His Stoic Mask, Her Bleeding Heart

Elyria's spindly fingers hooked onto Matthias' jaw and pulled with a surprising amount of strength, nearly tugging him into the back seat before he managed to begin struggling against her. The car swerved, and my body slammed against the door, but Elyria wouldn't be deterred. She tightened her grip on his jaw with one hand, her other hand snaking around to grip the side of his neck, and he grunted as she doubled her pulling power. The seat belt cut into his throat; his eyes bulged; his hands clung to the steering wheel for dear life. But still, she wouldn't relent.

"Stop this," he rasped around the seat belt's constriction on his windpipe. "Stop this before I have to take Kyrianna from you and have Eli killed."

"If you're dead, you can't do a damn thing," she snarled, teeth bared like she was in the middle of a dog fight. Her eyes flickered red for a moment, and I tensed. This had been funny before, but what if she lost it again? What if she lost it and never came back?

"Elyria," I murmured warningly, but the car jerked again, and I slammed into the door, my head hitting the window with such force that I half thought I'd cracked the glass. Disoriented, I sat there, watching her tug and tug at the man's head.

"Are you going to kill me by ripping my head off?" he asked, laughter to his gravelly tone. His eyes were on the road, but they mocked her.

She stopped pulling suddenly and gripped his head from the other side, slamming his skull against the side window with one swift thrust. The car swerved for a third time, and a horn blared as it nearly ran headlong into a pick-up truck, just barely managing to jerk the other way at the last second.

"Don't test me," she hissed in his ear before ramming his head into the glass once again.

"Elyria," I warned again, finally regaining my senses. She didn't seem to hear me, and I reached for her, but Matthias suddenly slammed on the brakes. Elyria flew into the front seat headfirst, and another car horn rang out behind us.

"My men have strict orders to kill Kyrianna if I don't return," the vampire said casually, rubbing at his throat and studying it in the rear-view mirror as best he could, "so watch what you do."

Elyria pulled herself upright in the passenger's seat, breasts nearly popping out of her top after the fall, and in spite of her messed up hair and disheveled clothing, she looked dead sexy – of course, I had a thing for wild women who could end me, so my version of "dead sexy" was very rarely anyone else's. "I'll kill you when we get to the mansion, then," she said sharply, voice murderously cool. "And I'll finish the rest of your men while I'm at it."

The car began to accelerate, and Matthias laughed rather heartily for someone who had just been so thoroughly threatened. "My, my. What a fiery little woman you are. I might just have to keep you for myself like Terrence did if you keep that up."

A small white fist flew out before he'd even finished the sentence, but I was quick to catch her wrist. She turned her amethyst glare to me, and I only shook my head. Pulling her wrist from my grasp, she turned from me, sliding across the seat to nestle herself in the corner, as far from Matthias as she could possibly get. She glared out the window, Matthias smirked, and I just sighed.

This night wasn't going to end well.

-?-

The sight of Terrence's mansion – Matthias' mansion, now – brought a grimace to my lips that I couldn't conceal. I'd spent so many of my days there, working blindly as a slave of the man who later tried to kill his biggest asset and my biggest obsession, and seeing it again after so long was like a knife in the chest. It had been different when I'd come to save Elyria, different when everything was still bustling with James' chaos, but now that I was likely going to be spending a great deal of quiet time in the building, I felt sick. Was his office where Terrence's had been? Was his bedroom Terrence's? Was I going to be standing in the room where I'd killed my long-time friend and where Elyria had lost that first piece of her sanity – Gabriel – unable to escape?

"Sick" was an understatement. Hell, "a knife in the chest" was an understatement.

My eyes slid to Elyria, and I was a bit surprised to find her gazing at the building with her composure completely intact. I probably shouldn't have expected to find her shaken in the first place, though. She was a rock, and her only cracks were on the inside.

Her door was opened suddenly, and Matthias' beaming face appeared in the gap. "Please, come," he said pleasantly, gesturing to the manor as he stepped aside to let her through. She stepped out, and I opened my own door and followed suit. "Don't try to wander off now," he continued in that same cheery tone, closing Elyria's door behind her. His eyes rested on me pointedly, chilling flames in direct contrast with his warm smile. "We have business to discuss, and I don't want to have to send someone after you. I don't have anyone particularly gentle on my staff." I wanted to tell him that his staff probably had half the strength and skill that I did, but I refrained, following him toward the house in cool silence.

