Blood Vengeance (Blood Curse Series Book 7) (10 page)

The corner of his lip turned up, and she flinched, still terrified that he was going to try and kiss her, that she was utterly incapable of stopping him.

That maybe she didn’t want to.

“Just answer one question.” He spoke with confidence. “And that’s all I’ll ask of you, for now.”

She averted her eyes and nodded abruptly, hoping he would just say his piece and let her go. Gods help her, but she felt like a mouse shivering in the paws of a lion.

“All the bullshit aside: Are you attracted to me, baby girl?”

Tiffany nearly swooned, and she wasn’t the type to swoon.
What kind of question was that?
Any woman who had eyes, ears, or warm blood coursing through her veins couldn’t help but be attracted to Ramsey Olaru. On a scale from one to ten, with regard to physical perfection, he was a five hundred, a demi-god. “Yes,” she uttered.

Why
lie?

He nearly groaned, and she felt his body instantly harden. But to his credit, he didn’t make any type of salacious move. “Then we’ll get there,” he said unemotionally. And with that, he slowly released her waist, held her gaze a moment longer than was reasonable, and sauntered out of the room.

eight

Tawni cowered in the corner of Salvatore’s lair, trying to tuck her body into a small insignificant ball. She wanted to become invisible.

Hell, she wanted to become extinct.

Her right hand was broken, each and every finger at each and every joint, and her body was still covered with ghastly snake bites, a result of spending the entire afternoon in the colony’s Chamber of Cobras with her new sadistic master. She shuddered at the thought of the horrifying chamber, where black smoke swirled around flaming candelabras, walls undulated like copulating men, and serpents slithered from the hollows of stony walls, before striking their helpless prey; and she tried to back even further into the corner.

Salvatore rose from his kingly perch on the bed and sauntered in her direction, his massive, powerful hands plastered over his ears. “Would you please shut up!” He was either referring to her constant, low-pitched, keening wail or her heavy, desperate pants. She rotated back and forth between the two, trying to withstand the pain.

He stopped about three feet in front of her, and she ducked to the side, covering her head. “Please,” she pleaded. “I’m sorry. I’m sorry.
I’m sorry
.” She was angry. She was desperate. She was at her wits’ end.

He raised his hand, drew it back, and just held it there, allowing the threat to linger in the air. “I mean it, skank. Shut up.”

She bit her lip so hard she drew blood, and then she simply kowtowed before him, trembling and waiting for the next bout of torture to come.

When he didn’t strike, she peeked up at him through dirty, disheveled hair. “Please,” she whispered in desperation, “just convert me.
Please
. I’ve done everything you asked.”

He scowled, his top lip matching the angle of his widow’s peak. “No.”

“But why?” she pleaded.

He licked his lips and retracted his hand, each gesture both confusing and terrifying her. “You know why,” he snarled. “You can still walk in the sun.”

She nodded agreeably. “I know. I know. And I understand why that’s so important.
I do
. It’s just—”

The blow caught her off guard this time, sending her front left tooth spiraling across the floor. She shrieked and curled into a ball, tucking her head into her lap.

Salvatore watched the tooth roll across the marble floor, ricochet off a stalagmite, and finally come to a full stop, with measured indifference. He rolled his seedy, dark eyes, sauntered over to the tooth, and then bent to pick it up. Scowling, he released a dollop of venom from his incisors, coated the tooth in the viscous fluid, and tossed it at her feet. “Put that back in before you’re stuck like that.”

Tawni snatched the tooth with her one good hand and tried to wedge it back into her gums. She sat there silently, waiting for the venom to take effect. Once the tooth attached, she sighed. And then she began to sob.

She couldn’t help it.

The pain was unbearable.

The torture was never-ending.

And the crazy-as-hell vampire was driving her to insanity.

“Why don’t you just kill me?” she blurted.

Remembering that he had left a dagger on the floor earlier, after carving his name into her thigh, she crawled the two or three feet necessary to retrieve it, grasped it awkwardly in her left hand, and placed the point of the blade directly against her carotid artery. “Convert me, or I’ll end this now.”

Salvatore’s thin brows rose in amusement, and his cruel mouth curved up in a smile. “Oh, will you, little rabbit?” he hissed. He nicked his own throat with a fingernail and laughed. “Can you do it quickly? So quickly that I can’t stop you first?” He cocked his head to the side. “Or will you fail miserably and provoke my punishment?”

