Bound by Night (The Moonbound Clan Vampires) (24 page)

“What I want,” Chuck cut in, “is for that vampire behind you to do his best to turn you.” He reached over and hit another button.

Riker’s restraints snapped open, and he crashed to the floor. He was only down for a second before he leaped up, teeth bared and spitting blood.

“Fuck you,” he snarled. “I’m not doing it.”

Chuck smiled grimly. “I thought you’d say that,
Riker
.” He pivoted around and disappeared around the corner.

“Asshole.” Riker rushed to Nicole, angling his body between her and the door as his strong, warm hands came down on her shoulders. “Are you okay?”

“Yes,” she lied. She was so not okay.
This
was not okay. Her brother—
half
brother—had lost his mind, and she’d put herself and Riker in terrible danger. “What about you?” He was bruised and battered, and while his wrists had stopped bleeding, they could use some antiseptic and bandages.

“I’ll live.” Riker glared in the direction Chuck had gone. “But if I get my hands on your brother, he won’t be so lucky.”

She didn’t bother to defend Chuck or ask Riker
for lenience. What Chuck had done—was doing—was indefensible.

Chuck came back into view and stopped at another chamber. With a jerk of his wrist, he drew up the blind, revealing a naked, battered female strapped, facedown and spread-eagle, on some sort of metal contraption. Inside the room was a barred door, but what it led to Nicole wasn’t sure. She’d never seen the design in any of the blueprints she’d studied.

“Neriya,” Riker croaked. “You evil
bastard
.”

“This is our breeding chamber,” Chuck said as he punched a numerical code into a keypad on the wall. The door
whoosh
ed open, and when he entered, Nicole found out what was behind the barred door.

A mountain of male vampire attacked the gate, his growls and snarls like nothing she’d ever heard. He was as nude as the female, his body a mass of old and fresh scars, but it was his eyes that made Nicole gasp. They were brown, not silver, which meant he was a born vampire, but it wasn’t the color that caught her attention; it was the pure, raw insanity that glowed like embers in them.

And they were focused not on Chuck but on the female. Nicole had to swallow against the bile that burned in her throat.

Dear God, it wasn’t a
breeding
chamber. It was a rape chamber.

Chuck freed Neriya from the contraption and dragged her out of the room, holding the barely conscious female so Nicole and Riker would be forced to take in the full horror of Neriya’s condition.

Her pale skin was marred by bruises, abrasions, and
numerous vampire bite marks. Dried blood clung to her lips and chin, and Nicole realized with sickening clarity that she’d had her fangs extracted.

“You sick son of a bitch,” Nicole said, her voice hoarse with rage. “Who knows about this? How many board members are involved?”

“Only a handful,” Chuck said, so calmly he could have been discussing his favorite red wine. “Roland wanted to tell you about it. Before you started talking about selling off his division. And before your new vampire friends killed him.”

Dark, oily despair slithered through her at the magnitude of all this betrayal. “How long?” she croaked. “How many years has this been going on?”

“It was our father who developed the breeding program,” Chuck said, and Nicole remembered Riker telling her something similar at the cave. “Your beloved nanny was one of his first test subjects.”

At those words, Riker lost it. Completely, utterly lost it. He hit the glass with a full body slam, his roar of hatred and rage echoing through the chamber with such force that Nicole’s ears hurt.

Chuck dragged Neriya to what Nicole recognized as an industrial-sized refrigerator. “Nicole, get your vampire friend to calm down and turn you.” He shoved Neriya inside the icy fridge. “Do it, or she dies. And I promise it won’t be quick and painless.”

R
IKER COULD BARELY
see through the anger that formed a crimson veil over his vision. When Chuck came out of the refrigerator, his self-satisfied smirk made Riker swear to rip him from limb to limb. What he’d done to Neriya and to Nicole made Riker want to do the tearing of limbs very, very slowly, over a period of days. Maybe weeks. Hell, if Riker could keep the fucker alive long enough, months.

