Prince of Power (8 page)

Siddoh gave a curt nod to his king as Thad, Lee, and Alexia left the room and then resumed a watchful and ready stance by the front door. His eyes were flat and firmly fixed on his new prisoner.

Apparently Thad wasn't the only one who couldn't stand to look at her.

Anton breathed slowly and carefully, a controlled in and out that served both to lessen the stabbing pain in his side and to delay announcing to the room that he was conscious. His ears worked fine, but his brain was still churning through sludge. The gist was perfectly clear: Tyra had told her brother who Anton was, and the shit had hit the fan.

It was a little hard to believe that he wasn't dead yet. How much time had they wasted while the doctor checked him over and the king read Tyra the riot act? Hours? Not that Anton was going to point that out, but instead of spending half the night and precious vampire-strength painkillers, they could've cut to the chase and more expediently done what everyone there knew they were probably going to do to him anyway.

But then none of that mattered because Tyra was close, the heat of her breath puffing against his cheek. The muscles in his neck twitched and burned with the urge to turn toward her. To open his eyes so that he could gauge the expression on her face. Maybe he could give them all the information they wanted and skip straight to the part where they killed him. He wasn't afraid to die, but he'd be happy to take a pass on more torture.

A shadow fell over his face. “Anton.”

The whisper caused a gentle flutter of Tyra's soft, damp lips against Anton's outer ear. Another puff of breath curled around the base of his neck and sent a shiver down his spine. His breath caught. Dammit, Anton wanted to look at her face. But that male—the one who had been here before, and whose voice had been colored with tones of possession and familiarity—was still in the room.

A warm puff of Tyra's breath hit Anton's skin. “I'm sorry I had to tell them. There was no other way for me to explain why I'd been with you. How you'd been injured.”

The brief frisson of excitement was chased down by a full-scale stiffening of his body of an entirely different variety. He groaned at the pain it caused. “Why did you even bother?”

Now Tyra stiffened, throwing off the kind of angry heat that one might expect to experience from, say, a sudden nuclear explosion. “That's some gratitude you've got.”

Gratitude? “Either way I was dead before we set out at the beginning of the night. Why prolong things?” He breathed the words in a low tone that, God willing, only she could hear.

“What the hell are you talking about? I saved your life out there,” she hissed.

Goddamn, he was too hurt and exhausted for this shit. “Do we really have to rehash this? They're going to kill me as soon as your brother has all the information he wants from me.”

“You saved my life. Thad will understand. I'll make him understand.”

“No
way
is he going to give a shit about that, honey.” The volume of both their voices had risen, but Anton didn't care. He was sweating now, his body vibrating intensely with an unfamiliar rage. He finally gave up the ridiculous pretense and opened his eyes, turning his head slightly to face her. Brown eyes flashed only inches from his own, dark and full of fire.

Tyra's jaw clenched, her lips pressed together into a thin line. “I am not your hon—”

A shrill whistle cut through the electricity between them. “Sorry to interrupt the love fest, Ty, but I'm gonna have to ask you to stop talking to the prisoner.”

Tyra rose to her feet, whirling to face the growling Siddoh. She vibrated with even more rage than Anton. Thankfully it was no longer aimed at him, but at the beefy vampire across the room instead. “He isn't a prisoner, Sid.”

The large vampire—Siddoh, his name was?—cut her off with a snarl. “You are fucked in the head, Ty, if you honestly believe that. Thad wouldn't have me standing here if he weren't. Son of a bitch is lucky he isn't being held in an interrogation cell.”

An excruciating pull in Anton's side made it a fight to sit up. Still, he gritted his teeth and pushed forward. He would not stand for Tyra being treated like that.

“Siddoh, he kept me safe for almost two weeks. You have no grounds upon which to treat him like a criminal.” Tyra advanced fearlessly toward Siddoh, shoulders squared and head held high. Her loose curls were in wild disarray from the wind outside, which only made her seem more feral as she challenged the big vampire. She looked for all the world like she was ready to take him on in any way necessary. She was gorgeous like that.

Siddoh stepped forward as well. “Which
might
mean Thad lets him die quick instead of slow.”

