4
TIMOTHY
The glass was cool in my hand as I looked out at the neon lights of the city. Wearing only my boxer briefs, I was still somehow hot under the collar.
I’d been overheated since seeinghim.
My place near the top of Sinopolis was dark, but illuminated well enough by the lights from the Strip. Assirak lay on the couch behind me, watching me but giving me space. I knew he was at the ready if I needed him.
While Seth was definitely up to no good, Miranda, Assirak, and I left because we couldn’t prove anything was amiss.
Seth had created an absolute spectacle and did it as a show of power.
He was up to something, and I’d no doubt he delighted in igniting my paranoia. But he couldn’t have known what Aaron was to me.
And Aaron clearly didn’t know about Seth, if he was foolish enough to blood-bond with the god.
“I can’t believe it.”
Miranda words echoed back to me from when we stalked back into the lobby of Sinopolis while the crowd cleared. “Aaronseems the same, yet...different. I mean, his stutter is gone, but is that a vampire healing thing? More importantly, he’s been here for months? What are we? Chop liver?”
“He’s obviously been occupied,” I had said, my words controlled, belying the way my fingers tapped against my thigh as my stomach twisted, desperate for something to hold onto. Or perhaps crush.
Miranda’s hand on my arm forced me to stop so I would look at her.
“Just because they are blood-bonded, it doesn’t mean they are...more.”
The queasiness had turned into an all-out scalding nausea. Even now, acid rose up my throat as sweat beaded along my hairline.
Not just at the thought that Aaron had been in the city, practically under my nose for months, not just because he’d been turned, but because the flash of guilt in his eyes when Seth held him by the scruff of the neck.
As if Aaron were some kind of possession. Some kind of dog he could hold up and show off.
Seth had no more respect for vampires than he did for humans. Hell, he had no regard for anyone other than himself, god or otherwise.
I’d like to believe I’d achieved some kind of mastery over my own baser instincts, that all these years observing humans and their endless dramas had distilled in me a stoic calm, a detachment from the frantic, animal workings of passion.
But standing there, I felt the crude machinery of my anger whir to life in ways that surprised even me. The sight of Seth’s hold on Aaron sent a tremor of raw, involuntary rage reverberating from the base of my skull down through my rib cage.
My vision, usually so precise and clinical, blurred at the edges. It was all I could do not to rip Seth’s arm out of its socket and beat him with the wet end.
I did not, of course. But the violence of that urge still called to me in vivid fantasy.
Seth’s shriek, the spray of dark blood, the look on Aaron’s face when he realized that, at the end of all this, the only hands left to touch him would be mine.
I sucked in a shuddering breath, attempting to calm myself. Closing my eyes, I tried to clear the violent images I couldn’t stop replaying.
I’d always ruled my emotions with the iron logic of a chess player, weighing each move, calculating the cost, the potential gain, focused on the long game. I could talk myself down from anything.
Except this.
Watching Aaron be touched—claimed, even, by anyone but me—made all that careful discipline go molten. It was as if I’d spent a century damming up a reservoir and had, in a single second, decided to blow it all to hell.
And though a blood-bond was not necessarily sexual in nature, the idea they had...that they might be...
Whipping away from the window and crossing to the dark kitchen, I gripped the edge of the kitchen counter.
I suddenly wished I had a vice I could turn to. Drinking, smoking, gambling, anything. But my only vice had ever been a blond human with sparkling turquoise eyes, a stutter, and an easy confidence that kept pulling me to that coffee shop day after day.
