Blood Legacy by Vanessa Redmoon Page A

Sanguinus’s building tops. I’d been spread out on a massive, downy white bed, and my skin felt warm and damp as if from a bath. “What . . . what happened?”
    “ You ,” he said playfully, poking my nose, “my naughty little agonie , were perhaps enjoying yourself a little too much.”
    I chuckled. “No such thing.”
    His smile waned. “The power can be . . . overwhelming, at first. I should have better prepared you. We could have eased into the rites better than we did. I simply—” He stopped himself, cheeks flushing. “It’s simply been so long that I’ve dreamed of this. I couldn’t control myself around you.”
    “I really made that big of an impression on you four years ago?” I asked.
    A comm pinged at the far corner of the room and a mechanical voice intoned, “Violetta Stregazzi has entered the quarters.”
    Victor’s face went ashen; I felt my own stomach lurch. Though what I feared, I couldn’t say. I was, after all, the one Victor had just tied up and screwed senseless. Literally. I grinned to myself. That was about as close to a religious experience as I’d ever had.
    The door to the bedroom flew open and Violetta stormed in. She was swathed in an enormous garnet gown the same shade as her hair and lips, and hundreds upon hundreds of black jets sparkled in the lamplight with her every step.
    Victor stepped forward, arms raised defensively. “Violetta—this is hardly the time—”
    “Silence. Sit,” she barked, her words stinging like a lash. She snapped her gloved hands. The sound reverberated throughout the opulent bedroom.
    Victor instantly dropped to his knees right there, in the middle of the floor, and bowed his head. I couldn’t blame him a bit. Had I not already been lying down, the authority in her voice would’ve made me obey, as well. But I suddenly had trouble reconciling the dominant, controlling Vampyr I’d seen not an hour ago with this docile house pet.
    “What were you doing?” Violetta seized him by the chin, forcing him to meet her eyes, and tilted his head from side to side.
    “I—I made an arrangement with Raven. She understands what she is, and she will—”
    Violetta cracked him across the jaw with the back of her hand. The massive black ring on her hand left a stinging welt on his skin. “And this couldn’t possibly wait until you’d made your announcement to the hundreds of the most important Vampyrs in the entire Republic?”
    I heard his teeth cracking together. “You know what this means to me.”
    “Well, we have much bigger concerns.” She glanced over at me on the bed, as if sizing me up. “Get dressed. Nastasya? Get Raven out of here.”
    Nastasya slunk into the room, tossing a quick look toward Violetta. “Yes, mistress.” She approached me and offered her arm to help me stand up. I groaned in spite of myself. Every muscle in my body ached, including several I didn’t know I had; the space between my thighs was particularly raw. I looked, sheepishly, at the bruises rising on my knee where Victor had bitten me so harshly, and at the red lines of scars along my thighs from his claws. Nastasya threw her arm around my shoulder and escorted me into a sitting room separated from the bedroom.
    “They acquired some sort of archive,” Violetta hissed, back inside the bedroom. “What the hell is it? How did they find it?”
    Before Victor could answer her, the door slammed shut. I stood, naked and shivering, as panic rose like a tide in me. Was she talking about the archive I’d passed to Finch? I’d covered my tracks flawlessly on the data warehouse logs. Besides, it was her archive—she knew damned well what was inside. Accounts of her plot to seize control of the Republic, if I had to guess.
    Nastasya arched one eyebrow at me as she fluffed out my gown. “Is everything all right?”
    I shook my head to clear myself from the reverie. “I—yes. Of course. Just exhausted, that’s all.” I took the gown from her with trembling fingers,