Menessos laid his hand on my arm. “No,” he said gently. However, he graced Eva with an angry sneer. “I said no chocolates here.”
She smiled broadly. Eating her meal had not smudged her lipstick. I wondered what brand would stay that glossy even through a meal. “I mean only to share the best of me with my superiors, my lord.”
“We discussed this already. I said no. I will not have the chocolate tainting my sweet.”
“I’ve never even heard of such a thing affecting the taste of blood.”
“My refined palate is no doubt more sensitive than your former host’s.”
I’d stayed out of their conversation, but it was clear Menessos meant to enforce his rule. Fine by me. My hand dropped back into my lap.
Eva pouted up at Menessos. “I am trying to make a good impression with her.”
“Your defiance of me has ruined that possibility.”
At his tone, Risqué eased a step back, then another. Moving the way a person backing away from a wild bear would, she put distance between her and Menessos.
“Let me reclaim it,” Eva pleaded. “Let her see how delightful my chocolates are.”
Menessos sighed, relenting. He nodded. I reached and Risqué moved in again so I could take one. As I opened my mouth, however, the vampire said, “Wait.”
“What?” I asked.
“Give it to Eva.”
This was getting weird and all eyes in the silent house were trained on us as if we were the after-dinner show. Maybe we were, but I didn’t have a script, so I did as told and held out the confection.
Eva stood and accepted it. “Shall I feed her, my lord? Shall I tease her with it for your pleasure?” The twisted corner of her mouth said she would enjoy it, too.
“Eat it,” Menessos said.
Her crooked smile broke. “I am allergic to straw-berries.”
“Eat it,” he said again.
“B-but …”
“An allergic reaction is a small price to pay for your disobedience.” He leaned forward. “Eat. It.”
Eva threw the strawberry to the ground and stomped it with her foot. “I will not!”
Menessos flew from his throne amid gasps from the audience. In a flash he had her by the nape of the neck. He held her head back, throat exposed. She clawed at him, trying to maintain her balance on needle-thin stilettos. Her hands found purchase in the layers of his suit.
“You defy me a second time,” he snarled, “before all these people!”
She swallowed, her throat working hard at that angle.
“You are not allergic.”
“I—I am.”
He threw her to the floor and her cheek smacked the flooring with a thud. Most of the audience flinched. As did I.
My thoughts ran to the Rege, and how he treated women. I’d been ready to come to Cammi’s aid when Gregor hit her, and I had reason to hate Cammi. While Eva wasn’t on my list of favorite people either, I couldn’t sit here and watch Menessos beat a woman. And yet my feet did not move. My outraged tongue did not cry out.
Menessos was not a male chauvinist like the leadership of the Romanian wæres so blatantly was. He was a master and he was within his rights to punish someone who, as he had made clear, defied him twice. And I knew in my heart that he would have reacted similarly, had the offender been male or female. The Rege could not say the same.
Menessos motioned Risqué nearer. By the time she had moved close, Eva had recovered enough to rise to her knees.
His fist closed in her hair and he jerked her head back again, forcing her to look up at him. From my position, slightly higher atop the dais, I saw that whatever brand of lipstick she wore would, after brute contact with a floor, smudge. Ugly darkness smeared onto her cheek, marring her exquisite beauty like dirt on an angel’s face.
“Open your mouth,” he said.
She clamped her mouth shut and no longer looked dazed.
Menessos gripped her jaw so tightly that his fingers pressed her cheeks in. She tried to keep her mouth closed, but couldn’t. A single sob wracked her lean frame.
Releasing his grip on her hair, Menessos reached across his chest to select a beautiful strawberry from the tray and held it over Eva’s mouth.
Her arms flailed. Her nails clawed at his wrist. She wrenched herself away, crying out, “It’s poison!”
My stomach flipped and flopped.
I’d almost eaten it!
The master vampire’s demeanor had remained calm throughout the gruesome display, but just then as he set the strawberry back on the tray, he was positively icy. “Are you allergic?” he asked, as he reclaimed his grip on her hair.
“No. No, master.”
“You lied to me,” he spat the words on her. “You tried to murder my Erus Veneficus!”
“It is the way of my former master’s court.”
“Defiance was the way of Heldridge?”
“No. Survival of the fittest, of the most cunning.”
“You were told it is not the way of this court!”
“Mercy, master!”
She had nowhere to go. No one to protect her. And she knew it.
With his one fist still wrapped in her hair, Menessos’s other hand shot down with enough force that as he grabbed her by the lowest part of her rib cage, his fingers stabbed through her dress and into her flesh. She screamed as he jerked her up, lifting her as if she weighed no more than a rag doll, and brought her bared throat to his mouth.
Her voice filled the renovated theater … until his fangs pierced her. Until his jaws clamped onto her throat and he shoved her away from him even as he tore a wide gash in her flesh. Blood squirted and gushed.
His bloody fingers slid free from her rib cage as Eva’s fingers clutched at her neck. Menessos snatched a strawberry from the tray and shoved it deftly between Eva’s fingers and into her opened throat, then took his hand from her hair. She fell back onto the stage floor, thrashing and kicking for long seconds.
Above us all, the scream echoed, and finally, like its maker, died.
“Destroy those,” Menessos commanded, gesturing at the tray Risqué held.
She hurried in her ruffled short-shorts to obey.
I just witnessed a murder. My heart thudded in my chest, my ears buzzed, and I felt cold to my core. My spine was wrapped in a thick weaving of anxiety, fear, and repulsion. But underneath my sternum was heat. Not lust heat. This was like the sharpest edge of a blade heated in forge-fire. It sliced through me and its blazing edge severed me from the naïveté that once would have denied that such things happened even in a vampire’s haven. But I could not deny it now. In the wake of that severing was a residue of cinnamon.
“This is my house,” Menessos bellowed to the stunned audience. “My rewards for loyalty are grand, but I tolerate no threats. I permit no defiance! I allow no harm to be doled out among you, one to the other. I will give you death if you defy me! My punishment is swift. Do you hear me, members of this haven?”
“Aye,” answered those who were already claimed as his.
“Do you hear me, initiates?”
“Aye.”
“Then come forth and receive your master’s embrace, accept my mark, and become mine.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
Once upon a time, I’d killed a man. It was an accident. He was a low-life druggie who was stalking Beverley’s mom and when I’d intercepted him he threatened me with a knife. In the struggle, we fell. He landed on the blade.
Those seconds as he died were seared into my memory.
It was my dark secret, a shame I would always carry.
In seeing Eva’s body and the pool of her blood, in peering out at the crowd, in having heard the words Menessos just uttered, and in knowing that Eva had meant to kill me, I knew for certain this was a murder no one would ever know about except those who’d witnessed it. And all those in attendance, save Johnny and me, belonged to the vampire who’d perpetrated the killing.