Crimson Debt: Book 1 in the Born to Darkness series (9 page)

“Fun?” I looked at her in disbelief. “Handing
Taylor over to be raped and tortured was what you consider
fun?
You sick bitch!”

Celeste hissed but Corbin was suddenly
between us.

“Step back, Celeste. Let my consort tend to
the fledgling.” He gave me the key, which felt oddly heavy in my
hand, and shook his head slightly. I wasn’t sure if he was warning
me not to fight with Celeste anymore or what but I was too upset to
care. With trembling fingers, I unlocked the two sides of the belt
and pulled it away from my best friend’s smoking flesh. There were
burns on her lily-white skin that made me think of the marks from a
barbeque grill. I had to fight my gag reflex as I helped her out of
it and threw the hateful thing over the side of the bed with a
clatter.

“You shouldn’t have come,” she whispered,
casting a fearful glance over my shoulder to where Roderick watched
us expressionlessly. “It’s not safe.”

“Corbin is helping,” I told her. “He’s got my
back so don’t worry about it.”

She got a worried expression on her face.
“What did you have to promise him?”

“Later for that. Do you have some clothes
around here?”

“By the side of the bed. He…he made me strip
them off before he…” She shook her head, unable to continue.

“You don’t have to say it.” I reached for the
clothes but Corbin was already handing them to me. He stood with
his back to us, considerately shielding Taylor from both Celeste
and Roderick while I got her dressed. Thankfully her flesh was
already healing so by the time I got her into her pale pink top she
was able to slide on the tan linen skirt that went with it without
too much pain.

“We can really leave?” She looked at me
hopefully as I finished getting her dressed.

I nodded firmly. “We really can. We’re going
to get you out of here.”

I tried to help her off the bed but she
nearly fell. “Sorry,” she gasped, clutching her head. “Just a
little weak. Light-headed.”

“How much blood have you lost? You need to
feed.” I pushed up my sleeve automatically, offering her my wrist
but suddenly Corbin was gripping my arm.

“No.” His silver-blue eyes were hard,
possessive. I glared right back at him.

“Let me go. There’s nothing sexual about
this—Taylor is weak after what that bastard did to her. She needs
blood.”

“Well, she’ll get no more of yours.” Corbin
swung Taylor into his arms and carried her around the side of the
bed. I followed reluctantly, glaring at his back.
Possessive
asshole!

I noticed that Roderick and Celeste were
whispering together but I was too angry to pay much attention to
the way they were staring at me. Let them look and I didn’t give a
damn if Roderick had heard me call him a bastard either. In fact, I
hoped he
had
heard me. All I needed was a tiny excuse to
pull the trigger and it would be fine with me if he gave me
one.

We marched out of the house and it wasn’t
until we were in Corbin’s Mercedes with Taylor safely stowed in the
backseat that Corbin said anything. He drove several blocks in
complete silence and then he turned to me, his eyes blazing.

“Do you have any conception of what you’ve
just done?”

“What do you mean? I didn’t do anything.”

“You most certainly did. I claimed you as my
consort and then you offered to feed another vampire. You made this
offer right in front of me as well as the Area Inquisitor and one
of my inferiors.”

“Taylor’s hurt—she needs blood.” I crossed my
arms over my chest defensively. “Look, I’m sorry but I wasn’t
thinking about your precious ego—I was thinking about my friend’s
wellbeing.”

Corbin gripped the steering wheel and swore
fluently in a language I didn’t recognize, though the gist of what
he was saying was pretty clear.

Finally he took a deep breath and looked at
me again. “What you have done was tantamount to offering to commit
adultery in front of high-ranking witnesses. In Roderick’s mind, I
now wear the cuckold’s horns.”

“The what?” I asked but Corbin only shook his
head and continued.

“Roderick will draw one of two conclusions.
Either he will think that I am weak and unable to control my own
consort or he will deduce that I was lying and claiming you falsely
as my own. Either conclusion puts us in a very, very
bad
situation.” His voice so quiet I could barely hear it yet so filled
with menace it made me shiver.

“I didn’t know,” I said.

