London, England—1904
”WHERE IS HE?” Thanos demanded as he appeared on the second-floor balcony of the residence they were currently living in. Vasilios, who was pacing a hole in the hardwood, stopped in his tracks and turned on him, his eyes alight with annoyance.
“Downstairs. Restrained. But it is not good. I haven’t seen him like this in years. Where have you been?”
Thanos ran a hand through his hair as he loosened the cravat around his neck. The damn thing felt like a noose. “It does not matter. I am here now.”
Vasilios scoffed as one of the other doors that led off the balcony opened, and Diomêdês stepped through it.
“You are barely in time,” Vasilios said, not sparing the other Ancient a glance. “Eton has been in turmoil while you have been off cavorting with whoever it is this month you have been sinking your cock inside of.”
Thanos took the three strides needed so he was toe to toe with Vasilios, and said, “I do not see how that is any concern of yours. Unless, of course, you are jealous. The only issue right now is seeing to Eton.”
“How nice to know you still care.”
Thanos ground his teeth together but refused to go another round with this male. He and Vasilios shared a tempestuous relationship. One that was tolerated due to the wishes of a male they both watched over—Eton.
Diomêdês stepped up beside the two of them, and placed a hand on each of their shoulders. “If you would please keep your voices down, Isadora and Alasdair do not need to hear all this commotion. If they do, we will be forced to lie, and I, for one, am not comfortable with dishonesty between an Ancient and their first-sired.”
Thanos glowered at the silver-haired vampire, fuming at his veiled accusation. “If you have something to say, then say it.”
“Very well. There is a reason Eton acted out tonight. You have to know that.”
Shame and guilt overcame Thanos at the truth of that statement. He knew what Diomêdês was referring to. The same as he knew Vasilios to be right about him meeting up with a young man this past month.
“He has sensed your attention wavering,” Diomêdês said. “Your priorities, they have shifted away from the one you are bound to.”
Thanos brought his hands to his face and scrubbed them over the top of it, thinking of Charlie, the one he’d been leaving each night to see.
He knew why he’d been seeking out the other man’s companionship. Charlie was sweet and kind, yet took great delight in pleasing his carnal needs in a way that reminded Thanos why he enjoyed what he did, as opposed to hating himself for it. Charlie was the opposite of everything else in his life, and he offered up a sense of calm that Thanos had needed since that night, several months earlier.
It was a memory he still couldn’t shake, and whenever he shut his eyes, the devastation and violence of that evening made him hate both himself and the one he was to keep in line…
IT HAD BEEN a particularly cold night, when he and Eton had decided to gamble away a small portion of Vasilios’s fortune with a pair of young dandies. They’d thought it would be a bit of fun to incense the Ancient, and they all had a raucous time placing bets on who would win whose affection for the eve. But several bets in, after one too many brandies, Eton had begun a game that even Thanos was destined to lose.
Within the hour, each of them had charmed one of the men to Eton’s bed, and within two, Thanos had gotten what he’d been after and fallen asleep beside the one he’d enjoyed having under him.
It was the next morning when things came undone, because when Thanos woke, he found both of the men torn to shreds at the end of the bed, and Eton nowhere to be found.
Up until that night, he had been so careful to keep his desires separate from his dark one, for fear of what might happen if he let his guard down. And now—now he knew…
“YOU MUST MAKE this right, Thanos.”
Vasilios’s voice had him lowering his hands and his spine stiffening. “And how do you propose I do that?”
Vasilios’s arm whipped out, and he took a tight hold on Thanos’s cravat and twisted it until it resembled the noose it had felt like seconds ago. “I do not care how. But you will fix this. You are here to serve that male. To keep him alive and safe.”
Thanos swallowed and shook his head. “I thought I was here to keep everyone else safe.”
Vasilios’s eyes turned to slits as he hauled Thanos in close to him. “Be of care, agori.”
