“I suspect there’s a lot you’ve never done before as a vampire, even though you own Dimitri’s memories … and not all of it is bad. I will show you.” He gave her a sexy smile, one so intensely erotic that she had to look away from him toward their targets.
“I’ve always gone for those in the midst of a commission of a crime—followed a robber or stopped a purse snatching or derailed a rape. I guess I just didn’t trust myself beyond that right away.”
“And yet you aspired to more. To reach the levels of the human masters, yes?”
She nodded. “But how did you know?”
“Everything you want resonates through every artery of your line down to the remotest capillary of it. This is how we know you still exist versus that time when your nights will become embers—and may that be an eternity from now, dear Tanya.” He took up her hand and pressed a tender kiss to the back of it. “Our job is to know what you want and how you want it, if we are yours.”
Tanya swallowed hard, feeling a pull to this man that she hadn’t expected.
He threw down a wad of bills on the bar to pay for their untouched drinks and then held out his hand again to her. She accepted it, quietly taking in the feel of his broad, slightly callused palm and long fingers, and then stood.
*
Sated, they left the bodies in the limousine that had chauffeured the businessmen to the restaurant, with a stunned driver none the wiser. Anastas dabbed the corner of her mouth with his thumb, wiping away a tiny trickle of blood.
“Are you all right with what just happened?”
Tanya nodded. “They were bad men to the core … fleecing hardworking souls out of millions.”
“Much worse than a poor junkie sticking up a convenience store, yes?”
“Yeah.”
“You don’t sound convinced.”
“I’m doing math in my head, is all.”
He stopped walking and looked at her. “Mathematics?”
“Anastas, how many bodies do you have on you after being around for hundreds of years?”
She stopped and turned to look at him when he didn’t answer. “That’s my point, man.”
“It is unavoidable, unless you have human minions who donate.”
“They do at the blood clubs.”
“And now you’re talking suicide to go there, unless your forces are extremely formidable—which at present, they aren’t.”
“Here’s a safe bet,” Tanya said with a casual shrug. “The masters dine on whatever they want and wouldn’t have to show up at a blood club. They have private gorging orgies in their lairs and don’t risk unnecessary exposure.”
“But their made men and women would.”
“Right,” she replied quickly. “Now you’re catching on. So, what better way to even the odds but to blow away a bunch of bottom feeders like the ones that just came after me?”
Anastas walked away from her in the opposite direction. “Now you are mad. I see how Dimitri was tricked. He thought he was dealing with a sane and beautiful woman only to be deceived!”
“No, think about it,” Tanya said, jogging to catch up with him. “If I hit the local blood clubs, wouldn’t that not only cull the other local masters’ ranks to be about equal to mine, but would also let them know not to send any of their thugs my way trying to pull a bullshit coup? Not to mention, it would get a helluva lot of vampires off the streets and allow us to walk into a blood club with some solid street cred under our belts.”
“And I supposed we’d just go in guns blazing?”
“No,” she said, laughing, and keeping up with Anastas’s long strides. “If you haven’t noticed, regular bullets don’t work, and I don’t have humans that can load my clips with silver or hallowed-earth-packed shells.”
He stopped walking and turned to stare at her. “Hand-to-hand combat so outnumbered is pure suicide.”