Her hands scrabbled at the stone, nails cracking. Tears ran hot down her temples. She couldn’t breathe. Couldn’t think. Her whole body focused on the tearing stretch and the venom burning through her blood. He was relentless. Pounding into her with vampire speed and strength, a hole to assuage his needs.
And then his fangs struck her throat with brutal strength, sinking into flesh and muscle, venom suddenly coursing through her arteries all over again, and the vampire drank her down.
He pulled from her throat, and the combination of pain and pleasure obliterated all thought. Her orgasm ripped free, igniting inside her in an explosion of sensation, and she came sobbing and screaming, her world an eruption of colors and sounds, her body a livewire. A tidal wave of pleasure crashed through the pain, and her entire body writhed while the vampire emptied himself inside her.
He licked her neck at the end, as if savoring this last taste of her, and then stood, stepped into his pants, donned the sweater, stepped into his shoes, and left without looking back.
Left her wrecked on the stone slab, cunt and ass leaking, pulse still crashing in her ears, orgasm still rippling in her very being.
A dragon defiled and consumed in a garden of monsters.
Zander watched on the hidden security camera, hoping to observe Emerald’s thoughts. Her shields were excellent, but perhaps they would fall while Matthias fed from her and overcame her senses.
Little Emerald had certainly grown up. He found it hard to think of her as Emmy, the adorable child full of questions who saw the world with more clarity than most adults.
But her shields held. He considered what he knew of her. Not what he’d learned through a Drake check, of course. He’d had to go to another security company for this particular historical dossier.
Emerald Drake had lost her virginity at fourteen, six weeks away from fifteen — and once she discovered sex, she’d been a wild child. A gorgeous undergrad at MIT until she’d had sex in the middle of the soccer field during a midnight game of capture-the-flag between dorms, and she’d been kicked out for conduct unbecoming. She’d also been kicked out of Princeton, Yale, Oxford, Harvard, Tulane, and a string of other hallowed, prestigious colleges in other countries. She’d finally managed to graduate with a degree in genetics at UC Berkeley, since they aren’t as bothered by public sexual activity. But even Berkeley had its limits, and she’d pushed past them while a graduate student, and was expelled. And then she’d managed to get herself kicked out of three more colleges during the pursuit of her postgraduatedegree, and her parents had decided some tough love was in order.
Her siblings were quite successful in their fields. Sapphire was the surgeon who’d performed the first cochlear implant — while still in her teens — and who was now working with robotic prosthetics, doing the research and study necessary to wire them directly into flesh and nerves, currently figuring out how to make robotic hands and fingers work with the human nervous system. And Hunter had made a name for himself as a premier anthropologist, proving human fire usage to have been far before previously thought, and showing early bipedal cross-species interactions to have been both brutal and consensual, depending on circumstances. Before, people had been in either one camp or the other, but Hunter had proven both. He was currently on a dig high in the Andes, running the whole shebang at twenty-three.
And then there was Emerald, who Zander figured would eventually be just as successful, but she needed to grow the fuck up, first.
She’d absolutely been more spoiled than her siblings, who’d stepped back and watched her in the spotlight while they were growing up.
But she’d just been so damned adorable.
And if he was honest, she still was — but she was going to have to figure out how to enjoy life while being a responsible adult.
Zander’s best friend for around three thousand years had gonesolong thinkinghe’d never have children, and he was now blessed with dozens of them. Dragons collect treasures of gold, jewels, property, and other valuables, so Aaron had plenty to give as large trust funds to every child, but he’d made it so they didn’t get the full trust fund until thirty-five, with him doling it out until then.
And he’d cut Emmy off.Completely.
Zander approved, and he’d do what he could to help his best friend get his prodigal child in line.
Though he had a feeling Emerald’s mother was never going to understand her daughter. She loved her, absolutely, but Sophia had led a criminally sheltered life, and had been a virgin at twenty-four. Sophia’s father, the Swan King at the time, had kept her imprisoned in a castle all her life, and only allowed her to read Victorian-era books, with no internet or television. Now forty-eight, she lived a full life with one exception — she’d only ever had sex with her husband.
No, Sophia would never understand her oldest child, but she still desperately loved her. He lifted his phone and called her. She’d call him soon for an update if he didn’t.
“She’s getting along well with the flock members she’s met,” he told her. “She’s fed two vampires and, so far, has followed most of the instructions.” And he figured she wouldn’t skip lubing her asshole a second time, but that probably wasn’t information Sophia needed.
“Most of them?”
“All but one, and it backfired, so she isn’t likely to skip it again. She’s here and she’s safe, Sophia.”
“Thanks for checking in. I appreciate it. I worry about her so much.”
He talked to her another couple of minutes before disconnecting. Spencer stepped into his office, and Zander’s cold vampire heart went all warm.
“Dearest.” He stood and walked to him, drew him into a hug.
“I’m going to eat dinner with the flock,” Spencer told him. “Maren’s going to have some scheduling issues this summer. She has an opportunity to go on an excursion as the WEMT. I approved it, but told her to be prepared to do daily feedings for at least three weeks after she returns. The deal you worked with Kendric will give us a dozen more masochists at Mordnik, but we really need some more here.”
Zander released his boy from the hug and sat in a chair. Spencer sat across from him and blew out a breath. “I knew Emmy when she was three. I can’t wrap my brain around it.”
“She isn’t three anymore, Dearest. We have to let her decide who she wants to be when she grows up. Right now, she’s part of our flock. If she gets back in good graces with her parents, maybe they’ll release enough of her trust fund so she won’t need a place to live and a salary from us. Until then, I’d rather she be here where we can keep an eye on her, rather than off in some random man’s bed, which is where she was before she arrived here. Someone she knew at Tulane. She’s been shacking up with him since Mardi Gras.”
“I know you’re probably right, but it’s still…” he shrugged. “Weird.”
