He didn't care about the heavy silver blade in my hand. The narcotic frenzy had completely destroyed his ancient, rational brain.
David lunged.
He moved with supernatural speed, a terrifying blur of motion that my mortal eyes simply couldn't track. Before I could even swing the silver scalpel, his large hand wrapped around my wrist, squeezing with bone-crushing force.
I screamed as the metal clattered uselessly to the immaculate floor.
He slammed his other hand flat against my chest, shoving me violently backward onto the massive marble kitchen island. The breath was knocked completely out of my lungs. I kicked, thrashing wildly, but he was a creature of solid stone and iron. He pinned my hips to the cold marble with his lower body, his weight absolutely suffocating.
"Just a taste," David chanted manically, his face buried deep in the crook of my neck, his hot, frantic breath scalding my skin. He was inhaling me like a man dying of thirst at the edge of an oasis. His hands were incredibly rough, tearing the collar of my grey cardigan aside, exposing the delicate, pulsing skin directly over my jugular.
"Get off me!" I shrieked, driving my free hand into his eyes, clawing frantically at his aristocratic face.
He didn't even flinch. He opened his mouth, and his fangs tore brutally into the sensitive skin where my neck met my shoulder.
I screamed, a jagged, tearing sound of pure agony that echoed off the cold marble and hanging copper pots. The pain was blinding—sharp, searing, and entirely devoid of the narcotic bliss I had felt when Kaelen drank from me. This wasn't a feeding. This was a brutal violation. A slaughter.
David let out a raw, animalistic moan, a guttural sound of pure, feral ecstasy that vibrated violently against my bleeding collarbone. The taste of my blood—heavily laced with the potent, lingering traces of Kaelen's venom—shattered the very last remnants of his sanity. He swallowed frantically, choking on his own unadulterated greed, the bloodlust twisting violently into a primitive, uncontrollable arousal.
With a starved growl, David yanked my body flush against his.
I gasped in absolute horror as he pressed his heavy, fully hardened erection insistently against my stomach, grinding his hips into mine with a mindless, desperate rhythm. He was completely lost to the frenzy, hopelessly high on the chemical cocktail pumping through my veins. His massive hands became frantic and brutal, gripping my hips tightly enough to leave deep purple bruises before dragging upward. He roughly grabbed and kneaded my breasts, his fingers tearing at the fabric of my cardigan and the silk blouse underneath, groaning into my bleeding neck as the predatory lust entirely consumed him.
"No! Please!" I sobbed, thrashing helplessly against the marble, but his weight was an inescapable cage.
Then, the ambient air pressure in the kitchen dropped so violently that my ears popped.
The temperature plummeted to absolute freezing in a single microsecond. Thick white frost exploded across the stainless-steel appliances, instantly coating the massive windows in a layer of solid ice.
David froze. The hands that were aggressively groping my chest went completely, terrifyingly rigid.
A sound echoed through the kitchen. It wasn't a word. It was a roar—a sound so ancient, so purely demonic and apocalyptic, that it vibrated the fillings in my teeth and shattered the glass doors of the pantry cabinets into a million glittering pieces.
Suddenly, the crushing weight of David's body was violently ripped away.
I gasped for air, scrambling backward on the marble island, clutching my torn clothes over my chest as my terrified eyes flew open.
Kaelen was here.
He didn't look like an aristocratic Don. He didn't look like a man. He was the Dragon incarnate. His eyes were pits of absolute black, radiating a terrifying, toxic emerald aura. His jaw was locked, the muscles in his neck corded with a jealous, catastrophic rage that seemed to physically warp the very air around him.
He had David by the throat, holding the massive, centuries-old lieutenant three feet off the ground with a single hand. Blood dripped from David's mouth—my blood.
Kaelen's pitch-black eyes dropped to David's crotch, registering the visible, unmistakable arousal. He looked at David's bloody lips, and then his glowing gaze snapped to the torn, ruined fabric exposing my chest.
David was choking, his hands clawing uselessly at Kaelen's iron grip. The sexual frenzy had instantly evaporated, replaced by the sheer, pure terror of a lesser predator who had just realized he had signed his own death warrant.