“You must have had at least some idea. I told
you when I was healing your scars.”

“You never specifically said—”

“Silence.” Corbin held up a hand and looked
away from his driving to glare at me. “We will have to find a way
to rectify this situation later. In the meantime, you are not to
give Taylor any more of your blood.”

“How is she supposed to heal if I don’t?” I
demanded, throwing a concerned glance over my shoulder. Taylor was
huddled in on herself, a small ball of misery in the back seat.
“You saw what he did to her,” I said to Corbin in a softer voice.
“She needs me.”

He looked at Taylor in the rearview mirror.
“She needs more than you can give her right now. She will be given
bagged blood when we get back to
the Fang.”

“But bagged blood won’t keep her alive for
long,” I protested. For some reason unless blood is fresh from the
vein, it doesn’t have the nutrients and life force vamps need to
keep going. Otherwise I wouldn’t have had to play pincushion slash
blood bank for my best friend for so long.

Corbin frowned. “It will suffice until I can
find one who owes me enough to pay the Crimson Debt and let her
feed from them without the use of glamour.”

“The Crimson Debt? What’s that?”

“It is none of your concern,” he growled.
“You’re lucky I’m seeing to your friend at all. I should let her
starve as part of your punishment but I am not like Celeste—I find
no pleasure in cruelty.”

I was about to thank him, albeit reluctantly,
when what he’d said really sank in. “Wait a minute—what
punishment?”

Corbin glanced at me. “The one you have
incurred by being disobedient and making the Area Inquisitor
suspect our duplicity.”

“You’re delusional, Corbin—you can’t punish
me!”

“Watch me,” he said evenly. “We made an
agreement and though I have honored my end of it, you are failing
miserably so far at yours. You have actually
weakened
my
standing with the Inquisitor. Some very serious punishment is
definitely in order.”

“What are you going to do? Put me over your
knee?”

I was joking but Corbin appeared to actually
consider the idea. Finally he shook his head. “I fear you’re too
stubborn for corporal punishment although it would be well within
my rights to spank your lush bottom until you cried tears of
contrition.”

I didn’t like the way this conversation was
going at all. “Look, when we agreed to work together I never said
anything about letting you punish me if things went wrong.”

“You didn’t have to. You agreed to act as my
consort and as such you tendered me the right to do whatever I
wanted with your mind or body.”

“I did not! Or if I did, I didn’t know it,” I
protested. Talk about not reading the fine print! But Corbin was
shaking his head.

“Ignorance of the law is not excuse for
breaking it. Make no mistake about it, Addison, you
will
take your punishment or I am taking your friend right back to
Celeste to do with as she chooses.”

“You bastard!” I wanted to hit him but I knew
I wasn’t strong enough to hurt him. “I can’t believe you’d
blackmail me into letting you do whatever you want.”

“Then you do not know me very well, Addison.”
We were pulling into the employee parking lot around the back
entrance of
Under the Fang
and he stopped the Mercedes and
turned to face me. “From the moment I saw you, I knew I would do
anything to have you and I do not care how I achieve my goal. By
fair means or foul, you
will
be mine.”

“But…but
why?”
I said desperately.
“Look at you, Corbin—you’re rich, you’re powerful—hell, you can
give multiple orgasms with your
mind
. You could have any
woman you wanted. Why me?”

He smiled humorlessly. “Maybe someday I will
tell you. For now all you need know is that you are my ideal and I
mean to have you. And tonight I am going to punish you.”

So we were back to that again. “Look, I’m not
going to let you—”

He put the key back in the ignition and
started the car again.

“Wait, what are you doing?” I demanded.

“Taking Taylor back to Celeste. You obviously
wish to renege on our deal.”

“No, I don’t! Anyway, you’re bluffing. I saw
the way you looked at Celeste—you wouldn’t take Taylor back to her
after what she did.”

He raised an eyebrow at me and put the car
into drive. “You think I am bluffing? Would you care to call my
bluff then?”

I crossed my arms over my chest. “No. Damn
you.”

Corbin frowned at me again. “You know, I
could chain you up and do what I wanted as Roderick did to your
friend. But as I said, I dislike such practices. Will you yield to
me willingly or not?”

