He shifted away from her and sipped his scotch again. He needed to get hold of himself, to stop lusting after the woman. If she chose to remain, more than anything he would want her to feel respected.
###
When Angelica woke up she lay on her back staring up at a carved ceiling. Reyes’s world made use of stone in ways she’d never seen before, sometimes a reflection of the actual makeup of the cavern, sometimes added. In this case, she wasn’t sure. An angled flow of black granite, speckled with silver, stretched across the entire cavern space. Parts of the room appeared to be squared up with drywall, but other parts had been carved out of rock.
Reyes was nowhere to be seen, but his bedroom suite was larger than her entire apartment, so he could be anywhere right now. She listened hard, wondering if perhaps he was in the workout room or the bathroom, but nothing returned to her.
She drew up her knees and crossed her ankles, resting her hands in her lap. The comforter was a beautiful burgundy silk and felt expensive. But then Reyes had money. He’d paid $5 million for her.
She pressed her hands to her cheeks as she once more processed all that had happened to her over the space of a week. She’d had her life turned upside down and was even now considering donning a blood-chain and binding herself to a vampire.
Her brain still had trouble making sense of the word vampire, despite the fact that Reyes had already sunk his fangs and taken his fill. If she bound herself to him he’d be doing more of that, which of course sent a shiver down her neck, and desire bloomed yet again.
What would it be like to really be with Reyes? To share his bed, his body, all that he was?
She slipped from bed and moved to the bookshelf opposite. Reyes had left the box in plain view, and she wanted to look at the chains once more.
As she flipped the lid there they were, two simple dark metal chains, each with loops about a half inch long. She recalled the revisiting vision and wondered if she would experience something similar again.
She touched the links, but nothing happened, perhaps because Reyes wasn’t nearby; she didn’t know.
She closed the lid, returning to the bed this time to sit down on the edge, her gaze fixed to the box, to the chains, to the tough decision she had to make. She’d hoped that when she awakened she’d know which way to fall, whether backward to her life as a human with a job that bored her and to the care of her mother or forward into the dark unknown, into what looked like a world that had enough evil to fill up a universe.
Instead, Angelica was as much on the fence as she had been the night before.
Her instincts told her that if she bound herself to Reyes what happened between them afterward wouldn’t be simple. Her attraction to him hadn’t dimmed in the least, despite the horrible nature of the events that had occurred after the Ruby Theater Players had put on their little production.
Her cheeks grew hot all over again as she recalled going down on Reyes in front of a bunch of strangers. She would be foolish, however, to fail to consider that something similar or perhaps even worse might happen if she agreed to stay.
As thoughts of Reyes came to mind, even going back as far as kissing him at the Ocean Club, she realized that what bothered her the most was her vulnerability to him. Her heart already leaned in his direction and had tilted even further when she’d learned that instead of being a slaver, he was intent on bringing down this part of his world.
For that reason, she couldn’t have admired him more.
But she also knew that she and Reyes lived on opposite sides of a deep gorge, with a very flimsy rope bridge between. The human and vampire worlds didn’t mix.
She simply didn’t know how to make this decision.
###
Reyes sat in his office, at his large burl-wood desk, going through page after page on the Starlin Group private Web site. Now that he was officially a member, he’d been given access.
So far his cruise through the site had essentially confirmed what he’d learned about Starlin over the decades, that Engles was Scorpion’s link to the rest of the group and that Scorpion remained the most powerful force behind the organization. But the Web site had at least given Reyes the names of all the Starlin board members.
His next step had to be getting on the Board of Governors, a process that would no doubt take a long time to achieve. And as much as he’d like to get this whole thing settled as fast as possible, he’d already accepted that his mission might require years, if not decades, of patient effort. But being on the board would give him access to the information he needed to bring the entire organization down.
When he’d opened up the Web site the first thing he’d checked was a slave mortality counter from the recent auction. The counter was still set to “zero,” which meant that none of the slaves had died yet. That number would change, but the fact that it sat on the Web site, with a flashing graphic around it, was one more indicator of the perverse nature of this group.
A link next to the mortality counter led to a secondary site for placing bets on which slaves were likely to die next and when, down to the minute. He’d clicked on it to familiarize himself with every aspect of Starlin’s operation, but what he found there only deepened his disgust, something he hadn’t thought possible. The site had pictures posted of every slave and her stats as well as information on the slave owners, including their known levels of abuse toward the humans they’d owned previously. Both he and Angelica were listed there, which meant that his cover held. He’d fabricated a reputation of having kept and killed over thirty-eight slaves over the past two decades, preferring slow-kills to short, brutal ones. Odds changed constantly, an indication that serious betting was going on even now.
As he scrolled back to the home page his thoughts turned toward Angelica and his senses told him she was awake. He almost shifted to altered flight and hurried to his bedroom in order to find out what decision she’d made about staying in his world. But he decided against it. He’d know soon enough, and the woman might want to have a shower first before confronting her vampire host.
He turned his attention, therefore, to the Starlin Festival and to the string of social events that would give each winning bidder more chances to display their newly acquired slaves.
He clicked on the Festival tab at the top of the Starlin Web site and found a rather lengthy list of parties that he could attend with Angelica, that is, if just this once the wind decided to blow in his direction.
###
Angelica still didn’t know what to do. She’d never been so torn about a decision in her entire life.