The final memento, a bloodied button from my shirt, was not with the rest.
I didn’t need to look for it. I knew exactly where it was, and why it hadn’t earned a place on the shelf.
We’d known the job had the potential to be dangerous, as all our jobs did. But vampires, on the whole, were usually placid creatures. And incubi tended to have a kind of kinship with them, what with both species needing to feed from others to survive. Not that vampires needed to havesexwhile they fed like we did, but their bite did have an aphrodisiac venom, so it usually led to sex anyway.
That kinship was why it never crossed our minds that we’d walked straight into a cult of unhinged vampires, driven by an appetite to sample every kind of blood the world had to offer. A cult of vampires that we later learned was responsible for decades of disappearances.
And on the menu for them that night was a pair of elusive incubi they hadn’t even needed to lure. All they’d had to do was hire us.
Ambrose and I had traveled to the super-secluded, super-secret lair (which, in hindsight, probably was a red flag), expecting to just be muscle for the night for an oddly unspecific job (another red flag), only to find ourselves standing in an abandoned crypt that smelled of rot, surrounded by a load of (spoiler:biggestred flag) vampires in hooded cloaks and with hungry gleams in their eyes.
I barely had time to register the blur of movement before pain exploded through my neck. Fabric tore. Flesh followed. I didn’t even manage a whisper of my shadows before I realized what had happened.
It wasn’t until I watched the vampire staggering back, a lump of my flesh slipping from his bloodied maw and hitting the floor with a wetthunk, that I realized the motherfucker had torn a chunk from my neck.
Arterial blood spurted everywhere while my body fought to knit itself back together. The rest of the vampires scented the air, their eyes flashing and canines lengthening. But those hungry looks faded into the background, for it was only Ambrose I saw in that moment.
Usually calm to the point of unnerving, he was unrecognizable. Unfiltered rage twisted his features just before the crypt plunged into a darkness so deep even I couldn’t see through it.
Perhaps that was for the best.
What followed was carnage. Flesh tearing. Bones splintering. Screams cut brutally short.
By the time my wound closed enough to stop bleeding, the nest had been reduced to nothing more than silence and shattered bones.
When Ambrose’s shadows finally cleared, I couldn’t bring myself to look at the blood and broken bodies surrounding us. His breath came ragged, his chest heaving with fury—and my only thought wasI need to get us home.
My shadows answered instinctively, curling around us as the world tilted. When they fell away again, we were standing in our living room.
Ambrose was still trembling with rage.
He didn’t speak. Just stood there with his hands clenched at his sides, onyx eyes fixed on the chunk missing from my neck, as if I might collapse at any second, and there’d be nothing he could do to stop it.
I’d taken a step toward him, tugging my bloodied, torn shirt over my head. The buttons had scattered across the floor as Iwiped the blood from my neck, trying to show him I was already healing.
His hand had lifted slowly, like he didn’t trust it not to tremble. His fingers ghosted over the scabbed bite mark.
And then his mouth followed.
The moment his lips touched my skin, something inside me ignited.
I told myself it was the adrenaline. The lingering aphrodisiac venom still burning through my veins.
But none of that explained howrightit felt.
In all the years we’d fed together, we’d never touched each other like that. And in that moment, it seemed absurd that I’d wasted all that time not knowing how soft Ambrose’s lips could be, or the warmth of his breath as it curled over my skin.
His hands slid down my sides, thumbs tracing the sharp lines of my hips. I felt the tremor in his touch—like he was trying, and failing, to stop himself—as he undid my belt, then my pants, his fingers brushing the waistband of my boxers, knuckles grazing my lower stomach.
Then he paused.
I saw the effort it took—the way his eyes searched mine, as if begging me to stop him. To remind him that we were best friends, not lovers.
But I couldn’t.
Not when I finally reached out with my senses and tasted his familiar bergamot desire flooding the room, and it was all for me.
Heat had licked up my spine, my entire body igniting in a way that I thought was only reserved for my fated mate. And, yeah, the venom was enhancing it—I could feel that foreign lust tingling at my extremities, promising me that every touch would be explosive—but the venom could only enhance feelings that were already there, not create them.
