Rebel Obsession (5 page)

After nabbing her cell from her bag, she punched in Persephone’s speed dial and pulled the phone to her ear.

“Hey you!” Persephone said.

Miriam smiled. Seph was her partner in crime and a sweetheart.

“I’m picking you up, Seph. I’ll be there in five.”

Miriam and Persephone had been friends since they were kids, but Seph’s family had only just returned to Chicago a couple of months ago after living in Italy for the past ten years.

“Where are we going?” Seph asked her.

“The usual.”

“Thank God. I’m almost out.”

Out. Out of cobalt. Just like Miriam. And being out was a bad thing. Very bad.

These little fights she had with her father pushed her to need the blue elixir more and more. Or the blue powder. Either way. That was the nice thing about cobalt. It could be inhaled or injected. She liked options.

Miriam pulled up the long, turnaround driveway at Persephone’s house. Within seconds, the door opened and Persephone darted out and hopped in.

“Hurry before Father stops us,” Seph said, throwing a hasty look over her shoulder.

Miriam was already hitting the gas and speeding back down the driveway.

After getting back on the road, Miriam glanced over at Seph, who had been through a lot in the last few weeks.

“How are you coping?” Miriam said. Persephone had been engaged to Arion Savakis for about a minute before finding out that Arion had already taken a mate. A male mate he worked with at AKM, from what she had heard. Talk about a blow to a girl’s confidence. Seph had taken the broken engagement pretty hard, especially since she had been dumped for another male.

“I’m okay. Easy come, easy go, right?” Seph brushed her lustrous, blond hair off her face, but her easygoing attitude wasn’t fooling Miriam. She knew Seph was devastated at losing her chance to be mated, especially to Ari. Seph had really liked him.

“Shit sucks,” Miriam said, hitting the highway.

The two hadn’t talked much since
that
night. That night being when she had overdosed and Seph had been a happy bride-to-be for all of an hour.

“Yeah, but what are you gonna do, right?” Seph shrugged and offered a weak smile. “What about you? I heard that tone in your voice when you talked about that guy. Eo, Io, or whatever his name is?” She laughed. “Ee-eye-ee-eye-oh!”

Seph seemed too pleased with herself. “Or is that ‘heigh-ho, the derry-o’?”

Miriam laughed. “You goof! Stop playing. That’s not funny.” She smacked Seph’s arm. “And it’s Io.” Her cheeks heated, her breath hitching over his name.

“A-ha! I heard that. You do like him.”

“What if I do? He sure beats anything my dad has ever presented me with.” Her father had introduced her to a lot of handsome,
worthy
young males over the years. Holiday parties and countless political functions had become a cattle parade of males all vying for her hand. She stiffened and scowled. Her father needed to mind his own business and leave finding a mate in her hands.

He thought that if he introduced her to countless males, the one who would soul-mate her would magically appear, but that wasn’t how it worked. Not for her. She was in charge. She would choose. Her father’s only saving grace was that he didn’t just want to marry her off the way Seph’s parents had tried to do with her. Everyone saw how disastrous that had been. Poor Seph.

Besides, Miriam wasn’t interested in taking a mate right now. She just wanted to have a little fun. She wanted to experiment, make out, touch and be touched—learn what this thing about the opposite sex was all about without having to worry about anyone getting arrested or killed for touching her. But her father wouldn’t even give her that much. At the times when she was able to break away from the ever-present watch of her father’s guards, it was never long before they eventually caught up to her, such as they had last night. She had been so close to tasting her first real kiss last night, but the guards had busted in and broken up the party before she’d had a chance to sample more than just the human’s blood.

But the human wasn’t who she really wanted. The gentle male from AKM, Io, who had brushed her hair and made her feel things she had never felt—that was who she wanted. She had been thinking a lot about him. What did his lips feel like? How did he taste? Would he be afraid to touch her like all the others, or would he be brave enough to break the rules with her?
Io.
With his hypnotic gaze and his tattoo and his easy manner. Why did she suspect he wasn’t as gentle as he had seemed? Was it the glint in his eye or the way he seemed to smile out of one side of his mouth as if he had a secret? Whatever it was, Io was the one she really wanted to kiss and get to know better.