“Or what? You will kill me? I think you have forgotten that if I die, so does he. And considering the lengths you have gone to in order to keep him alive, I hardly think you should be making any rash decisions right now.”
“That is enough!” Diomêdês barked. “No one is going to die tonight.”
Vasilios released Thanos with a hard shove. “You need to go to him. Work out whatever it is that is festering between you two, and then things shall return to normal.”
Thanos wasn’t sure he could do what Vasilios so obviously wanted of him. How could they go back to normal, when he wasn’t even sure what normal looked like? “And if we cannot work it out? Then what?”
“You already know the answer to that.”
Death. Both his and Eton’s.
“Let us hope it doesn’t come to that, hmm?”
Thanos straightened his jacket and inclined his head. For the first time in years, he was intrigued by the peace that death would bring. Not so much for himself, but perhaps for Eton. Then he shut his eyes and located his Ancient, and with one more thought, he was off the balcony and below the residence.
When he re-formed in the room they’d painstakingly outfitted for moments such as these, he found Eton curled up on the cold stone floor with a set of heavy cuffs around both his wrists and ankles. Thanos could see the blistering on his arms that the restraints had caused, and cursed at the pain Eton must’ve been suffering.
His usually sunny hair was a dirty, tangled mess atop his head, and when he raised his face to see who had entered, Thanos clamped his teeth into his lower lip from the brutal visual he made.
Eton’s left eye was swollen shut and was a garish shade of purple, and above the abused skin was a cut across his eyebrow that was leaking blood down the side of his temple. The right side of those bow lips was split, and it was twice the size it should be, and even though he knew it had to have been necessary, Thanos hated that Vasilios had marred Eton’s angelic face. That was the one place he never touched. All of the scars he had left upon Eton from silvering, whipping, or veinous peeling were in places that could be hidden.
It was difficult to see his Ancient like this, broken, battered, and bound. But as Thanos crossed the expanse between him and Eton, he knew that Vasilios would’ve hated doing this even more.
The silver around Eton’s arms and legs were preventing him from healing, and it was the pain he experienced from that which was keeping him cowered in the corner like a frightened animal instead of the demon who had clearly come out to play while Thanos had been gone.
Fuck, he wasn’t sure how much longer he could continue with this.
“You are here,” Eton said as he tried to get to his feet, and Thanos crouched down, holding a hand up.
“No. Do not tax yourself. There is no need to rise. Not to me.”
Eton slumped down so his back was to the wall, and the chains rattled as they moved with him.
“What happened?”
Eton lowered his head to the floor, but Thanos wasn’t about to let him hide. He reached for his chin and raised his face so they were looking across at one another, and asked again, “What happened?”
“I killed one of Vasilios’s newlings.”
Thanos’s eyes narrowed to slits. “You killed him? Or—”
“It did,” Eton said.
“Why?”
Eton yanked his face free of Thanos’s grip and said, “You know why.”
Thanos shut his eyes at the betrayal he heard in Eton’s husky voice—the accusation.
&nb
sp; “I know I have disappointed you. Disgusted you,” Eton said, wringing his fingers together. “It is why you seek others outside of our bond.”
“No,” Thanos said, even as he knew some of Eton’s words to be true. Because while he cared deeply for this male, the two of them…they could not be. They were too similar, too damaged, to be more than what they were. “You are merely being you. It is I who has changed, Eton. I who has disappointed you.”
Eton scrambled to his knees and reached for Thanos’s face and adamantly shook his head. “You could never disappoint me. I ask more of you than any other. I have since you said yes to me. Yes to a life with much burden.”
“It is a life I would not have without you. It does not seem like much of a burden to do as you request.”
“And which part of that request do you mean? To beat me? Or to love me?”
Thanos brought his hands up to cover the ones holding his face. “You know as well as I do—our kind, we do not love.”
Eton slicked his tongue over the cut on his lip, and Thanos’s eyes fell to the move.
