Total pages in book: 209
Estimated words: 196141 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 981(@200wpm)___ 785(@250wpm)___ 654(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 196141 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 981(@200wpm)___ 785(@250wpm)___ 654(@300wpm)
The cat lets out a distressed meow.
Kyle glances again. He’s not sure if he’s ever actually heard her make a sound before, not even a full-breathed hiss.
What is it about this night that makes everything so odd?
“Babe …?” moans Elias.
Kyle slips off the bed, moves to the door. The cat scuttles away, then glances back over her shoulder, meeting Kyle’s eyes. Kyle closes the door, says, “Sorry, Little Lion,” then returns to the bed, where his focus quite suddenly lands on Elias’s thick, muscular thighs. He slides right back between his man’s legs nearly undetected, then brings his lips to the left inner thigh, causing Elias to jerk with surprise—though with the restraints, he moves impressively little.
It only takes one kiss for Kyle’s thirst to reignite. He opens his mouth fully, baring his teeth, relishing in the taste before he has even allowed any to touch his tongue.
And finally, he bites.
Elias sucks in a breath, delirious with that specific, exquisite cocktail of pleasure and pain. The neckties creak as Elias pulls upon them, tightening them more.
Kyle’s teeth sink deeper.
The taste holds such a powerful sway over Kyle. But blood is more than just its taste, which is admittedly an acquired one. Blood is also literal life that coats Kyle’s tongue, that ignites his soul, that charges his body with a vibrant and incalculable force that makes him feel capable of anything. He is more powerful with the blood. Each dream in his heart becomes unlocked and effortlessly possible.
Kyle didn’t do drugs or illegal substances as a human. Not even a single puff of weed. But he can imagine the feeling he gets upon tasting blood with his new, transformed self is something akin to the mind-altering madness that is giving oneself to the deadly embrace of a thing that shows you paradise just as easily as it can kill you.
It’s a risk he assumes every time he tastes blood.
The risk of losing himself to the thirst.
Something Tristan warned him many times over the years would be dangerous to do.
It’s why they hardly ever tasted blood. Only human food, as inadequate as it was in satisfying any interpretation of appetite. For reasons Kyle could never fully understand, Tristan was adamant they stay as far away from blood as they could. It hastens our transformation, he said repeatedly. I will try with every fiber of my being—including my unforgivably blond hair—to keep us human for as long as I can. Or rather … as human as we can call ourselves even now when we are so clearly … not. Yet Kyle, despite his unwavering obedience, often found himself curious about all the dangers Tristan neglected to elaborate upon.
It took meeting Elias for Kyle’s curiosity to be satisfied.
It took Elias begging to be bitten for Kyle to throw caution away and sink his teeth in, indulging himself, tasting the taboo.
Many times. Over many nights. Over many weeks.
Does it change Kyle? Does it stain his soul, or tamper with his heart, or transform him deeper into the inescapable clutches of their cursed and terrible nature?
Will Kyle someday become one of Them?
“Babe, mmm, can you, ouch, bite somewhere else?”
Kyle stops, lifting his face from Elias’s thigh. The mark his teeth left is deep, appearing like a bruise, sickly and reddish.
He is horrified at once. “Oh … I … think I …”
“My thighs are pretty amazing, huh?” says Elias, grinning, then wincing. “But yeah, that spot’s a bit sore. Can you—?”
In one second, Kyle is about to express all the doubts he’s been suppressing since their argument less than a week ago that nearly split them up. The last thing he wants to do is inflict real pain on the man he loves. He wants to stop. He worries he was right all along and one day, he will go a step too far. He wants to grab the first aid kit from the bathroom.
The next moment, he is overpowered by a resurgence of Elias’s deep desire for Kyle to continue, to bite him somewhere else, to bite him everywhere else, no matter the cost.
Elias seems to enjoy even the soreness and the pain, as if it’s nothing more than sore muscles after a tough workout.
He wants Kyle to make every other vulnerable part of him just as bruised.
The sexual appetite swelling between them reverberates—Elias’s driving Kyle’s, Kyle’s driving Elias’s, the pair of them in a deadly dance with an increasing tempo that has no chance of slowing until someone kills the string quartet.
Perhaps this is the first moment Kyle recognizes how truly dangerous his own gift can be, how it renders him susceptible and vulnerable to anyone’s emotions within reach.
Even still, Kyle finds himself on Elias’s chest again, chooses a spot, ignores caution, sinks his teeth into an arm.
Don’t they both deserve this?
Haven’t they been afraid for long enough?