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I don’t know who kisses who first. But I know the second Nix’s lips touch mine, I want more.
6
Kim
“Lucien, we need to talk about this.” I stalk him down the hallway, half expecting him to morph into a bat and take flight with the fucking mood he’s in.
He is walking quickly, heading for his office. When he reaches it, though, he leaves the door open so I follow him inside.
“Do you ever feel claustrophobic here?” I ask as he shoves his desk chair out of the way, opens the top drawer of the desk, takes out a flask of blood, and downs it.
He looks up at me and wipes his mouth with the back of his hand. His eyes are still freckled with red. “Here?” he asks, looking around. Obviously, his study is decorated in black with black blinds, a deep mahogany coloured floor, dark wood furniture, and creepy paintings.
“This mansion. This whole place. You barely leave it these days. At least before Luna arrived, you spent some time at the museum, but the last few weeks you haven’t gone anywhere. At all.”
“I sometimes walk the grounds at night,” he replies, sitting down hard in his chair and leaning forward to steeple his fingers together church style.
“Oh, my mistake. The grounds are lovely at night, I hear.”
Lucien looks at the chair in the corner of the room. “Are you going to sit down?”
“Am I staying?”
He licks his fangs, opens the sideboard behind him, takes out a decanter of blood this time, and fills a whiskey glass with it.
“Right. I’m staying.” I pull the chair over and sit down. “Don’t suppose you have any coffee?”
He takes his phone out of his pocket, looks like he’s about to text, then remembers the guy who makes the coffee is dead, and slams it down. “You’ll have to go make it yourself.”
“I’ll wait.” I cross my legs at the ankles and lean back. I’m not giving him an excuse to put this off. “If you want me involved in this, I have to know what’s going on. Which means I need the breakdown on your family tree and why your brother is the one trying to take over the goddamned world.”
Lucien stares into his glass and swills the blood around slowly. It coats the inside of the glass and the part of me that remembers eating the heart of the big bad Queen Vamp last summer wonders what it would be like if I tasted some. Just a little.
But that’s a slippery slope to an FHB addiction. I’ve known that ever since I spent three weeks post-heart-eating high as a fucking kite. Sure, it heightened my hunting abilities. Made me basically superhuman. But the comedown was brutal, and Lucien was the one who warned me not to let it go any further.
“So, you two are brothers? You and Nix?” Clearly, I’m going to have to tease this out of him.
“Not by blood.” He looks up. “We do not share human parentage. But we have the same maker. Which is a bond that runs deeper than genetics.”
“I see.”
“Nix is older than me. He was more powerful once, but now I’m not sure. Our maker was old. Ancient. One of the first vampires to walk the earth.”
My eyes widen as I take that in. “One of the first? So you’re like vampire royalty?”
“You could say that, yes.”
“Shit.”
“Zephyra, too. We were all—” He shakes his head.
“Zephyra?” It takes me a second to place the name. “The Queen? The one whose heart I ate?”
Lucien nods once. “Darius made her long before either of us. Why do you think Nix waited until she was dead to move on Cambridge?”
Well, shit. So killing Zephyra ended nothing. And Zephyra was Lucien’s sister?
“What’s important is that Darius created me because he wanted sons. He wanted Nix and me to be the ones who destroyed humanity and made his vision for domination finally come true. Zephyra was too head-strong and she valued humans for what they could give her. So, it was mine and Nix’s mission to sire others, to build an army—”
