Emmy laughed, surprising herself. “The bar is so low it’s underground.”
“And yet we cleared it,” Zander said, his hand resting on the top of her thigh. “And we’re on the way home without even a minor wound.”
Home. The word settled into Emmy’s chest, warm and right.
And it wasn’t that the silo was home, but her suite with Zander and Spence. Wherever they were would be home.
And so, once again sandwiched between her two men, their warmth surrounding her as the SUV made its way through the darkness, she settled in and relaxed.
She’d survived telling her parents, and her mother had even given a kind-of blessing.
All things considered, it really was a win.
Chapter 15
Emmy awoke the next morning to discover Zander had flown a sleek corner desk in for her — dark walnut with a long return on the right, with two extra monitors situated just above her laptop screen.
She’d told him she loved his desk chair, and he ordered an identical one for her.
He showed it to her, and then he was gone, apologizing ahead of time for how much he was going to need to be gone in the coming days, possibly weeks — fallout from the Krvi debacle.
She gave him a big thank-you kiss, and then turned to organize her new desk, which was absolutely perfect and exactly what she needed. Ten minutes later, she settled into her work with the luxury of her ideal workspace.
In the coming days, she crammed ten- and twelve-hour marathons into her days, with silicone earplugs under noise-canceling headphones playing music designed to help with concentration.
She got lost in her work, fingers flying over keys until her shoulders ached.
And Spence was her steadfast lifeline. Every few hours, he’d set a plate down in front of her and leave without interrupting. Mostly savory sandwiches, so she could eat without slowing her pace, though there were also chicken nuggets, cheese sticks, and tons of other finger foods.
The endless nights settled over Mordnik like a suffocating, icy blanket, and Zander’s absence left the suite feeling incomplete, a hollow echo where his presence should have been.
Spence gave her the gist of the problem when they talked in bed at night, old alliances in danger, new threats whispering from the shadows. Zander needed to keep his finger on the pulse of gossip and political maneuvering, and any absence meant missing the undercurrents that could explode into problems. Without the daily sunrise to knock them out, the vampires could freely scheme, seduce, and create endless mayhem around the clock.
Meanwhile, her time spent with Spence was pure joy. He slept curled against her every night, legs tangled with hers.
When she couldn’t get her mind off her work long enough to drift asleep, she’d ask him to rub her feet, and he’d immediately shift position, his hands reaching for her nearlybefore she finished asking. It wasn’t just a massage, it was devotion made physical. Strong fingers kneaded the muscles of her feet and calves, then gradually softening, his touch becoming a gentle worship that had nothing to do with duty and everything to do with the way he looked at her in the darkness. She could feel the care radiating from him like warmth, and those moments, suspended between waking and sleep with Spence’s hands on her skin, felt like coming home to something she hadn’t known she’d been searching for.
But some nights a foot massage wasn’t what she needed, and she’d tell him she wanted his mouth. Without hesitation, he’d slide down, tongue delving slow and sure, lapping her to a series of lazy, shuddering releases that pulled sleep over her like a blanket.
Mornings were her favorite indulgence. She’d wake him with teasing strokes, riding the hard length of him until he groaned her name, or going to her back and commanding him to pound her hard and fast. After she’d come multiple times, she’d wait until he was right on the edge and then order, “On my belly,now.”
And her lovely Spence’s eyes would darken with desperate submission as he obeyed, hot stripes painting her skin. “Clean it up,” she’d tell him, and he’d lick every drop with reverent swirls of his tongue, the intimacy of it sending fresh sparks through her core. No pain, no threats — just the sweet power of his willing surrender, the emotional tether pulling tighter with every shared breath.
They missed Zander fiercely, their threesome incomplete without his cool presence anchoring them, but the routine held — genetic lines blurring and then snapping into focus, meals appearing like magic, evenings where she surrendered to the feeding frenzies and was thoroughly fucked and fed from, and then nights wrapped in Spence’s warmth.
And because Zander does nothing halfway, the feeding frenzies were far beyond fantastical and magical, with tons of depravity thrown in to make them extra-fun.
She was the star for the mermaid feeding frenzy, and the entire production was like a fever dream. The theater stage was transformed into an undersea palace of shadows and shimmer. The daywalkers’ legs were all trapped by fins, turned into mermaids and mermen, and then displayed on elevated, silk-draped tables around the room, their costumes a riot of illusory pageantry: tails crafted from iridescent sequins in scales of shaved emerald, sapphire, and obsidian.
Emmy’s tail was a siren’s lure: shifting teal-to-violet scales that hugged her hips and flared into a massive fin — with the bottom portion of her ass bare and her genitals easily accessible from behind. She wore a bejeweled choker that looked more like a collar than a necklace, and her bare breasts sported deeply rouged nipples.
When the theater was full, the spotlight came on to show her swimming in a long, narrow acrylic tank center-stage. She swam back and forth, gliding and flipping, her tailpropelling her in graceful arcs until a vampire dressed as a fisherman dropped a large net into the water, settling it around her, tangling limbs and tail alike. The coarse cords scraped skin as they wrapped her torso and trapped her arms. She fought hard, thrashing with real strength, water sloshing violently as she bucked and twisted, the tank shuddering under the force of her struggle.
The fisherman braced himself and hauled.
She broke the surface in a cascade of water, gasping as he dragged her dripping body from the tank and slammed her onto the rough wooden table. The sound echoed through the theater — flesh against wood, water splattering in cold sheets that ran between the planks and pooled beneath her.
He rolled her facedown with brutal efficiency, yanking her encased legs off the edge so the mermaid tail bent her at the hips, leaving her utterly exposed. His weight came down on her back, pinning her down with unyielding strength. One hand fisted in her wet hair, arching her head back enough to make her gasp; the other moved from her lower back, and seconds later, she felt his cock at her entrance — blunt pressure, then the breach, the violation, the stretch.