“So? You going to see him again?” Persephone said, as if reading her mind.

Miriam snapped out of her fantasy and smiled. She would love to see Io again. He was handsome and tragic in an odd sort of way that made her feel like she had more in common with him than the fact that they were both vampires. The male had demons haunting him just as she did. She could see it in his eyes. And what amazing eyes he had. Green and golden brown mixed, and intense in a way that touched her all the way to her soul. It warmed her to think about him and the short time they had shared while she had been recovering at AKM from her overdose.

And it had been obvious he had been attracted to her, too. However, reality made it clear that she and Io had about as much chance at seeing each other again as a fly had against a fly swatter. As in, zilch. No chance. Nada.

“Yeah, Seph, like that will happen,” she said, rolling her eyes.

“You never know.”

“Pah-lease. Do you want to know what would happen to Io if I saw him again? Father would ruin him. Io would lose his job, his credibility, his livelihood, everything. Maybe even his life.”

It sucked having the king as a father. He did a decent job ruling the race, but he was a lousy dad. Domineering, controlling, completely out of touch. The simple fact that he had made reference to ruling her earlier was a huge clue that he needed parenting lessons in the most severe way. His idea of parenting was keeping Miriam under lock and key and preventing any male from touching her.

And if she saw Io again, she would most definitely encourage his touching her, which was why Io would never survive if she somehow managed to find her way back to him. Father would destroy him.

Her thoughts went back to that day two weeks ago, when Io had been brushing her hair while she had been in AKM’s medical ward. Io’s boss had busted in and reprimanded him for being so casual with her.
You’re not allowed to touch her,
he had said. The words had echoed like the lyrics of a bad song that had engrained itself in her mind, playing over and over ever since.

No one was allowed to touch her. As if she were some paper-thin, crystal egg shell.

“Still, you like him, Miri. I can see it all over your face.” Seph’s voice was soft. “I’ve never seen you so starry-eyed over a guy.”

Okay, so Seph was right. She hadn’t been able to stop thinking about Io since meeting him. “He brushed my hair,” she said, blushing.

Seph’s face screwed up in a cheesy half-frown, half-grin. “What? You didn’t tell me this before.” She sounded accusatory, but in a playful way.

“I know, I know. It sounds lame, but….” She sighed wistfully. “It was the most romantic thing, Seph. He brushed my hair. He got right up on the bed and sat behind me and just…brushed my hair.” She could still feel how tenderly Io had smoothed his palm over her hair as he swept the brush through it. His body heat had been intoxicating behind her and she could have sworn at one point he had wanted to reach his arm around her waist and hold her. Damn, her nipples hardened even now at the thought.

“Oh boy, you’re completely smitten,” Seph said.

“I am not.”

“Are to.”

Miriam giggled. “Okay, maybe a little.”

She had needed this. After the fight with her father, she had needed to get out and find a way to laugh and smile. Funny how thinking about Io over the past couple weeks had been about the only thing that had been able to do that.

CHAPTER FIVE

After unlocking his shackles, it took Apostle over an hour to crawl out of the corner he had been confined to for the past several weeks and reach the bathroom in the opposite corner of the room. Who would have thought a commode would feel like a luxury item? But after weeks with only a pot to piss in, properly relieving himself like a civilized gent brought him back to the land of the living.

Bishop had always been ruthless, but he seemed even more so now. Apostle never would have imagined that Bishop would subject him to such abhorrent accommodations, or that he would have allowed those scorpions to sting him. But not only had Bishop allowed it, he had encouraged it, pulling each deadly creature out from its aquarium, one-by-one, and placing it on Apostle’s body. The fucking things seemed trained to sting only him, because they never hurt Bishop.

Maybe it would have been better if he had died in Chicago, after all, because at least he wouldn’t feel like death without the funeral right now.