"Why am I here, exactly?" Elyria asked as we passed through the front door, finding the entrance hall blessedly empty.

"Because we need to discuss this new blood business of mine," Matthias answered, leading the way up one flight of stairs, then down a hallway, "as well as what I can do to keep this empire running smoothly." My chest tightened as I recognized the path, one I'd walked with Terrence countless times before: the path to his own private chambers in the attic.

"I told you, I can't help you with this empire you're trying to build," Elyria said with an exasperated sigh.

"I'm not trying to build one," he corrected her, rounding a corner and glancing at her over his shoulder. "I'm just trying to fix one, and I'm sure you can help me with that pretty easily." He opened a door at the end of the hall, and Elyria sighed again.

"Do we really have to go up there to talk about this?" she asked.

"Why not?" he asked in return, turning to face her at the bottom of a flight of stairs. "Isn't this where you conducted all of your business with Terrence?" A lightning-fast knee to the groin had him doubling over, groaning in pain, and she shoved him aside without a second thought.

"Ladies first," she sneered, offering him one last nasty look before starting up the stairs.

I stopped beside him, a smile threatening to break through my deadpan facade. "I hope you don't think you're going to take advantage of her. She's not an easy person to manipulate."

He glowered up at me, slowly pulling himself upright with the help of the wall. "Terrence manipulated her rather easily, and James managed to do so even easier. She's not nearly as tough as you seem to think she is."

"Really? Are you going to keep hiding behind Terrence's example?" I quipped, then followed Elyria up the stairs.

When I reached her, she was standing beside the bed across from the stairwell, gazing down at it with her arms crossed. It was the same bed that had always been here, the same bed where she'd lain with Terrence dozens of times before, but when I searched her face, I found an impassive mask to rival my own. Whether she was genuinely unfeeling about this or merely doing her best to hide her emotions, I wasn't sure, and I didn't dare ask.

"Have a seat," Matthias said rather nastily as he entered the attic bedroom, undoubtedly tired of how we mocked him. "I'm sure the bed is just as comfortable as you remember." I wanted to backhand him for that remark, but Elyria calmly perched herself upon the edge of the bed, crossing her legs in a decidedly prissy manner as she looked up at him.

"Why, yes, it is quite comfortable," she said, a mockingly saccharine smile curving her pretty pink lips. "Thank you so much."

"Well, then, why don't we get down to business?" He shot her a cold smile of his own, then strode past me to make his way to the desk across the room. The smallest twitch of Elyria's fingers gave away her dislike of that desk, and I remembered the day the two of us had finally faced Terrence – the day she'd been slammed into that desk several times, the day I'd nearly been overcome by the man, the day she'd watched that human boy, Gabriel, die. Her eyes lingered on the doorway a few feet from the desk, and I ached to hug her. That was where the boy had died, his head on her lap and his blood on her hands. That was where a part of her had died that day.

The sound of drawers opening and closing, of fingers shuffling through sheaves of paper, was just barely enough to tug me out of my morbid reminisce, and I turned to watch as Matthias rummaged through the desk. He returned to us after a moment, eyes skimming the foremost page of the pile he held in his hands. I wondered what it could be. Vampires didn't typically rely on paperwork for things such as this.

"These are the terms of our agreement," he said as he held the sheaf of papers out to Elyria.

"We've made no agreement," she retorted, merely staring up at him, making no move to take the papers he offered.

"But we will," he said with an arrogant smile. She pursed her lips, her entire expression tightening into one of thinly concealed rage, and pulled the papers rather roughly from his grasp. I secretly hoped she'd given him a paper cut.

Her eyes darted over the words, sprinting through sentence after sentence, and with each passing second, her expression grew darker. When she turned to the second page, she paused to glare down at the title bolded at the top, but soon continued on. She never even made it to the third page, stopping halfway through the second to shout, "You have got to be kidding me!" She turned to peg the vampire with a murderous scowl, and he just smiled serenely back at her. "I'm not signing Kyrianna over to you. You're even dumber than I thought you were."