“You act as though you have never had love, nor I. But before we were this, when we were human, we knew of love. Did we not? We knew of it, even if it wasn’t given to us in abundance. Do you not think we can replicate that? I believe Diomêdês and Isadora have.”
Thanos didn’t quite understand where all of this was coming from, but before Eton could confuse him any further, he said, “If we can, I do not think that we should.”
“But we are one. Shouldn’t those who are of one blood love each other?”
“We may be one, Eton. But we are not the same. If we were, neither of us would survive this bond we share.”
“And you do wish to survive, even if it is a lonely existence, don’t you?” Eton asked, and the question was so soft that Thanos barely heard it.
Maybe he’d been right in thinking Eton was tired of this life. But at the same time, Thanos wasn’t ready for it to be over just yet. So he said the only thing that made sense right then: “I do. Even though I know it is not my choice in the end.”
Eton shut his good eye and rested his head back against the wall he was shackled to, and a second later Thanos heard inside his mind, You always have a choice, Thanos. And as long as you remain true, I vow never to take that from you. Even in death. Should you wish it, I will grant it.
Thanos blinked several times, shocked by Eton’s promise. “With our bond, that would mean you would perish also.”
“Yes,” Eton replied, but didn’t open his eye. “It would.”
No more words were spoken between them that night as Thanos locked himself away in the basement with Eton and both of their demons, and exorcised him of them until they both passed out from the exhaustion of it.
It wasn’t until the following morning that Thanos realized he must go to Charlie and cut ties with him. Because if he did not, he knew without a doubt that, after the vow he made last night, Eton would track him.
Track him. And kill him.
I’M BACK IN the room with no doors, Paris thought, as he came to and rubbed his head. Back in the room with the studded leather walls. The same room that had the ominous hook hanging from the roof, and sitting across from him on the only seat—well, really it looked like a throne of some sort—was the female vampire, Isadora.
Paris pushed himself up until he was seated on the rug she had put him on, and as his fingers sank into the plush black fabric, he shut his eyes and tried to calm himself.
“Yes, please do that,” Isadora said, having realized he was awake. “I saw what kind of damage you do when you are upset. I do not think I would be of much use shriveled at your feet.”
Paris gulped at the reminder as he crossed his legs and stared up at her. She was watching him with wary eyes, as though he might turn on her at any second.
“It’s okay,” he said, feeling some kind of need to reassure her. “I’m not going to hurt you.”
Her blood-red lips tipped into a small smile, and with her long, waving hair and porcelain skin, Paris was taken aback by how different she appeared to that day they’d first met. She was a gorgeous woman.
“As much as I would like to believe you mean me no harm, it is hard when you do not even know what you did in the first place.”
She had a point. But Paris thought he’d have some kind of sign, right? Like maybe a tingling in his palms, some kind of sixth sense?
“Or maybe you just get angry and bam, I end up dead.”
Though it wasn’t funny, after everything that had happened to him, Paris couldn’t stop the laugh that bubbled out.
“I’m sorry,” he said, and brought a hand up to cover his mouth.
Isadora frowned. “Is something amusing?”
Paris shook his head. Jesus, his life had turned into some kind of paranormal fiction novel. “Nothing at all is funny. That’s what’s so crazy,” he said, as she sat forward on the chair. “You’re a vampire.” When Isadora didn’t answer, Paris continued. “I just keep thinking back to Elias’s office and everything he told me about how dangerous you were, and now I’m here and all this shit has gone down and you’re the one sitting there afraid of me. Kind of ironic, right?”
He began to laugh again, feeling as though he was losing his mind, and really, he could’ve been. Vampires, gods, demigods. Hell, he was pretty sure he’d lost his mind the first time he’d woken up here.
“Can you feel him?”
The question was quiet, and when Paris looked up at Isadora and saw true concern in her eyes, he asked, “Who?”
“Elias. Can you feel him?”
What did she mean, feel him?
