Nightmaster

“Do not mock my liberality,” he said, his voice a deep rumble. “I can withdraw it in an instant. I can still take from you whatever I wish.”

“What I offered already,” she said, tipping her head back to give him easy access to her throat.

He leaned toward her, and she could feel his warm breath fanning over her flesh. Once again she imagined his teeth grazing her neck, puncturing her skin on that big bed, while he...

Oh, God, she thought. She couldn’t let it happen. No matter how decent, how reasonable...how sexually attractive and potent he was to her. She couldn’t let herself feel.

“Go,” he said, stepping back as if he didn’t trust himself any more than she did her own mind and body.

Stumbling out of the room, Trinity half ran through the office and into the Great Room. His abrupt dismissal didn’t matter. He wanted to probe her mind and absorb her knowledge—though she didn’t trust his reasons in the slightest—and was clearly fighting his own desire to take her. He’d given her a kind of power over him she could use to her own advantage.

She would learn everything she could about the workings of the Household. She would make friends of even the lowliest serfs. She would use any method necessary to find members of the Underground in Ares’s Household and contact those outside it.

And she’d become invaluable to Ares. So indispensable, so trustworthy and useful that she’d make it impossible for him to resist her.

He’s only the means to an end, she reminded herself. And she was a soldier of the Enclave who hated everything he stood for.

And always would.

Chapter 6

Ares summoned Cassandra six hours later, after Trinity had retired to rest. He ordinarily avoided taking blood from his Favorite more than once a day, but his body’s other hungers had become too demanding to ignore, and he knew that Cassandra would never object.

He had spent those six hours pacing his room, trying to concentrate on ancient human texts, receiving his client Freebloods, taking reports and drinking wine until he could drink no more.

Every hour he had considered calling Trinity to him. His entire body throbbed with wanting her. She moved him not only physically, but also emotionally, and that made no sense to him.

He had told her the truth: he wanted to know her thoughts, to hear her views of things about which he could not be objective. But, above all, he needed to understand why she could be so unwillingly attracted to an Opir, especially when he owned her very life. She had every reason to hate him, like any of the humans in Erebus. But he had smelled her arousal, heard the rapid thrum of her pulse when he came near. She seemed to be giving way to some primal urge within herself that had little to do with gratitude.

He wondered if she was drawn to him because he was different.

From the beginning of human civilization, when the first Opiri had begun to gather in groups and hunting parties, Ares had been branded an outsider. The earliest Bloodmasters had declared that he could not be full-blooded because of his hair and eyes—that he was, as Palemon had called him, a “freak of nature” and a throwback to some ancient, more primitive species no Opir wanted to remember.

Many had tried to kill him, but he was strong, and he had fought all the harder to prove himself. Fought to show he was more a true Opir than any of them, in every way that implied. He had fought and killed until no one dared Challenge him again, and he had remained awake while the vast majority of other Opiri had taken the Long Sleep.

In all those years, weary of bloodshed and battle, he had lived alone, making no contact with the other Bloodmasters still roaming the earth. Since the Awakening, he had maintained a solitary existence within the Citadel, devoting himself to study and intellectual pursuits.

That had directly led to his choice to treat his property with decency and avoid unnecessary conflict. It was simple logic that one’s life ran more smoothly without such complications, and he despised any alteration of the Household routine.

Now, merely because of her arrival, Trinity had completely unsettled it. “My lord?”

Cassandra, dressed in a sheer sleeping shift, her eyes heavy and her hair tousled, stood in the doorway to his bedchamber. She had never looked more beautiful.

“Come in,” he said. “Wine?”

“Please.” Cassandra glided toward him, the diaphanous fabric sliding over the lush curves of her body, concealing and revealing naked flesh with every step. Smiling seductively, she lifted the glass of wine he poured and watched him over the rim of the goblet.

“How may I serve you, my lord?” she asked, her full lips stained red with the wine.

Before she could answer, she set down her glass, undid a tie at her neck and let the shift fall into a foamy puddle at her feet. As he had expected, she clearly had no objection to sharing his bed again after only six hours.

He had never asked her why she had been Deported, but she had been both experienced and unafraid when he had claimed her. She had told him more than once, when they were entangled in the bed and the barriers had fallen, that he was a superb lover.

Without waiting for his suggestion, she climbed onto the bed. She seldom required any foreplay, and she seemed far more eager than usual.

Because of Trinity, he thought. She believed she had a rival.

Refusing to think on it further, Ares began to shed his clothes, hardly aware of what he was doing. When he joined Cassandra on the bed, he wasn’t thinking of her at all. It was not her hips he caressed as he positioned himself behind her, not her lovely back or the elegant lines of her neck.

“My lord,” she said, squirming to entice him. “Please.”

He rolled off the bed, leaving her looking after him in confusion. He dressed with his back to her.

“I have no need of you now,” he said, more roughly than he had intended.

“My lord?” she said. “How have I displeased you?”

He forced himself to look at her. She seemed very small, very vulnerable, all her sophistication and provocative manner gone as if she had shed it along with her shift.

“It is not your fault,” he said, belting his tunic. “Go to your room, Cassandra. I have asked enough of you today.”

Cassandra stared up at him, tears leaking from her eyes. Ares had never seen her cry.

“How long will it be my room?” she asked, clutching the sheets tightly above her breasts. “I knew this was going to happen ever since I saw her. She’ll have my place, won’t she? You’ll send me to the harem, and I—”

“Silence,” Ares snapped. “You will do as I tell you. Go to your room.”

She climbed down from the bed, dragging the sheets with her. “I know you,” she said, her voice trembling. “She can only cause trouble here. Why did you fight for her?”

“You would be wise to hold your tongue, Cassandra,” he said.

“I know she excites you, but she’ll never let you have her the way you want her.”

“She is a serf. She will obey me.”

“But you don’t want it that way, do you?” she laughed bitterly. “She isn’t afraid of you. She’s not afraid of anything. You could take her if you wanted, but you expect her to come crawling to you and beg. You never had to do that with me.” She took a step toward him. “There is something wrong about her, Ares. If you can’t see it...”

All the tension in Ares’s body seemed to explode out of his skin. He strode to Cassandra and grabbed her wrist. The sheets fell to the floor.

“I have given you every privilege,” he said. “Every comfort, the highest status a serf can possess. But you will not speak to me this way, Cassandra. You will never challenge or question my decisions again.”

She stared down at his hand on her wrist. He let her go, sickened by the look of despair on her face.

“I have no wish to cause you pain,” he said as gently as he could. “Trinity will live in the harem quarters. Her value to me is in her knowledge.”

“You are generous, my lord,” Cassandra said, bending to pick up the sheets. Ares got to them first and stood holding them in his hands until she took them and covered herself again. “I shall never forget your kindness. May you always find what you seek.”

She walked through the door to her room, the sheets sweeping behind her like a train. Her parting words rang in Ares’s ears.