He positioned her in front of him, one of his arms going around her waist holding her tight against his chest and his stomach. Her sweet ass pressed to his thighs.
Feeling her soft body against his hard one, he knew it would be a long week to wait for The Bloodletting.
He reached across the front of her taking up the quill and he dipped it in their combined blood.
Take my hand in yours, he commanded.
She did as she was told.
Together they wrote the word Bound between their names in their mingled blood.
It was done. She was his.
Triumph seared through him.
He hadn’t felt that in a long time either and he liked it the best of all.
His arm tensed along her waist as he shoved his face into her neck, smelling her skin, her hair, the perfume that she didn’t need, hearing the blood sing warm and moist through her veins. He heard the breath move out of her in a gasp and knew he was using too much strength.
He kept her pinned to him and didn’t let go.
Mine, he declared.
Never, she returned.
His mouth moved to her ear and he murmured, “We’ll see.”
He felt her shiver.
Then he freed her mind and her body from his control.
She felt it immediately, turned in his arm to glare at him a moment before she tore herself free and ran directly from the room.
Chapter Three
The Bloodletting
I stood at the window staring out at the night.
The sky was free of clouds, the moon full, its brightness frosting the dark, immaculate garden below in a way that was appropriately eerie.
My eyes moved from the garden and I caught my reflection in the glass.
I looked like an idiot.
I was wearing a pale pink nightgown, simple, unadorned by lace or any other accoutrement. It was ankle length, slit up both sides all the way to my hips with spaghetti straps holding up the bodice and the back under my shoulder blades between a deep exposed V.
Some strange woman named Edwina had come in to do my hair and makeup. She’d been quiet and watchful but smiling and obviously excited like I was about to be crowned queen of the world.
I let her have at it and stayed quiet too. I had too much on my mind.
I shouldn’t have stayed quiet. She gave me way too much hair. She also gave me way, way, way too much makeup.
I was, imminently, going to get my throat gnashed open by that fucking vampire’s teeth, he was going to suck my blood and then go home to his mate.
Why all the fuss?
After The Selection I told my mother what happened in the Contract Room and demanded she contact the Vampire Dominion and appeal the contract.
At first, she looked shaken. Then she called my aunts. My aunts called in my sister but surprisingly not my cousins.
They had a meeting I wasn’t invited to which pissed me off.
Then they contacted The Dominion but not to appeal the contract, to get a copy of it.
As was my and their due, this we received. Avery delivered it personally. Behind closed doors, without me there, they’d perused it for hours.
Okay, more like an hour but it felt like a million of them.
My sister came out first, her face pale, eyes shocked. She said not one single word before she took off. This was surprising. Lana was chatty. She could chat anyone’s ear off. I didn’t think it was even in her not to say a single word.
This was not a good sign.
My Aunt Kate came out next. For some reason she looked shocked too but determined. The oldest of the four Buchanan matriarchs, as tradition had ingrained in me for four decades, she had the final say. I just didn’t like the final say.
It was this: “You’ll abide by the contract.”
“What?” I shouted.
“Every word,” she returned. Then without one more word, as if she was scared of what those words might be and I swear Aunt Kate wasn’t scared of anything, she took off.
So did Millicent and Nadia.
My mother stood before me and I demanded, “They can’t be serious.”
“If you go against us, you’ll be banished from our family,” my mother replied softly trying, I knew, to take the sting out of her awful words. “If you go against Lucien, with that signed contract, he’ll have certain rights, Leah. Rights you won’t want him to invoke. Rights, I feel relatively certain, he will.”
“And those are?” I snapped, tired of the secrets and not scheduled to go to my Vampire Studies until the next day. Vampire Studies were two days of learning all things vampire and all things concubine, something I was not only not looking forward to but had, at that moment, no intention of doing.
“He’s allowed to hunt you and when he finds you, which he would, he’s allowed to do as he wishes,” Mom answered.
“And ‘as he wishes’ means suck my blood which is exactly what that contract allows him to do, amongst other things.”