Anton stepped forward, panting through each stab of pain. He ignored the damp trickle down his side. Siddoh and Tyra were toe to toe now, two hot-tempered vampires coursing with barely contained fury.

“No one is killing him. I am Thad's sister, for chrissakes, and I am telling you—”

“You aren't shit anymore, Sister. He is our enemy, and he's in serious trouble just for being here.” Siddoh's mighty bellow was accompanied by a shove of his ugly, meaty hand against Tyra's shoulder, sending her back a few steps.

Oh, hell fucking no. Before he even thought it through, Anton had launched through the air, ignoring the head-spinning nausea and the scream in his side. “Don't you touch her!”

Shit. One second Anton was launching himself at a seething wall of vampire, and the next, Siddoh had disappeared entirely. The blow came from behind. White light exploded behind Anton's eyes, and the plush white of Tyra's living room carpet smacked him in the face. He followed the sound of boot steps, pushing away from the floor to confront Siddoh again, but a powerful wave of dizziness pulled him sideways.

“Anton?”

Tyra's hands were warm and reassuring as they pressed gently on either side of his face. Once again he was bleeding from somewhere. The fresh, bright red against the white fibers struck him as bad, but through his rattled brain and the ringing in his ears, Anton couldn't make sense of it.

Someone tried to help him up. Tyra. Boy, she smelled good. “Anton. My God, Siddoh, what did you to do him?”

Anton groaned, and the angry voices faded away. Everything was so blurry all of a sudden. So much for being the white knight.

***

“Oh God. Oh God.
Fuck.
” Thad's fingers clawed at the sheets. He stilled, his release coming just as Isabel bent over him, fangs extended, to rip into his flesh. Sore and spent, he lay still and let his breath come under control as his blood flowed freely. Likely he was bruised head to toe.

Isabel sucked hungrily, and after taking her fill and lapping at his wound, a trickle of his blood still leaked from the corner of her mouth. Her hair was wild and full, flowing over her shoulders. Ten points of pain, five on each arm, told Thad her nails were still embedded in his skin. The pregnancy had turned Isabel's need, both for his flesh and for his blood, into something base, carnal, and altogether primal. Thad fucking loved it.

“Did I hurt you?” The languorous sweep of Isabel's tongue over that stray rivulet of blood and the catlike curve of her lips showed that his female knew just how much he enjoyed these wild lovemaking sessions. He brought his wrist to his mouth to seal another leaking puncture with his own saliva.

“Of course you did,” he murmured to his mate. His body was leaden and wrung out from the frenzy, which had been just exactly what he needed. The world outside their bedroom door was more than he could handle on so many occasions, and given that handling it was exactly what he had pledged to spend the remainder of his days doing, he reveled in knowing that one thing he could do for certain was please Isabel.

They'd come such a long way together in such a short time, with Isabel changing from the party girl who had run away from him when he'd first found her to the trusted lover and confidante he now had.

Isabel curled against Thad's side. He lazily combed his fingers through the soft auburn waves of her hair and then trailed his fingers over her damp skin. Foggy mist hung in the air, a result of their union. When the two of them made love, Thad's power of fire and Isabel's ability to produce ice came together in a most explosive way, sometimes producing a light mist and sometimes enough steam to turn their master suite into a sauna. The drawers in each of the two bedside tables were already starting to stick, as was the door on Isabel's closet.

Perhaps they needed to replace everything in the room with deck furniture.

“Feeling any better?” His mate ran a lovely, pale manicured hand over his chest. Thad sighed into the touch, bringing the hand to his lips so that he could kiss and lick the salty sweat from her fingers. An essence of something sweet, like vanilla sugar, lay on her skin as well.

One more deep, bolstering breath and Thad nudged Isabel to the side. He needed nearly every spare ounce of energy to get his ass out of the privacy of their curtained, walnut four-poster bed. He hated the loss of Isabel's warmth.

“Better?” He shrugged and bent to retrieve a discarded pair of black fatigues and a rumpled shirt from the floor. “You popped a button, love.” He smiled wryly and tossed it into the special bin the maid had placed beside the dresser for damaged clothing in need of repair. Most fighters had such a bin. Fighting was a messy business, after all. But Thad's bin had never seen as much action as it had since he'd stopped fighting and mated with Isabel.