Now this set Tawni off.

By all that was dark and unholy, what did she have left to lose?

“Provoke your punishment?” she mocked him, imitating his facial expression. “
Provoke your punishment
! Are you kidding me?” She forgot the condition of her broken hand and waved it wildly through the air, wincing from the sudden stab of pain. “All you do is punish me. All day. All night. Every second that I breathe. What the hell do I care if you try to punish me?” And then she did something that surprised even her—she drew the blade across her throat. As awkward as the angle was, she sliced her gullet from ear to ear and immediately began to gurgle. Her eyes bulged and her jaw shot open as she clutched at her throat and choked.

Salvatore harrumphed. “Hmm. Well, I suppose that answers the question.” He strolled across the room once more and squatted in front of her, staring absently at the wound as sputtering pools of blood welled up from the gash and spilled onto the floor. And then he bent even lower, to taste the bright red substance, moaning in delight.

Tawni shook like a leaf now, completely stunned by what was happening: So
this
was how she was going to die?
How long does it take?
she wondered, emitting ever more violent choking sounds.

Salvatore sank back on his heels and continued to watch her. Obviously, he could not have cared less one way or the other. He placed his hand on his jaw and rubbed at the five o’clock shadow that had just started to sprout that morning. “Well, let’s see,” he pondered. “I could heal you”—he reached forward and poked an extended pair of fingers directly into the wound, causing her to gag on the sharp, added obstruction, and frowned—“Or maybe not. That is a fairly nasty wound, and you are yet human.” He scrunched up his nose and shook his head in disgust. “I could convert you”—he pressed his forefinger to his lips as if really giving the idea a lot of thought—“but then, that would be a lot like giving a spoiled child her way, very poor parenting, very poor indeed.” He sat all the way down on his bottom, brought his knees up to his chest, and hooked his arms around his shins. “What should I do, Miss Duvall?”

Tawni began to feel the room sway and tilt. The light was fading, and the pain? Well, it was beyond imagining, beyond enduring. It was otherworldly, and she prayed for death.

Salvatore hissed, a long, drawn-out sound that seemed to come from far away. “You are really trying my patience this time, Tawni.” He extended his incisors to a grotesque-looking length, punctured his palm, and began to rapidly fill it with venom until it swelled up like a blowfish. And then he released a claw on the opposite hand, tore a long, deep gash in the swollen flesh, and shoved it against her throat, applying the substance like a poultice.

Tawni swiped at his arm.

She tried to hit him, punch him, to push him away, but her right hand was useless, and there was no strength left in her body.

No!

She would have screamed to the
heavens
and back if she could have.

Nooooooooooooo!

She was so close to death, so close to being free, so close to being released from this hell, if only to descend to another one.
Oh, God, be merciful
,
please let me die!
she pleaded inside.

Salvatore snickered out loud. In fact, he guffawed so uproariously that the opulent chandelier at the center of the lair shook, and a pair of stalactites fell to the floor, crashing in an ear-piercing explosion of calcite.

He was listening to her final
thoughts.

“Not final,” he said. “And really, Tawni:
God, be merciful?
Please, who are you kidding?” He bent so close to her face that she could smell his breath, and then his expression turned dark and lethal, more sinister than it had ever been before. He wasn’t playing around anymore. He was infuriated. He was livid. “
I
am the only god in your life now.” He pressed his hand harder into her throat. “
I
hold the power of life and death over you, and
I
dictate the quality of both.” He lowered his head and pressed a harsh, bloody kiss on her mouth. “If you ever defy me like this again, all that you’ve gone through up until now will seem like a blissful stroll through the park. I will break you. I will annihilate you. I will hurt you in places you don’t even know you have.” He grit his teeth and snarled. “Do. You. Understand?”

Tawni took her first breath of air in what felt like forever, her heart sinking with the realization that her throat was healing, she wasn’t dying, and all she had done was anger her master—and he was a merciless son of a scorpion when he was happy. She sighed, getting a feel for her newly constructed throat, and then she tested her voice. “Yes.” It was a piteous whisper.

“Louder,” he demanded.

“Yes,” she barked, and then the strangest impulse overtook her. She scrambled to her knees, bent as low as her body could stoop, and pressed her nose against the cold marble floor, peeking through the corner of her eye. “My lord?”

Salvatore sat back, eyeing her curiously.

