dropped his hand to his side. “No.”
She nodded. She suspected as much. She may not have a choice whether to become the “guest” of the vampire, but she could choose whether she went sobbing and screaming or with her head held high.
She walked up to him and felt his gaze on her every step of her approach. As she drew near, he lifted his hand again. She sighed and slipped hers into his. With a firm pull, he yanked her into his chest and banded an arm around behind her back. His other hand caught her chin and tilted her head back to look up at him. “Do not mistake my kindness for weakness.”
He was furious. She saw it now, seething in his red eyes. The night had not gone the way he had wished it to. He had lost this round of the game and was now trying to make it very clear that the board was still his.
“I never would.” She let her hands curl into the fabric of his coat. “Do not mistake my surrender for submission.”
A dangerous grin flashed across his chiseled features, and she watched in fascinated horror as his eyeteeth grew long, sliding from his jaw like the fangs of a snake. “We shall see about that…”
She did not fight him as he tilted her head away. She did not make a sound as his hand slipped from her chin into her hair, fisting it in his fingers, holding her still. He bent to her neck, and she only gasped as he slid his tongue up along the line of her throat, tender from the previous night.
It was only as his fangs broke into her skin that she made a sound at all. And it was not one of pain that he drew from her. It was a moan of pleasure, and she pressed up against him, searching for more.
She let her eyes drift shut.
18
Another vision. This time, she did not stand in a field of mud and gore. She was standing atop the steeply pitched roof of a tower of a castle. She squeaked in surprise as she saw how very close to the edge she was and flew back from the lip that would send her tumbling down hundreds of feet into the darkness below.
She impacted something firm.
It chuckled.
An arm snaked around her waist, holding her against his chest. She knew who it was without looking. She could feel him there around her. She recognized the evergreen forest before her. She had seen the mountain range before in her mind, images stolen from his memories.
“Vlad?”
“We are sleeping in my home. Your gift is insistent and difficult to avoid.”
“Does it bother you?”
“Hardly.”
He was wearing a long, black, crimson-lined cape. It whipped in the wind around her. It was tattered, ragged, and torn. Holes in the rich fabric revealed the stars and the crimson moon behind it. For all the world it looked like jagged, broken claws tearing angrily at the sky.
He was a monster.
“This is who I am. This is what I am.”
She shivered. He had bitten her again, and everything had gone dark. He had put her under. She had no idea where she was, but she knew it was with him. “You can hear my thoughts now as well?”
“Yes. You are part of me now. I held it at bay yesterday as best I could to keep from alarming you. But here, in this place, I fear it’s inescapable. Your blood beats within my heart.”
Her hand went to her throat, but here in the dream, she had no marks to remind her of what he had done. Only the memories of how it had felt. She felt her face explode in heat as she blushed violently at how wantonly she had responded to the pleasure it had brought her. She knew if he had rolled up her skirts, she wouldn’t have stopped him. She would have let him—
He could hear her thoughts. She shoved them back into a dark