Total pages in book: 163
Estimated words: 154735 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 774(@200wpm)___ 619(@250wpm)___ 516(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 154735 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 774(@200wpm)___ 619(@250wpm)___ 516(@300wpm)
And had gone.
She needed to hate somebody in all this, though.
Glancing down at her Louboutins, she planted one in the mess and moved the toe of her stiletto back and forth in the viscous puddle, watching as the lesser blood gleamed like inky come. It was the only way to feel connected to her lover, this six-degrees-of-Kevin-Bacon not even close, but all she had.
Remnants of him left behind.
“Where the fuck are you,” she demanded.
OMEGA.
Clear as day, she could see the letters crudely depicted on the wall of her lair, the Book communicating to her what she had been too dense to understand until it was so obvious that it was, quite literally, right in front of her face.
The truth of her lover’s origins had tantalized her.
They were also going to define his future.
His goal, now that he’d broken free of her, was inevitable, and she told herself that it came with good news. He was going to stay in Caldwell.
Because that was where the vampires were.
That fucking Lassiter might have broken the spell the Book made for her, but those fanged assholes Lash was going to be so determined to kill were the diversion that was in her way. If her lover didn’t have them to worry about, he would see her, he would be with her, with or without the Book’s bullshit. They had the sexual compatibility. They could have built on that.
But noooooooooooo. He had to go Van Helsing on everything.
Her hatred swirled away from the neighborhood’s architects and former residents and toward that race of night dwellers. Then she thought about that fucking angel and his shouldn’t-have-ever-happened reunion with his beloved.
Fuck.
But surely, if there were no vampires, then her lover would fall in line…
“Oh, who am I kidding,” she muttered.
Lash would likely move on to something else to conquer. Just as, for her, there had always been something else she wanted to buy: It wasn’t about the acquisition. It was about the struggle, the hunt. The capture and own.
Tilting her head back, she measured the amount of light in the sky. It was such a gray, overcast day, you wouldn’t need sunglasses, but the illumination was still going to be too much for her lover—at least from what he told her. There had been a time when he’d been able to withstand it. No longer, however.
Where was he hiding?
She needed to get to him, but again, that lock of hair hadn’t worked. She was the one who had the tie to him, not the other way around—so she couldn’t draw any energy from him and pinpoint his location. He was giving nothing to her now that he was gone.
“Fuck.”
If she could only find him, though, she could talk some fucking sense into the motherfuck—
It was as she went to duck back under the tape, without having any concrete next-destination in mind, that she caught sight of a gleam over on a stairway. So subtle, the reflection of light, the kind of thing that should have escaped her notice.
Frowning, Devina walked to the set of steps. There were hunks out of the poured concrete contours and also a variety of stains and weathering on them, but she ignored all that.
It was the drops that dotted the scuffed surface, so shiny in the dull daylight, so stinky. Leaning back, she looked up the facade of the Victorian four-level. Where was the yellow tape around the entrance? The cops had either missed the drips or they’d cleared the building because they’d found nothing.
Or maybe the inky stuff in the middle of the road was as far as they were willing to take things in this war-zone part of town.
Either way, she was going inside.
There had to be a basement.
Had to.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
When Lassiter pulled back from their kiss, Rahvyn could not breathe. Staring up into his beautiful, oddly colored eyes, her heart was hammering and she had no voice. Not that he was speaking, either. The angel seemed as transformed as she was.
His hand shook as he brushed a lock of her hair over her shoulder.
“My first kiss,” she whispered.
He closed his eyes, and as his features tightened, she wished she had not spoken. The truth had to come out, however—and she imagined it was going to be hard for him to reconcile her fumbling with the fact that she was no virgin. Meanwhile, on her side, she was going to struggle with the aftereffects of the violence that had been wrought upon her two hundred years ago by the calendar, but mere nights past for her experience.
Fortunately, here in this netherworld, with him… all of what had been done unto her seemed far away.
The challenge was going to be to keep it at such distance. With the way he’d just melded his own mouth with hers, and how she was feeling the now, so hot and hungry, things were going to progress to places where making sure that she stayed where she was in this vital present, and not regress to where she had been in that castle, might become more difficult.