The human would also pay extra for Terese’s treatment. Riker had suspected abuse, but the reality was far, far worse than he’d imagined. How many times had she been strapped to that contraption? How badly had that brutal male hurt her?

“You’ve got an hour,” Chuck said. “Nicole takes blood first. We’ve found that the rate of infection is slightly higher if the vampire gives blood to the human before feeding rather than the other way around.”

Chuck disappeared through a door at the rear of the gymnasium-sized chamber Riker hadn’t been able to see when he’d been hanging from chains. Now the giant room appeared to contain dozens of small cells
like the one he and Nicole were in, plus some sort of large cage near the center. There was movement from within, but Riker couldn’t tell what it was.

“That son of a bitch.” Nicole’s voice was stricken, her expression equally so, as she gazed in the direction Chuck had gone. “I’m sorry, Riker. God, I’m so sorry.”

“I know,” he said. “But let’s not worry about that now. We need to get out of here.”

She slammed the side of her fist into the window, and the resulting warbling sound reverberated around the room in an almost musical wave. “These cells are built to neutralize most vampire abilities, so unless you have a laser-vision superpower we didn’t know about that can burn a hole in the Plexiglas, we’re screwed.”

Well, she’d just explained why he hadn’t been able to use his hypnotic ability on Chuck while the asshole was stringing him up in shackles. “Sweetheart, I’ve been screwed many times, and trust me, this doesn’t even come close to being the worst of them.” She shot him a dark look, no doubt thinking of their encounter in her room when he
wasn’t
screwed, and he clarified. “When I was in the military. I spent a lot of time pinned down in burnt-out buildings and on mountain ridges. There’s always a way out.”

“Then what do you suggest?”

He scanned the area, noted the cameras mounted in dozens of spots on the walls and ceiling. “Do you think he’s watching?”

“Probably.” She glanced at the twenty-four-hour clock on the wall in the main chamber. “It’s the middle of the night, so except for a guard, he’d be the only one.” She rubbed her ribs where Chuck had kicked her, the bastard.
“I still can’t believe this is happening.” Riker didn’t have that problem. Humans were capable of anything. Nicole turned to him, her eyes haunted, her face pale and etched with desperation. “You’ve got to try to turn me.”

He shot a middle-finger salute at one of the cameras. Yeah, yeah, real mature. “Not an option.”

“It’s the only way to save Neriya.”

“You know he’s not going to release her.”

“No, but maybe he won’t kill her,” she said, looking so troubled and disgusted that he had to fight the urge to take her in his arms. No way was he going to give Chuck a means to hurt them both. Better if he believed they were enemies. “The longer she stays alive, the more time we have to figure a way out of this.”

“I’m not going to turn you.”

She studied the equipment in the outer chamber. “I hate to even say this after everything Daedalus has done, but the company
has
had great success with its medical applications. The vaccine Chuck injected me with should work.”

“And if it doesn’t? You had complications from the first vaccine. What if something similar happens with this new one? Are you prepared to spend the rest of your life being what you hate the most?”

There was a long pause. “What I hate the most isn’t vampires.”

Her gaze slid up to his, and the devastation in her eyes rocked him to the core. He suddenly didn’t want to know what she hated the most, but he had a feeling she was looking inward rather than out.

He hated seeing her in pain, and the irony wasn’t lost on him, since for two decades, all he’d wanted
was to see everyone in the Martin family suffer. But now that he was here with a Martin who was suffering inside her own facility where vampires had been tortured and killed, he felt no sense of vindication. Nicole wasn’t the monster he’d believed, and again, he had to fight the urge to comfort her. Protect her.

How could he sink his fangs into those scars on her throat, knowing how much a vampire had hurt her? “I swore I wouldn’t bite you.”

“And I swore I’d do whatever it took to rescue Neriya,” she said firmly.

Shit.
This was a no-win situation if he’d ever been in one. They weren’t going to get out of here unscathed, but he was determined that they
would
get out. Not a win, exactly, but not a loss. At this point, he’d take a draw. And he
hated
draws.

