I toss the corpse, crawl into a small pool of spilled blood, and start to suck it up from the ground.
Strong arms come around me, and I’m ripped away. I scream, thrashing about.
I want to eat. I want to make things bleed and feed this voracious hunger that tears through me.
“No!No!Let me go!” I’m wild. Animalistic. Lucian’s stopping meagain. The cruelty of him. He’d rather see me starve than live.
“You need to listen to me, Monty,” he growls in my ear. “You need to calm down.”
“Fuck you!” My feet kick the air as he lifts me a foot off the ground. “Put me down!”
“You want down? Is that it? Fucking fine.” He throws me down to the ground. The back of my head slams against the floor, my vision darkening for a second and the fight leaving me. Then his weight comes over me, pinning me there with his body.
“How’s this for down? Hard enough? Real enough? I know how you’re feeling, and it’ll pass, I promise.”
Promise what?
Torture?
I need to feed. I need all the blood in the world. I need flesh ripped open, hot blood gushing. And he thinks he can stop me?
With a growl, I try to rise up, but he simply slams me back down.
Lucian’s an elegant savage, and right now I despise him down to my core. Into the parts of me that are dying.
He grabs my face, fingers digging into my cheeks to hold me there, and makes me look at him. I don’t know how or why, but I’m compelled to, even though looking at him is the last thing I want to do.
Fuck, I hate him.
“Andrew,” he says, not breaking eye contact with me, “get this place cleaned up.”
The male vampire hovering nearby nods.
This place? What place?
Where am I?
I glance around—at least as well as I can with Lucian’s hands still on me—and I see the rusty metal beams and half-caved-in roof of a warehouse.
How did I get here?
Lucian’s fingers dig deeper, and there’s a warning in his tone. “Monty.”
A woman with vibrant red hair and ruby painted lips steps into view, hovering close to Lucian’s shoulder. Her name springs from my fuzzy memory. Vittoria. That’s who she is. Vittoria, Lucian’s second in command. “Be careful, Lucian, that one had teeth before you turned her. She’s going to be a monster.”
“Not if I can help it,” Lucian says.
Turned me?
Wait, what?
“Leave us, Vittoria,” he orders. “I’ll handle her.”
With a grunt, she saunters out as Andrew and some others start to clean up the bodies and the blood from the place.
I can see and hear and smell everything, like the place is lit up bright and filled with microphones. Like all the scents are dialed up past eleven.
“Monty.”
