The next day, she met a few more shifters on their little expedition into Anchorage. She enjoyed cutting up with ared panda shifter named Lana, who had a sarcastic streak and a messy bun that bounced with every joke. A lynx named Davien annoyed the bejeebers out of her until Toby, bless his heart, reminded the damned cat that dragons bite annoying fucktards. Okay, he didn’t use those words, butthankfully, the cat backed off after Emmy promised to leave plenty of marks if he truly wanted naked time with her.
It was an odd crowd, people brought together by circumstance, but there was laughter and camaraderie.
But then she arrived home as the sun was setting, and her phone buzzed with a message from Matthias. “Statue Garden in fifteen minutes. Ten if you’ll need more than a few minutes to undress. Don’t shower first.”
No room number this time, and an outdoor setting. No directions, because apparently she was expected to know where the hell the Statue Garden was. She showed the message to Rhea, who gave her a long, wordless look before motioning off to the right. “Go back outside to the driveway and follow the walkway. You can’t miss all the naked statues when you get there. He’ll probably want you in the stone court, in the center. Creepy as fuck, and I’m pretty sure whoever put the obfuscation spell around the garden did so with the intention of making it feel creepy. Just breathe through it. You’ll be fine.” She blew out a breath. “Probably. Matthias can be rough, but if your contract is solid, he can’t hurt you.”
The walkway was light-colored granite flagstones on gravel quartz, but once she was inside the garden, the granite was in dark shades on a bed of black basalt. Yeah. Creepy, indeed.
And as Rhea said, the statues were naked. A man being thrashed by a steel-barbed whip. A woman on hands and knees, mouth stretched grotesquely around the cock choking her throat, eyes opened blaringly wide in frozen,animal terror as five men used her: one buried deep in her ass, one driving into her pussy, two latched onto her nipples, and the fifth forcing himself down her throat while marble tears streaked her carved cheeks forever.
Emmy walked past quickly before her own arousal could grow, and the vampire would think she wanted … what? To be used by five men at once? Her record was four, with three holes filled while she jacked a fourth with her hand.
She rounded a corner and saw a stone vampire with fangs buried in a too-young girl’s thigh, her legs spread so you could see the details of a tight, virginal-looking pussy.
Next up was a naked, chained Aos Sí on her knees, obviously in pain at the touch of the steel. The Fae can’t stand steel, but thankfully, Emmy didn’t have that problem. Silver could be an issue, but gold was fine.
Her boots crunched over the gravel as she walked deeper, each statue worse than the last. Hunger, violence, ecstasy, despair — it felt like a museum of the monstrous.
And in the center, it changed.
A circle of smooth, dark granite marked the court, hemmed by columns that reminded her of ancient Greek ruins, complete with Ionic columns. The stone altar at its heart was rectangular, waist-height, and flanked by braziers that weren’t lit.
Matthias sat on an elaborate throne carved from stone at the outer edge, whittling a length of pale wood, long curls peeling off and falling like paper shavings. His expression was unreadable when he looked up to meet her gaze, foldedthe knife without looking at it, and tossed the wood off to the side.
“Juvenile dragon. What a delicacy Zander has brought to us. And a princess, to boot. Undress while I consider how I want you, now that I’ve seen your beauty and felt your aura.”
Emmy had worn black canvas pants and a salmon-colored hoodie. She sat and pulled her boots off along with the socks, and settled them just outside the structure on the statue base of a woman speared à la Vlad the Impaler. She stripped her pants and panties off all at once, folded them beside her boots, and then pulled her hoodie off and folded it on top of the pants. She hadn’t bothered with a bra.
It was cold enough to make her nipples hard, but she ignored them.
The garden held few plants, mostly wind-stunted evergreens that smelled of resin and cold earth, their twisted limbs reaching like fingers frozen mid-scream. Most stayed low, as if afraid to draw attention in a place meant for suffering. She recognized the juniper scent but couldn’t name the others. Not pine, but in the same family. The scents should’ve felt fresh, but here it just made the place feel colder, as if the garden had been scrubbed raw and left to freeze.
She considered the vampire. Even seated, she could tell he was tall and muscled. His steel-blue eyes were cold and calculating, and his dark blond hair made her wonder where he’d lived when human. It wasn’t hard to see him as a Viking, complete with skulls hanging from his belt. His nose had been broken as a human and hadn’t healed right, but alongwith the high cheekbones and the angular jaw, the look absolutely worked for him. He was wearing navy Patagonia corduroy pants and a charcoal Fjallraven sweater, neither meant for the extreme cold.
“I’ve read your contract,” he said when she turned to him, naked and awaiting further instructions. “No pain simply for the sake of it. You enjoy doling it out rather than receiving it.”
He stood, tall and elegant, and efficiently removed his pants to show he was commando underneath — and was well-endowed. Next came the sweater, every movement refined violence layered over brute strength. This man had been a powerhouse as a human and would be a nightmare with all the raw power she could feel flowing from him. Not as much as Abbott or Kendra, but still scary-powerful.
He didn’t speak again. Just watched her in silence before he finally gestured toward the altar. “On your back.”
She walked barefoot across the granite court and climbed onto the slab, the stone colder than she expected, and her nipples went even harder. She bent her legs up, kept her arms loose at her sides.
His power prickled over her skin when he moved closer, and she sucked air in when cold fingers drifted down her belly, then lower, sliding through the wet heat at her center.
He pulled his fingers free, curved them under her hips, lifted and angled her, spreading her farther, and then his mouth was on her, his cool tongue licking her, savoring her, tracing her folds, circling her clit.
Her thighs trembled and she went liquid inside, heat rising, blood pulsing. She arched her back as the pleasure built, and then screamed when he struck. Faster than a snake, his fangs went into her clit without warning — and without any of the anesthetic vampires can put into their saliva. Sharp pain.Fire. Agony burst behind her eyes, stealing her voice halfway through the scream. Her body tried to jackknife on instinct, but still he held her, injecting venom that felt like acid straight into her clit until the blaze lanced through her like lightning.
She’d been bitten on her clit before, but this wasn’t the euphoric precision of a vampire aiming to please. No, it was the raw violence of someone choosing the most sensitive nerve cluster in her entire body without any numbing agent at all, so there was only pain. Blinding, searing, venom-laced pain.
When he finally released her, she was shaking. Traumatized from the shock and the pain.
But he didn’t care. He merely rose over her and plunged into her, cold eyes unreadable, driving in with a single violent thrust. But the venom had flooded her system with adrenaline, heat, and off-the-charts arousal, so she didn’t resist. This wasn’t submission, it was a detonation, an explosion of need and hunger, and she moved her hips to fuck him back. Her spine arched, her hands slapped at the granite, and her moans sounded like pleas.
Nothing about this vampire was soft, and his hips pistoned hard and fast, but she kept up, everything in her rising and pulsing,needing, and when she was about tobreak open and explode into release, he pulled out and forced himself into her ass with only the lubrication from her pussy.
She screamed again, throat raw. She hadn’t prepped, hadn’t lubed — and he didn’t fucking care.
