Page 82 of Edge of Darkness (Night Prowler 4)
Her brows drew together in confusion.
He lowered his head and brushed his lips across hers, raising the hair on her arms. He whispered, “That you’re in love with me.”
“I-I didn’t…really…say…that.” She was having a hard time concentrating on anything she might have said over the last five minutes.
His tongue skimmed the corner of her mouth. His teeth grazed her lower lip. “Tell me.”
Crumbling, crumbling, the footing beneath her feet, as if she stood on the edge of a very high cliff and piece by piece, inch by inch, the ground was giving way beneath her.
She breathed his name. Her hands around the back of his neck trembled, and she felt his smile against her mouth, a gentle curve of his lips she wanted to trace with her fingers. With her tongue.
“All right. I’
ll let you off the hook for the moment. But you have to go and pack a bag now. Just bring the essentials, I’ll get you anything else you need—clothes and whatever else—tomorrow.”
Blinking out of her daze, Ember asked, “What?”
Christian raised his head and gave her a wide, dazzling smile. “Oh, didn’t I mention? You’re moving in with me.”
When her mouth dropped open in shock, he added firmly, “Tonight.”
Caesar decided that aside from the sounds of a whip cracking, a woman screaming and a stronger man than he whispering a deferential, “Yes, sire,” the most beautiful noise in the world was the wet crunch a finger made when smashed beneath the heavy steel head of a hammer.
Well, the howl of pain that accompanied it was pretty good, too.
“Oh, don’t be such a whiner, Nico, you know it’ll heal in a few days!” he said cheerfully to the man writhing in agony in a chair opposite him. He was being held with his arm stretched across a wood table by four others, trusted males who’d proven their appetites for pain nearly matched his own. A fifth was vigorously applying the hammer to Nico’s fingers, one by one.
They were still on his left hand. Caesar wanted to prolong this little show as long as possible.
He held up a knife, ran a finger along its serrated blade, and watched all the blood drain from Nico’s face. “The wounds from this blade, however, might take a bit longer to heal.”
There would be scars, however. Lovely, lovely scars.
Nico begged, “Sire, the girl was already gone. There was nothing I could do. She moved—”
“Nothing you could do?” repeated Caesar with lifted brows. “Well if there’s nothing you can do, why on Earth am I keeping you around?” He smiled at Nico and watched with gleeful satisfaction as he cringed in terror. There was snickering from the other four. The male holding the hammer was silent, watching Caesar with avid, unblinking eyes for a sign to continue.
Caesar gave a tiny nod, and he lifted the hammer.
“Her landlord!” Nico screamed, seeing the sinister motion. “I can find out where she went from her landlord!”
Caesar held up his hand. The hammer paused.
“Why didn’t you do that in the first place, Nico? We could have avoided all this if you’d just done your job correctly.”
Not that Caesar wished he had. This was far too much fun.
Caesar liked to watch things bleed. In fact, “liked” was too soft a word, much too tepid to describe the surge of lust and hot excitement that gripped him when he saw blood. Any blood—even his own. He’d gotten into many fights as a younger man simply to watch himself bleed. It didn’t matter that he inevitably lost. Just the sight of that lush, crimson liquid dripping down his face gave him such a raging hard-on he’d explode as soon as he touched himself.
This bloodlust ran in his family. His father had it, and his grandfather, and if the whispered rumors he’d caught snatches of all his life were true, his great-grandfather had it, too.
But as far as he knew, none of them shared his particular attraction to dead things.
His particular sexual attraction to dead things. The females he chained up and whipped until they expired were of use to him long after they grew cold.
Well, no matter. Those men were all six feet under and he wasn’t—he never would be—so what he shared in common with long-dead ancestors was of no consequence. What was of consequence: finding the bland-as-white-bread brunette who would lead him to the male who’d killed two of his men and most probably wanted to kill him, too. They’d almost had her; one of his men had chanced upon a newspaper article featuring a picture of her staring with big, haunted eyes into the camera at the opening of a bookstore a few years ago. Once they knew her name, it was simple enough to find out where she lived.
But then the idiot Nico had botched it.