I took a deep breath. He wasn’t giving me a
choice. “Fine. I’ll, uh, yield to you. But I think after this we
need to spell out the terms of this contract between us. And also,
you’re an asshole.”

Corbin smiled grimly and killed the engine.
“I have been called worse. Now, come—the night is not getting any
younger and I want plenty of time to savor your punishment before I
have to think of a way to keep us both alive.”

Corbin called some of his underlings to take
care of Taylor. Then he escorted me to an underground chamber
beneath his office I hadn’t even known was there. But when he
opened what looked like a reinforced cellar door and made an “after
you” gesture, I balked at going down the long stone staircase.

“Uh-uh—don’t think so. I’m
really
claustrophobic.”

“The passage opens up after a few hundred
feet.” He gestured again at the dark, shadowy staircase leading
down. I felt my heart leap into my throat.

“No, I’m not going down there.”

I suppose he could have grabbed my arm and
forced me down the steps but instead he sighed and looked me in the
eyes. “Why?”

“What do you mean, ‘why?’ Why do you think?
Just look at that—it’s like a set for a horror movie. The kind
where you keep wanting to shout at the clueless girl not to go down
in the basement but she goes anyway.”

A faint smile tugged at the corner of his
mouth. “I know the movies you speak of. I find them most
entertaining.”

“Well, I find them frightening and I’m not
about to be the stupid airhead who goes down into the dark looking
for the monster.”

He crossed his arms over his chest. “Is that
what you think of me? That I am a monster?”

“You’re about five hundred times stronger and
faster than me and you live on blood. What do you think?”

“So again, you fear my strength. You fear
that I will, what—lose control and hurt you?”

“Hurt me or kill me.” I shook my head. “If
you only knew the things I’ve seen. Do you know what happens when a
vampire tries to have sex with a human?”

Corbin got a sober expression on his face.
“Indeed, I have seen such scenes as you describe. They are not
pretty.”

“Right. So you’ll forgive me if I don’t want
to end up looking like a pet puppy some careless toddler ‘loved’ to
death.”

“Haven’t I explained that this is not a
problem with older vampires who have learned control? The secret is
all in keeping the urge for sex separate from the urge for
blood.”

“Oh yeah? Well then, why did Roderick ask if
you could…could fuck me without breaking me?” My cheeks were hot as
I spoke the words.

He sighed again. “Therein lies the caveat.
Roderick, in all his centuries, has never cared enough to learn to
control himself with a fragile lover.”

“And you have?”

Corbin got a distant look in his silver-blue
eyes. “There was one in my past. I will not speak of her now, but
yes, I cared enough for her to learn control.”

I was interested despite myself. “And what
happened to her?”

He looked away. “She died anyway.” I noticed
he didn’t say
how
she died or if he or someone else had
killed her but the expression on his face was such that I didn’t
dare ask.

“I’m sorry,” I said awkwardly.

Corbin shook his head. “Don’t be. It was many
lifetimes ago—your ancestors had not even been born when it
happened.” He seemed to shake himself, throwing off the melancholy
mood that had gripped him. “So you fear to go down to my resting
place with me because you think I will want to make love to you and
then lose control.”

“That about sums it up, yes.”

“But I have told you before that I am not
interested in an unwilling bed partner. And you are most certainly
still unwilling,” he pointed out. “What if I promised that I would
not try to have sex with you tonight?”

“Really?” I was beginning to wonder what form
this punishment was going to take. If spanking was out and sex was
out, what was Corbin going to do with me?

“Yes, really.” He nodded. “In fact, I will
barely touch you tonight.”

“Honestly?”

“On my word of honor.” He nodded gravely and
then reached out to cup my cheek. “Addison, I do not like to be at
odds with you.”

“Then let me go home,” I said at once.

He got an almost regretful look on his face.
“I am afraid I cannot do that. But though I cannot let you go, I
will not hurt you either. Can you at least trust me enough to
believe that?”

I looked into his eyes—those silvery-blue
depths that always seemed to conceal hidden monsters—and saw only
sincerity.
He means it. He really means it.