And he prayed to his mahmen who didn’t exist anymore that Lassiter would not come into the room. Into the foyer. Into the fucking house.
Please, oh Great Virgin Scribe in all your drapey-drapey, if you’ve ever loved me, and I know you didn’t, but still, just don’t let that fallen angel—
Turning his cell phone screen up, he checked the time again. Then he lifted the glass, put it to his lips, opened his throat—and tilted his head back. He took the three inches of vodka on a oner, the burn lighting a fire down his esophagus and into his gut.
It didn’t help with the sweating. He cleared his brow again—
Bing!
V nearly dropped the glass as he jerked the phone up. Opening the single text that had come through, he saw what he hoped to see, what he needed to see.
Just a single period.
.
He took another drink from the glass, catching only the drops that were left. Then he put it aside, wrapped both hands around the granite edge of the bar, and bowed his arms. Bracing his weight, he tightened the muscles of his shoulders, and then went all the way down his spine with the flexing. Heat now, blooming throughout his body.
Behind the fly of his leathers, his sex thickened. Hardened. Pushing off, he wheeled around and stalked through the room. On the way out, his hip banged into one of the pool tables and the pain made his cock pound with its own heartbeat.
In the grand foyer, he crossed over the mosaic depiction of an apple tree in full bloom in total silence, glancing up the red-carpeted stairs to the open doors of Wrath’s study. Off in the distance, he could hear doggen talking in the kitchen and someone was running a DustBuster out there, the high-pitched whine as loud as a concert to him. It was well after Last Meal had been cleaned up, and too early to start prep for First Meal, the downtime typically meant for sleeping for the staff. Nonetheless, Fritz had set up a rotation of skeleton crews so someone was available to the household at all times.
Skirting around the base of the staircase, he went to the hidden door tucked under the great carved-wood and gold-leafed rise. Entering in a code, he was aware that his palm was sweaty as he opened the way under the earth.
He took the steps two at a time, and when he broke out into the underground tunnel to the training center, he nearly ran.
But there were two people coming at him.
Tohr and Xcor were walking side by side, towels looped around the backs of their necks, their huge bodies glistening with sweat. As V approached the half-brothers, he was dimly aware that they were talking to him, telling him Jane was still in the clinic—
Yeah. He knew that.
—asking him how he was, saying they’d had a good workout in the gym.
He put his cell phone in front of his enormous hard-on. “Yeahgoodthanksrightgoodyupokaybye.”
Or something to that effect. He had no clue what was coming out of his mouth and he didn’t care. He just wanted the syllables to make enough sense so that neither of those two fighters delayed him to make sure he wasn’t having a stroke.
When they kept going, and so did he, he took a deep breath.
Maybe his last one of the day.
When he got to the door into the training center, he paused. It was getting harder and harder to keep from orgasming. Every step forward, each shift of his weight, stroked the tight leather over his cock and squeezed his hypersensitive nut sac.
And with the anticipation and the images going through his head, his arousal was on the knife-edge of release.
His hand trembled as he punched in the passcode, and the muffled thunch as the dead bolt retracted made him swallow through a dry mouth.
As he passed through the office’s supply closet, his shoulder caught a box of envelopes and pulled it off the shelf. He left the thing where it fell in a scatter.
On the far side, the little glass-fronted room with its computer and desk was empty and dim, the illumination from the corridor beyond offering a false moonlight.
V kept going, pushing open the glass panel and stepping into the concrete corridor that ran all the way down to the parking area to the right and all the way down to the pool and target range to the left. Drawing a long inhale through his nostrils, he scented Tohr and Xcor . . . and no one else, thank fuck. If Fritz decided to come down here and clean? V was going to send that butler back to the kitchen to service an order of fifty-two footlongs for Hollywood. No doubt Rhage would be overcome with gratitude.
The problem with living in a huge household with lots of help was that sometimes discretion among staff and the natural circadian rhythm of vampire sleeping patterns didn’t go far enough. You wanted real privacy, the kind that meant you weren’t just alone with someone, you were isolated from everybody else.
Lowering his head, he got to moving again, his eyes locking on the worn, steel-toed tips of his shitkickers. The training center’s medical clinic was something he had built his Jane as a kind of engagement/mating present. And actually, they’d done a lot of the work together. She had helped with the drywall of the build-out, and she had planned all of the treatment spaces from the examination and recovery rooms to the OR itself.
As he came up to her section of the facility, all of the doors were closed. Except for one.
The last one was cracked ever so slightly, the kick-stopper deployed against the tiled floor, a two-inch seam of glow revealed in the gap to the jambs.
V put his gloved hand down to his erection. He couldn’t help it—
The hiss he let out seemed loud as a car horn.
He knocked. When there was no answer, he pushed his way in.
The patient room was lit with black candles on tall stands, the pinpoint flames agitating as he walked in.