"I thought you might say that," he said with an irritating casualness, already on his way back to the desk. He returned after a brief pause to hand her another paper, saying simply, "This may be a bit more to your liking."

She jerked the page from his fingers, quickly skimming the single paragraph at the center of it. "You want me to share her?" she asked incredulously, tossing the sheaf of papers across the gray bedspread. "How is this any better than taking her from me? You're going to ruin her or get her killed!"

"Relax," he laughed, placing a heavy hand on her shoulder. "Nothing's going to happen to her, and nothing's going to happen to you."

She knocked his hand from her shoulder and got to her feet, ire clouding her lovely face. "You're damn right nothing's going to happen to us," she said, then slammed her fist into his stomach. She followed the blow up with a punch to the face with her other hand, and the vampire toppled onto the bed with a grunt of pain. "You're nothing like Terrence," she hissed, though I could tell by the way her voice cracked that she wanted nothing more than to scream it at the top of her lungs. "Terrence wouldn't have tried to pull this crap with me, and he certainly wouldn't have been so easily overwhelmed."

The wall shook when Elyria's back slammed into it, and she fell to the floor, coughing, when Matthias released her arms. He cleared his throat and smoothed his shirt as if he'd just been part of some terrible accident, and the sneer he gave the still-coughing girl on the floor made me want to slap him even more than before. "Look what you made me do."

I took a step toward him, fists already clenched and ready for a fight, but Elyria flipped her hair out of her face and leveled the man with a pair of brightly glowing amethyst eyes. He tried to turn away – I could tell by the twitching of his body – but he wasn't able. He'd fallen under Elyria's spell.

Slowly, a hand on the wall for balance, the necromancer got to her feet, blindingly bright eyes still locked on Matthias' though she'd already overtaken him. "Terrence never forgot what I was, either," she told him icily.

"Although he did frequently put his hands on her, so kudos for getting that one right," I added with a cool shrug, crossing my arms over my chest. I turned to Elyria. "Want me to kill him for you?"

"If he doesn't cooperate," she answered, still glaring directly into the man's eyes. I shook my head, well aware that her plans were always something I just had to disapprove of, but I said nothing. She would do what she wanted, whether I objected to it or not. "This agreement of yours isn't happening," she started, the chill to her tone lost in favor of something even more empty. "If you so much as think of Kyrianna again, I will kill you, and I will kill everyone else under your rule. If you so much as think of hurting Eli, I will kill you, and I will kill everyone else under your rule. If you so much as look at me the wrong way again, I will fucking kill you." Her tiny shoulders were rising and falling with each labored breath, her voice a low growl of rage, and I waited for the flicker of red I knew was bound to come. "This isn't your game anymore, Matthias. It's mine. And if you think the legions of vampires you have under your command will stop me from getting every single thing that I want from you, you're wrong." There it was: the burning crimson of the beast within, casting a fiery glow across Matthias' still face. "James is no longer my master, and I will kill whoever I want to kill, including those men you think will protect you." A hand darted up with superhuman quickness to grip his face, squeezing his cheeks together to poke out his lips in a comically fishy way, and she smiled a broad, wicked grin up at him, baring a pair of slowly growing fangs. They glinted in the low light of the room, and my eyes became just as fixed on them as Matthias' did.

"I'll help you with your blood trade, Mattie," she purred, voice low and taunting and oh-so-sexy. "But I will be your only source, and I will rule this empire alongside you." She placed a light kiss on his perked out lips, dragging her vampiric fangs through his lower lip with a slow, painful deliberateness to send two droplets of blood rolling down his pale white chin. "It's been a pleasure doing business with you," she whispered against his bloodied lips, then sent him backward onto the bed with a light shove at his chest.

She turned, then, the glow of her red eyes fading to signal the withdrawal of her presence from his mind and body, but my eyes were already on her mouth, where the tip of a slippery pink tongue snaked over a pearly white fang. I'd never wanted any woman more than I wanted Elyria at that very moment.