"Boss," David choked out, his voice a pathetic, gurgling squeak. "Boss, please. The blood... her scent... the venom... it made me..."
Kaelen didn't yell. He didn't speak a single word. He simply tilted his head, his black eyes locking onto David's terrified face with a lethal, clinical detachment that was far more terrifying than any scream.
"You tasted my blood in her veins," Kaelen whispered. The sound was softer than a breath, but it carried the absolute, devastating finality of an executioner's axe. "And you dared to press your filthy hands against what is mine."
"Mercy," David begged, tears of pure blood streaming down his aristocratic face as he desperately kicked his legs.
Kaelen's expression remained carved in unforgiving marble.
With a sickening, wet crunch, Kaelen didn't just twist his wrist. He plunged his free hand directly into the center of David's chest and pulled.
He ripped the man apart.
The sheer, terrifying force of the motion severed the lieutenant's head and upper spine from his torso in a horrific, explosive spray of dark, corrupted blood.
The mangled body fell to the pristine white tiles with a heavy, lifeless thud. The head rolled across the floor, stopping near the green apple I had dropped earlier, its eyes wide with frozen, eternal terror.
The kitchen descended into a deafening silence, save for the dripping of thick blood from Kaelen's hands and the ragged, panicked sound of my own breathing.
I sat on the edge of the marble island, pulling my torn cardigan tightly across my chest, trembling violently. I had just witnessed a man—a creature that had lived for a century—dismantled like a defective toy in the blink of an eye because of a jealous, primal rage.
Kaelen stood over the corpse for a long, agonizing moment, his broad chest heaving as the demonic fury slowly receded. The pitch-blackness in his eyes dialed back, replaced by that blazing, furious emerald green.
He slowly turned his gaze to me.
He didn't rush forward to comfort me. He stalked toward the island, his expensive shoes leaving bloody footprints on the pristine tiles.
He stopped directly in front of me, planting his blood-stained hands on the cold marble on either side of my hips, trapping me against the counter. He leaned in, his face mere inches from mine. He smelled of extreme violence, cryogenic air, and the metallic tang of fresh death.
He closed his eyes and inhaled deeply, taking in the scent of my neck where David's saliva mixed with my bleeding wound. He could smell the lingering scent of the other vampire's lust on my skin.
When he opened his eyes, the apocalyptic fury in them was directed entirely at me.
"What did you do?" he demanded, his voice a low, vibrating growl that sent terrified shivers down my spine.
"I... I saved your men," I stammered, my bravado completely shattered by the decapitated body lying a few feet away and the raw, terrifying vulnerability of my torn clothes. "You told me to synthesize a cure! You told me to use my blood to fix the synthetic plasma!"
Kaelen's eyes narrowed into highly dangerous slits. He looked at my left arm, where the sleeve of my cardigan had ridden up, exposing the thick white compression bandage over my vein.
He reached out, his icy fingers gripping my wrist with terrifying strength. He traced the heavy bandage with his thumb, his touch brutally unforgiving.
"I told you to use your blood as a blueprint, Seraphina," he stated, his voice dropping to a lethal, deadly calm. "I told you to reverse-engineer the biological anomaly. I told you to synthesize a chemical replica."
"I didn't have time!" I argued desperately, my voice shaking uncontrollably. "The molecular structure was too complex to isolate in forty-eight hours! Your men were starving! It was the only way to stabilize the fluorocarbons. I drew my own blood and used it as the direct catalyst. I stopped the starvation!"
"You arrogant, foolish little human," Kaelen hissed, his grip on my wrist tightening painfully. "Do you have any idea what you have actually done? You did not just feed my army. You drugged them!"
"I was trying to help!" I yelled back, the adrenaline finally kicking in, fighting through the tears. "I am a doctor! I fixed the problem you couldn't!"
"You created a massacre!" Kaelen roared, his voice shaking the thick frost from the windows. "They are not human patients in a hospital ward, Seraphina! They are beasts of instinct! When I told you to synthesize a replica, I meant a sterile chemical clone. By bleeding your raw, unfiltered veins directly into those vats, you permanently imprinted your exact biological scent onto the palate of a hundred starving killers!"