“We can sense one another,” she said as she sank down off the seat to kneel opposite him on the rug. “Their presence, their health, our Ancients, we can feel them. I wondered if you could feel him.”
Paris shook his head, and she let out a defeated sigh.
“I thought not.” When she shut her eyes, her thick lashes brushed her cheeks, and Paris reached out to touch her hand.
“I’m sure he’s fine. Elias is tougher than you think.”
When she opened her eyes, they glittered at him, and Paris heard himself ask, “What does that mean?”
As her eyes narrowed, she pulled her hand from his, and Paris clasped his own in his lap.
“What does what mean?”
“Your eyes… I mean, all of you, umm, vampires, your eyes,” he said. “They glow sometimes. What does it mean?”
“It depends, handsome. Who are you specifically thinking of?”
Thanos entered his mind immediately. In the bathroom when he’d been holding him. The sound of Isadora chuckling had him blinking her back into focus.
“I think you know what it means.”
Paris licked his lower lip, and she nodded.
“Yes, exactly that. It means he finds you…appealing.”
“As in a meal?”
Unbelievably, she let out a loud laugh at that. “No. As in the way you find him appealing.”
No. There was no way Thanos was interested in him like that. He hardly even looked at him. “He barely tolerates me. Won’t let anyone near him.”
“Yet you were the first he has spoken to in days…weeks.”
I was?
“Yes. You were. He had secluded himself from all others ever since the attack. So understand, it was quite the shock to see him tonight.”
Paris tried to comprehend all she was telling him, but still didn’t know all that had gone on. “Why was he hiding? What did Elias do to him?”
Isadora frowned again and slumped back against the edge of the chair. “He attacked Thanos the night he took me. He damaged him very badly.”
“His face?”
“Yes. And so much more,” she said.
She had to be referring to this thing with Eton they were all so worried about. He had seen how closely she and that Alasdair were with their Ancients, or whatever they called them. How must it be to be
ripped from one?
“Agony,” she whispered. “It would be like a part of you had been cut open and left to bleed.”
Paris pictured the sorrow in Thanos’s eyes then, and felt an incurable need to help him. How could Elias, a man he’d called a friend all these years, hurt another so badly? That was the real mind twist. It was difficult to imagine the Elias he knew doing anything so heinous. But it was clear there was so much going on here that he didn’t know about his ex-professor and current boss.
“That is true,” Isadora said. “Elias has been involved in this for years. Tasked to bring it to completion by a vindictive goddess who didn’t tell him what he was walking into.”
Paris rubbed his fingers across his forehead. “And even after all he’s done, you’re worried about him?”
Her haunted eyes found his, and she inclined her head. “It appears that even when the heart stops, it still recognizes the one that it was destined to beat for.”
Paris didn’t want to ask the next question, but knew he needed to. “Do you…do you think he’s dead?”
Isadora shook her head at that. “No.”
“Why? Do you feel him?”
“No,” she said again, but this time aimed a weak smile in his direction.
“Then how are you so sure?”
“Because I have to believe that if he were dead, I would most certainly feel that.”
Her words were full of conviction as she got to her feet and began to pace the length of the rug. Back and forth. Back and forth. And before he even knew he was going to ask, Paris heard himself say, “Do you love him?”
Isadora stopped and slowly rounded on her heels to stare down at him, and then asked, “Who?”
Who? Weren’t we talking about Elias?
“I suppose we were,” she answered. “But there are a lot of hims in my life, Paris.”
Well shit, she had a point. What must that be like? Those vampires were a whole lot to take in. Each of them just as scary as the other.
“’Tis true. I am surrounded by masculine arrogance and posturing at all times. And while the very nature of them goes hand in hand with our kind, these seven are a different brand of male. They are the kings of kings, and I am the only queen. Not a bad role for a girl who came close to dying at the hand of her own brother. But back to your original question. You meant Elias. Did you not? And do I love him?”