“
My lord
?”

He humored her. “Speak.”

“I am not worthy of you. I am not worthy of your patience or your perfection. I am not worthy of your time.” She gazed up at him with seeking eyes, and beseeched him with every cell in her body. “I am not strong enough to endure your exquisite torture, and I am not smart enough to learn from your tutelage.” She averted her eyes in acquiescence. “I know this. I do. And that is why I disobeyed you, out of weakness, not defiance.
But
”—she strongly emphasized the last word—“but make me as you are, and I promise: I will find a way to get to the woman you have chosen, even without the sun.” She sat up, just slightly, and pressed her open palms together, literally
praying
to the monster. “Salvatore…
master
… I have already convinced her that I’m a battered woman.” She laughed half-heartedly and shrugged. “And that’s really kind of true. But the thing is:
I can use it
.” She looked at him then, pleading with her eyes. “That woman is
never
going to befriend me. She is
never
going to give me the time of day, let alone a job. But she did pity me—
she does pity me
—because she has a generous, compassionate heart. And if I call her and ask for help, beg her to help me escape my batterer, I believe that she will help me. No, I
know
she will help me. I won’t stop trying until she does. And so what if it has to be after dark, after the sun goes down. That makes sense, right? I can’t get away during the day. I have to plan some elaborate escape after my boyfriend falls asleep… drunk.” She waved her left hand through the air, dismissing the details, and then she dared to reach up and stroke his chin, lovingly.

“Salvatore,
master,
please… I swear on my blackened soul, I will not fail you. And I will make her feel every ounce of pain you have gifted to me.” She thought about his hatred toward the king and his ultimate goal, and she quickly revised the pledge. “I will do to the prince what you have done to me, before I take his life, but I need vampiric powers to do it. Just stop this endless procrastination and give me a chance to murder him.
Soon
.” She rubbed the pad of her thumb over his bottom lip and groaned with desire. “Please, master…
please
.”

Salvatore took a long, slow, deep breath and stroked his groin. He reached out to place his palm on the top of her head and slowly caressed her matted hair. “Oh, my pet, my pitiful, little pet.” He twirled his fingers through the bloodstained locks and hissed. “Break your other hand.”

She gaped at him in shock… and dread.

How?

She certainly couldn’t use her shattered hand to do it, and she most definitely did not want to refuse him. She placed her left palm against the marble floor, splayed her fingers wide, and bit back her shriek as she slammed her right elbow down against her hand.

It wasn’t hard enough.

It didn’t break.

She grunted and shouted and did it again… and again, wielding her elbow like a hammer until her bones finally snapped.

Salvatore smiled.

He reached for the bloody dagger and held the hilt out to her while pointing the blade at his own belly button. “To the hilt,” he instructed. “Do it… to yourself.”

Tawni whimpered to no avail. She shut her eyes and tried to breathe as beads of sweat coalesced on her forehead from concentration. She fumbled with the hilt of the dagger until she finally grasped it between her wrists and brought it to her naval. It fell to floor, three separate times, and she had to start over again. When, at last, she had it in a secure grip between the heels of both broken hands, she ground her molars together and roared as she fell forward onto the blade, arching her back as she struck it to make sure it lodged to the hilt.

Her body jerked in agony, and she fell sideways onto his lap, keening once again in unbearable pain, a piteous animal sound that frayed at her ears. “I’m sorry I’m so weak,” she sobbed.

Salvatore was finally satisfied.

He hovered over her ruined body, grasped her face in his hands, and pulled her upright, drawing a tortured scream from somewhere deep in her exhausted throat.

And then he kissed her.

Slowly.

Tenderly.

Deeply.

Drawing both his affection and her suffering out as long as he could.

When he finally pulled away, he brushed her hair behind her shoulder and stared at her blood-streaked neck. “What a pity,” he droned. “And to think, I just healed that awful mess.” He smiled, releasing his canines to a lethal length. “Very well, I will convert you, Tawni. And you will find a way to get through to Miss Matthews—and to execute the little prince—or I will rip out your heart and behead you.
Vampirism
is not your salvation. You will
never
be my equal.”

“Never,” she repeated, nodding frantically. “Never.”

He kissed her once more, and then he snarled, sounding more like a rabid dog than a vampire. “Say goodbye to your soul, Miss Duvall,” he whispered.

And then he opened his mouth and tore out her throat with his teeth.

*