"Come, Eli," she sighed almost boredly as she walked past me and started down the stairs. "We have business to attend to elsewhere." I was momentarily hypnotized by the bouncing of her blood-red curls and the flouncing of her short skirt with every step, but I soon followed like her faithful puppy – her faithful little horndog, to be exact.

We passed several vampires in the hallway this time around, going into and coming out of rooms and wandering along with another destination in mind. All gave pause when Elyria passed, even the women, turning to gawk at her as if she was someone they'd never seen before. It took many of them only an instant to recognize her, however, and the catcalls and sexual remarks started in a matter of seconds.

"It's been a while, Elyria," one man purred as she passed, and she threw a fangy smile his way.

"Nice ass!" came a much less seductive call, but she smiled to that one, too.

"Damn," a woman murmured in awe, and Elyria shot her her biggest, most inviting smile yet.

By now, I'd come to walk dangerously close to her, close enough to trip her up if either of us stopped paying attention. I glared at the men we passed as well as the women, and every time someone yelled something too inappropriate for my liking, I bared my teeth in a snarl while Elyria just kept smiling away. Finally, I snaked an arm around her shoulders and pulled her to my side possessively, a low growl of annoyance still rumbling in my chest.

She giggled, her hands darting up to wrap around the fingers I'd left dangling over her shoulder. "Do you like me more this way, Eli?" She looked up at me with a sly knowing to her eyes that made me turn guiltily from her.

"No," I answered, and it was only a bit of a lie. "If you stay like this for too long, you're probably going to return to the monster you were when you were in James' possession." We started down the stairs, and she continued to play with my fingers, wiggling them about like an easily entertained child.

"I feel fine," she said airily. "I think this is how I'm supposed to be."

When we reached the front door, she stopped but continued to bend my fingers, and I took the hint and reached around her with my free hand to pull the door open. She promptly walked through it, and I followed her down the next flight of stairs, just barely managing to close the door behind me as I tried to keep up with her quick pace.

"It's not, though," I told her once we'd reached the street. "You're not meant to be a monster; you're meant to be Elyria."

She stopped and turned to face me, my fingers slipping from her loose grip. "Do you know how to hotwire a car?" she asked both very suddenly and very seriously.

For a moment, I could only blink down at her. "I'm sorry. What?"

"Do you know," she said slowly, then paused for a second to let the words sink in before continuing, "how to hotwire a car?"

"You want to steal a car?"

"Yes," she said, her broad grin returning. "I don't want to walk all the way back home, and Matthias took his keys with him."

I placed my hands gently on her shoulders. "Elyria, stop this," I told her softly, looking deep into her glowing crimson eyes. God, I hoped no humans passed. "I need you to come back to me. I don't want the monster; I want you." And only part of it was because I had no idea how to hotwire a car.

Her expression immediately soured, her smile withering away. "I don't know what you're talking about," she snapped, knocking my hands from her shoulders roughly. "I'm fine this way."

"No, you're not," I argued as calmly as I could. "You're clinging to something that isn't you. You need to come back." It was amazing how my feelings could change – only minutes ago, I'd wanted to ravage her, monster and all; but now...

"I'm not gone," she snarled, not realizing how her tone contradicted her words. "I'm fine. I like this."

"Elyria –" I began, but she cut me off with a shout of "No!" I sighed, tempted to roll my eyes but fearing that that would send her even further over the edge. Even more amazing than how my feelings could change was how her very personality could change – and I didn't mean just turning into a monster. She'd gone from sex goddess to tantrum-prone child on a matter of moments. How was this even possible?

"Elyria –" I tried again, but again, she screamed "No!", even adding an enraged shove at my chest this time. My back hit the car I only just now realized we'd been standing beside, and my instincts kicked in as she took a threatening step toward me. She opened her mouth to speak, likely to scream, but before she could get a word out, I cut her off like she'd cut me off – only I did it with a blow to the side of the head that sent her crumpling into my waiting arms.

Knocking her out may have been a cheap and silly way to get what I wanted, but she was bound to hurt both me and herself. What other choice did I have?

Throwing her limp body over my shoulder like a sack of potatoes, I started down the street toward her apartment building, resisting the urge to begin whistling innocently all the while.

I wasn't borderline committing a crime. Not at all...