Blood Ties Bundle: Blood Ties Book One: The Turning / Blood Ties Book Two: Possession / Blood Ties Book Three: Ashes to Ashes / Blood Ties Book Four: All Souls' Night. Jennifer Armintrout
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held me fast. “Your body tells me something entirely different. You want me. I can smell it on you.”
I ground my teeth. “It’s the blood tie. If you were any other guy, I’d have slapped you by now.”
“If you were any other woman, you’d be dead by now.” Despite his menacing words, he let me go. “I slept quite late this evening and I haven’t had my breakfast. Would you care to join me?”
“Will you answer my questions?”
“That depends on what you ask. But yes, Carrie. I will give you the answers you’ve so bravely sought.” He held out his hand for me, and I bit my lip, considering his offer. Was this a trick? A trap? But he couldn’t have known I was coming. He hadn’t even known who I was when he’d first seen me. There would have been no time to plan anything devious. At worst, I’d spend an uncomfortable meal trying to fight the effects of the blood tie. At best, I’d get a better understanding of what had happened to me. I slipped my hand into his and let him lead me to another room.
The dining room was large and windowless. It was even more ostentatious than the ballroom, if that were possible. Dark wood paneling covered the walls, and the only light came from candles held in ornate silver sconces.
Cyrus pulled out a chair from the long dining table and motioned for me to sit. Then he sat at my right, at the head of the table.
The table was long enough for twenty people, but it was only set for two. Crystal wineglasses took the place of plates. The largest covered platter I had ever seen dominated the center of the table. I wondered who he’d planned on sharing his meal with before I arrived.
“Dahlia.” Cyrus replied to my thought as he gracefully smoothed a napkin over his lap. A dainty crystal bell lay by his left hand, and he rang it. It unnerved me that he could read my private thoughts so easily.
A distinguished-looking black butler entered, followed by two of the guards. The butler reached for the shining silver dome over the platter and hesitated at the sight of me. One of the guards made a noise. The butler glared at them and whisked away the cover.
“Your breakfast, sir,” he said, a look of distaste on his age-lined features.
The nude body of a young woman lay on the platter. She was obviously dead. Her blank eyes stared sightlessly at the ceiling, one hand propped limply on her breast. Her other arm stretched high above her head, mimicking the curve of the platter. Someone had thought to garnish her with rose petals. The woman was displayed beautifully before us like a Renaissance goddess. I was horrified by my reaction. This woman was dead, her remains exploited for aesthetic purposes.
To please the man sitting beside me.
The terror I should have felt from his presence fought to the surface, then was quickly drowned once again by the blood tie. Despite all the harm he’d already done to me, it seemed absurd that he would ever hurt me again. I caught myself yearning to touch him, desperate for the security of a physical connection, and I squashed the feeling down.
He’s a monster. A murderer. You’re smarter than this.
“Thank you, Clarence, that will be all,” Cyrus said with a polite nod.
The butler and guards departed. Cyrus stood and reached for my glass. He lifted the dead girl’s arm and flicked his razor-sharp fingernails across her wrist. Dark red blood poured from the wound. She hadn’t been deceased for long.
The calm, matter-of-fact manner in which he handled the corpse made it seem perfectly normal to be dining off a dead body. I stopped reminding myself to be horrified—what good would it do me?—and concentrated on the questions I wanted answers to.
He filled his glass next and lifted it to his nose, savoring the scent. I ignored my glass, but he didn’t seem to mind.
“Now, what were we talking about?” he asked after he sat again.
“You mentioned Dahlia. Were you reading my mind?”
He drank deeply from his glass, then dabbed his lips with his napkin. “Of course. You wondered who I had planned on dining with since the table was set for two. Dahlia sometimes likes to consume human blood, and I indulge her.”
“Is she a vampire?” It was a silly question. I knew I would have recognized his blood in the taste of hers.
As I expected, he shook his head. “No. Dahlia is very sweet, one of my favorite pets, actually. But I’d never make her one of us. She’s not…special? I suppose that is the word for it.”
“And I was special?” I felt a surprising sympathy for the girl. She thought I’d taken her place when there had actually been nothing to take. But that’s not what concerned me most. “Can you read my mind all the time?”
“If I want to.” He smiled. “And to answer your first question, yes, you’re special.”
“But I was an accident,” I said as I fixed him with a piercing stare. “I remember that night, or at least, most of it. You never fed me your blood. It got into me when I stabbed you, but you didn’t mean for it to happen.”
Sighing heavily, he leaned back in his chair. He studied me for a long moment before speaking again. “You have my blood, Carrie. Even if I didn’t intend to share it with you, it still flows through your veins. It makes you precious to me.”
I glared at him. “You attacked me and left me for dead. I wasn’t so precious to you then.”
He raised his hand to stop me. “Please, excuse me. These damned eyes, they dry out so quickly.”
He lifted a small knife and plunged it into his borrowed eye. The organ fell to the table with a soft, squishy sound and flattened. A gruesome image of the dead morgue attendant flashed through my mind.
Cyrus leaned over the face of the dead girl and carved out one of her eyes. When he’d inserted his replacement, he freed the second eye from the corpse and dropped it into his glass. It sank to the bottom like an olive in a martini.
“I had two perfectly good eyes before I returned to this city. Fresh ones are hard to come by, and they wear out before you’ve gotten much use from them.”
My physician’s curiosity took over then, distracting me from our earlier line of conversation. “How does it work?”
“I don’t know.” He blinked a few times, as though he’d just put in new contact lenses. A thin line of blood ran like a tear down his cheek. “I’m assuming it has something to do with the regenerative humors in human blood.”
“There’s no such thing as humors. Does it work with other body parts? Limbs?” I scooted forward in my chair. “What about teeth?”
“How do I know? Carrie, I understand your thirst for knowledge, but there are questions even the blasted Sanguinarius can’t answer.” He sipped from his glass. The eye inside rolled around to stare at me.
I was going to barf.
Cyrus either didn’t notice or didn’t care. “I’ll have the servants prepare your room, but I fear it won’t be ready before dawn. You can stay with me today. I’m sure we can find some engaging activity to fill the boring daylight hours.”
“Whoa, whoa.” I waved my hands in front of me as though I were signaling a plane. “I’m not staying.”
Not that I wasn’t tempted. The blood tie was an incredible aphrodisiac, despite the fact I’d just watched him pick over a dead body as if it were a rotisserie chicken. But I had only come here in need of information, not an unfathomably dirty one-night stand.
Cyrus’s expression darkened. “I thought you said your apartment burned down. Surely you need a place to stay.”
“I have other options. Did you do it so I’d have no place else to go?”
“I didn’t do it at all. If Dahlia harmed your property, then I’m sorry. The drama of fire seems to hold