Nicole blew out a long breath. “This is my fault, Riker. I need to do something to help.”

As much as he loathed seeing Nicole in agony, he loved how fierce she was when she was trying to make things right.

“You know how you can help?” He angled himself so the cameras wouldn’t miss what was coming next. “You can die.”

“Excuse me?”

Savagely, he wrapped his fist in her hair and wrenched her head so his mouth rested against her ear. “I’ll try to turn you,” he murmured, “but I’m going to make it look brutal. Your brother thinks I’m an animal, so I’ll give him what he expects. Then you need to play drained.”

“He’ll come for me to keep you from killing me,” she whispered.

“Exactly.” He snarled, hoping to hell Chuck was watching, because he didn’t like doing this. If he was going to take Nicole’s blood, he wanted it to be intimate, pleasurable. Maybe it was foolish, but he suddenly wanted to erase the memory of the vicious attack on her as a child, to show her that a vampire’s bite didn’t have to be an instrument of pain. He might not be able to make it an especially enjoyable experience, but he could at least make sure she didn’t suffer more than she already had. “It won’t hurt, Nicole. I promise. But I need you to struggle and scream like it does.”

“No.” She shoved against him. Unprepared for her sudden movement, he released her, and she scrambled backward. “No!” she shouted. “I don’t care about Neriya enough to do this.” She looked into a camera. “Chuck, let me out. Please!”

Good girl.
Riker almost smiled. She should have been an actress. In a flash, he lunged at her, catching her around the shoulders even as he bit into his wrist and released a stream of blood. She struggled as he jammed his arm against her mouth. She shook her head, fought hard enough to score him with her nails.

This killed him. Under all that determination, he scented her anxiety as blood filled her mouth and dripped down her chin. She wasn’t swallowing; self-preservation and instinct had likely kicked in, overriding her brain.

Come on, Sunshine, you can do this
. He loosened his grip a little, hoping to ease the feeling of being trapped, and her struggles lessened.

She swallowed, and a single tear rolled down her cheek. Relief and sorrow knotted in his chest. He’d
never turned a human, never even thought about it, let alone done it against the victim’s will. Oh, Nicole was willing, but it wasn’t because she
wanted
it. She was being forced by her brother, and Riker was the weapon of choice, the gun held by the crazy person.

Pulling back his wrist, he licked the wound to seal it, tasting Nicole on his skin. God, what he wouldn’t have given to make this a special, tender moment. Cursing silently, he touched the tip of his tongue to the backs of his fangs, releasing the liquid agent that both turned pain to pleasure and injected an almost instant high.

“I’m so sorry,” he murmured against her neck.

Her entire body trembled as he sank his teeth into her tender throat. She stiffened, gasping at the invasion of his fangs into her body, but within the span of a heartbeat, pleasure made her groan.

Fight me, dammit
. He cleared his throat softly, a prod that worked, because suddenly, she screamed and kicked, and as her blood flowed over his tongue, he began to drown in self-loathing.

Because as much as he hated this situation they were in, he found himself loving every moment of having Nicole in his arms and in his body.

JUST A WEEK
ago, no one could ever have convinced Nicole that she would enjoy the feel of a vampire’s fangs buried in her throat. Now she had to keep reminding herself to struggle against Riker, when all she wanted to do was melt into the warmth of his touch, and even his bite.

The taste of his blood still lingered on her tongue, but her stomach hadn’t rebelled. In fact, she felt a
little drugged, even relaxed. Her initial struggles hadn’t been feigned; her instinctive panic had been far too real. But now . . . now she had to make a conscious effort to fight him.

After what seemed like seconds, he withdrew his fangs, but he kept his mouth over the punctures, licking, making the sucking motions for her brother’s benefit.
Half
brother. And now she couldn’t consider him even that. If she turned into a vampire, she was going to kill him. If she died, she was going to haunt him.