I stopped breathing, the horrifying reality of my scientific shortcut finally crashing down on me.
"You didn't cure them," Kaelen growled, stepping completely into my personal space, his broad chest pressing against my knees. "You served them the pure, unadulterated nectar of the Dragon, filtered through the hot vein of a Laurent. You turned yourself into a walking aphrodisiac, and then you casually walked the open halls alone like a piece of raw meat for them to grope and defile!"
He pulled me forward by the wrist, forcing me off the counter so I was standing flush against his chest. I could feel the erratic, furious thumping of his slow heartbeat against my own.
"Look at him," Kaelen commanded, his hand moving to the back of my neck, forcing my chin to turn toward David's decapitated body. "Look at what your scientific arrogance cost me. David was my loyal lieutenant for ninety years. He survived wars, inquisitions, and famine. And he died today because he lost his mind the second he smelled you, and I had to butcher him for daring to put his hands on my property."
I squeezed my eyes shut, a tear escaping and trailing down my cheek as the memory of David's grinding hips and bruising hands flashed vividly in my mind. "I didn't know it would affect them like that. I thought I was fixing them."
"Ignorance is not an excuse for a scientist," Kaelen snapped, releasing my chin but keeping his body pressed against mine, establishing a suffocating, dominant cage of muscle and cold. He looked down at my ripped cardigan, his jaw ticking with a fresh wave of possessive, dangerous anger.
He leaned down, his lips hovering near my ear.
"Listen to me very carefully, Dr. Laurent," he whispered, his voice dripping with lethal authority. "You are an asset. You are my asset. I will not allow you to be torn apart and violated by my own men because you wanted to play God in a laboratory to prove a point."
He pulled back, his emerald eyes locking onto mine, burning with an intensity that made me want to look away. But I couldn't.
"You will go back to the West Wing immediately," Kaelen commanded, each word precise and unyielding. "You will destroy every remaining pouch of that narcotic batch. You will synthesize a true, sterile chemical binder. But you will never put another drop of your raw blood into those vats. Do you understand me?"
I swallowed hard, the magnitude of my mistake crushing the breath from my lungs. "Kaelen..."
"And if you disobey me again," Kaelen said softly, his voice dropping to a terrifying deadpan, "I will lock you in a titanium cage in my private quarters until the end of your days, and I will be the only one holding the key."
He stepped back, the distance between us suddenly feeling colder than his touch.
"Now, move," he ordered, gesturing toward the kitchen doors. "Before another one of them catches your scent."
I nodded numbly, wrapping my torn cardigan tightly around my exposed chest, and took a shaky step toward the exit.
But I didn't make it to the door.
A sound stopped me dead in my tracks.
It wasn't Silas. It wasn't the Inquisition.
It was a low, guttural, synchronized howl. The terrifying, vibrating sound echoed from the heavy mahogany doors of the Great Hall, vibrating through the pristine floorboards of the kitchen.
Then came another howl. And another.
Followed by the heavy, frantic thud of dozens of combat boots sprinting across the marble floors of the estate.
Kaelen froze. His emerald eyes widened for a fraction of a microsecond before dialing into absolute, lethal focus. He looked down at the puddle of my fresh blood mixed with David's dark gore pooling on the white tiles.
"Kaelen?" I whispered, my voice trembling with a fresh wave of absolute terror as the howling grew louder, accompanied by the horrific sound of claws tearing into the wooden walls of the hallway. "What is that?"
"They smell the open vein," Kaelen breathed, his voice stripped of its arrogant certainty.
The heavy, reinforced oak doors of the kitchen began to shudder violently as something massive slammed into them from the other side.
BANG.
BANG.
"Boss!" a feral, maddened voice shrieked from the hallway. "We can smell her! Give her to us!"
Kaelen didn't hesitate. He grabbed me by the waist and violently shoved me completely behind his broad back, positioning his massive body between me and the shuddering doors.
The Mafia King lowered his stance, his fangs fully extending as his eyes burned with apocalyptic emerald fire.
He wasn't preparing to fight the Inquisition.
He was preparing to slaughter his own army to protect me.