“A little more relaxed, at least?” Her brow furrowed in that way it did when she was worried, creating an amusing topography of hills and valleys on her face. Thad leaned down to kiss the spot above her nose where the deepest of the frown lines ended. His hand smoothed over the skin, willing it back to normal. His finger traced carefully over a scar on her throat from a childhood accident. She regarded him thoughtfully with green eyes, one clear but one cloudy from that same accident that had left her an orphan.

“A little. Thanks.” Though even as he said the words, responsibilities that lay just outside their door came barreling into his mind, causing his muscles to draw tight and his heart to beat faster.

Thad deliberately turned his back while he donned his pants and rummaged in his smaller closet to find a clean shirt. When at last he was dressed, socks on and boots laced, he chanced a look at the bed. Isabel's expression was deadpan, and her arms were crossed over her ample breasts as she sat propped against the headboard.

That otherworldly left eye narrowed at him from across the room. “See, I know you're not trying to bullshit me, Thad, because I just drank your blood.”

Uh-uh
.

Hands on hips, Thad shook his head slowly. “I'm not trying to bullshit you.” He dropped his chin to his chest and sighed. “I just can't wrap my head around what Ty was thinking in trusting this guy. I can't fucking believe—” At Isabel's visible wince he stopped short and lowered his voice. Her preternatural hearing was off the charts these days.

“Sorry. I just can't believe Ty was stupid enough to bring an enemy into our midst like that. And then there's Lee. After seven hundred years he makes a boneheaded move like leaving her with this guy for more than a week? I don't know what to do with any of it. I can't let it go unanswered.”

“You said this man protected her.”

“Wizard,” Thad ground out.

“Okay. Wizard.” After a nasty smirk aimed in his direction, she rose from the bed so she could slide into her robe. Thad's annoyance died away and his heart clenched at the sight of her voluptuous curves disappearing beneath layers of peachy satin. “So this supposed wizard helped her. He offered her blood and protected her for days while she was in torpor.

“Lee, your guard, your friend, who has pledged his life to keeping your family—
our
family—safe, took an incredibly dangerous mission upon himself. He used those centuries of experience to make a judgment call that he was leaving Tyra with a concerned individual so he could try to finally kill the monster who most threatened not just her life but the lives of all of our kind.

“There must have been no malevolent aura about this man. Lee is old enough, strong enough, that he would have sensed it, even if it were subtle. For that matter, Tyra can read emotions. She ought to have felt it if this guy was dangerous to her. I know she's impulsive sometimes, but your sister is not stupid. I can't see her putting herself in his grasp at her most vulnerable healing time if she sensed any kind of danger from him.”

“Isabel…”

Isabel silenced Thad's protest with one lift of a finger, and he stifled a growl. She was with child, of course, but there were limits to Thad's patience, even with her. He strode impatiently back and forth across the length of their bedroom.

“So that means probably this wizard was telling the truth about his intentions. Maybe he really was trying to help Tyra find the secret lair or whatever, not lead her into a trap. And maybe he really is willing to help us.”

Thad scrubbed a hand over his face. “The fact that he saved Tyra's life is why he's under guard in her house and not locked in a solitary cell across the estate. But I cannot just ignore who and what he is, or the fact that Tyra kept pertinent information from me.”

Suddenly Isabel was behind him. Warm arms, breasts, and gently swollen belly pressing. She wasn't very far along, but vampire pregnancies progressed quickly. Feeling evidence of his offspring inside her was a turn-on. His cock swelled slightly despite his exhaustion. Despite the fact that it hadn't been long since the last time.

“What are you going to do if it's something more serious with this male than just saving her life? After all, we both know how grateful I was when you saved my life not so long ago.”

The very memory of Isabel's gratitude the night he'd saved her from being kidnapped by wizards kicked his body temperature into high gear in a very pleasant way. Thad turned into her embrace. Her lips were warm and soft against his when he claimed her mouth. A trace of his own blood lingered when his tongue swept inside. If only he could kiss her forever, or at least until this whole terrible business with Tyra and that wizard got straightened out.