Through the poison haze in his mind, Apostle recalled walking into his Chicago home two months ago to find his twin brother’s decimated body alongside those of his team. Something very powerful had crushed them from the inside out, leaving them in virtual puddles of flesh. The entire living room had looked like it had been through both a tornado and an earthquake, the floor ruptured and the furniture broken and flung in disarray.

The only answer as to what had caused so much damage was a vampire. Well, more like a mixed-blood vampire. Only a mongrel could possess power like that. Full blood vampires certainly didn’t come pre-packaged with an instant natural disaster at their disposal, but mongrels could possess powers strong enough to do that kind of damage.

That fucking Micah obviously had powerful friends. Two-faced, Indian-giving asshole. Micah had come begging Apostle to kill him—a task Apostle had gladly accepted. To kill a vampire as old and strong as Micah would have been a marvelous notch in his belt, and he had wanted the notoriety of taking down the legend himself. Micah was well-known in the dreck community, and he was highly feared for his lethal skills with a knife and his fearless manner of fighting first, asking questions later. No one wanted to cross Micah, and Apostle had been thisclose to removing him as a roadblock that stood in the way of dreck progress.

Which bit Apostle’s ass no end that his moment of triumph had been thwarted by that human wench, Samantha. The bitch had shown up and shot him in the shoulder before he could finish the job on Micah in that goddamn parking garage. Apostle knew he should have killed her when he had the chance, but she had startled him and his team, and they didn’t want to risk exposing themselves further than they already had. Still, not a day went by that he didn’t regret not taking her down that night.

Oh, but he had gotten the last laugh. It had taken him some time, but he had tasted revenge when he had tracked her to Micah’s apartment to come face-to-face with the bitch again. This time, she had been helpless—no gun and no Micah to protect her—and Apostle had bitten her, giving her a lethal dose of his venom. No doubt, the catastrophe at his Chicago home had been retaliation for her death since Micah had allegedly taken her as a mate.

Touché. Except that they had missed the real target—him—and killed Deacon, instead.

The irony of enduring Bishop’s punishment after surviving the attempt on his life had made Apostle delirious with laughter more than once. Micah and his powerful mongrel friend had wished him harm, and in the end they had gotten it, hadn’t they? But Apostle wasn’t dead, which was the only in-your-face he had against Micah. Still, all the agony he had endured at Bishop’s hand over allowing his twin to be killed in his place had been worth it, because at least he had taken something away from Micah and had left him just as empty. Apostle knew how shit worked for mated male vampires, and Micah was as good as dead without Sam.

Which made his desire to go back to Chicago about nil. His job there was done, as far as he was concerned. No use tempting fate. But now Bishop had told him he wanted Apostle to return there. Why?

Probably because he was absolutely livid over Deacon’s death and wanted a slice of his own payback against the Chicago bloodsuckers. A fact Apostle knew all-too-well, because he had lived through Bishop’s immediate fury over Deacon’s death. His itching, swollen flesh made him feel like he was on fire and near death himself. What was with the scorpions? When had Bishop become so enamored of those vile creatures? Apostle swatted his arms like he was having a seizure just from the thought of those tiny stingers piercing him and pumping his body full of poison.

Were the scorpions simply used for torture or were they a part of some larger experiment?

Apostle knew that in addition to producing the mother lode of cobalt for distribution around the globe, Bishop conducted genetic experiments in his underground laboratory here in Arizona, but Apostle had never been involved in that side of the family business. He had been in charge of distribution, based in Chicago, which was an ideal location for shipping within the United States. So when it came to the Dr. Frankenstein shit Bishop had going on, Apostle was relatively clueless.

His twin, Deacon, had been in charge of the lab and the production facility, but when Apostle had to travel outside of Chicago for any length of time, Deacon usually filled in for him to keep up appearances in the Windy City. That was why Deacon had been in Chicago two months ago. He had been there to pose as Apostle while Apostle traveled to New York to deal with mafia entanglements and a rising turf war over cobalt distribution. He had only been gone a day.

In Chicago, Apostle had posed as a police officer. What better role to play to get cozy with the criminal element responsible for pushing product? And being a police officer had lots of helpful perks, such as doing pretty much what he wanted, when he wanted, and to whom.