Richard laughed. I jumped and Jean-Claude went even more still beside me, as if should I let go of his hand he would simply vanish in plain sight. Most vampires couldn’t really do that, but the old ones could be so still that you were forced to remember this was not a truly living being, but something else. Live human beings didn’t ever feel like this with their hands in mine. Moments like this were one of the reasons I’d been able to resist his charms for so long. His hand was still wrapped around mine, but it was like holding a “living” mannequin.
I pulled at my hand, and he let me go. He knew how I felt about moments like this, and I also knew that it was his way of protecting himself from what was about to happen. The two men he was probably more attracted to than any others were about to tear us all apart again. Fuck.
“And what have I done to amuse you, Ulfric?” There was no teasing now, but the beginnings of anger made Asher’s eyes gleam.
Richard started for the bed, taking his jean jacket off as he moved, so that by the time he got to the bed his upper body was painted against the red of his shirt. He’d been keeping up with his gym time. I knew that because it was one of the few places I’d seen him since summer. When you can bench-press a small car, as he could, you couldn’t really get a challenging workout at a normal gym. Thanks to Jean-Claude’s vampire marks I was stronger than I should have been, too. Micah, Jason, and Nathaniel had been taking me to the gym that was designed for that.
Richard threw his jacket on the foot of the bed and stood there looking down at Asher. He looked back, his face locked in an arrogant mask that meant whatever he was thinking was something he didn’t want to share. I knew part of it; no one who was moved by a handsome man could gaze up at Richard and not want him.
I looked at Jean-Claude. He was more unreadable than Asher. There would be no help from him, and I had no clue what to do.
Richard turned back and held his hand out to us. “Are you joining us?” He was smiling and he didn’t look angry.
I shrugged and walked toward the bed. I knew I wasn’t going to stay frozen by the door like a scared rabbit. If it was all going to go down in flames, the least I could do was run into the smoking building and try to salvage something. I let Richard take my hand and help me onto the bed. It was tall enough that in hose I tended to slide off the black satin coverlet.
We crawled onto the bed, and Richard used his hand in mine to direct me onto the side of Asher closest to the door, while he crawled around Asher’s legs so he could lean into the pillows on the other side. I sat there, a little stiffly, and had a moment to share a look with Asher. He let me see that he was wondering what the hell was going on, too. Glad it wasn’t just me.
I took a deep breath, let it out slow, and lay back on the pillows still fully clothed including heels and my weapons, so not exactly comfortable, but so far we weren’t completely fucked. It was a record for the four of us alone in a room.
Jean-Claude looked at us. For a moment he was that almost two-dimensional stillness, and then he took a step and from one moment to the other it was as if he came to life. It was like the difference between a photograph and film. He had that easy smile on his face, and was all ease and grace. He walked toward us as he’d probably walked into a thousand rooms over the years, smiling, pleasant, beautiful, and still hiding what he was feeling just as surely.
He stopped by the bedpost, his hands stroking the black and red curtains. He looked at us all and shook his head. “Too good to be true,” he said.
Richard nodded. “I’ve been a bastard and I’m sorry.”
We all looked at him, including Asher. It startled him enough that he didn’t even worry about how his hair fell so that his scars were bare to the soft glow of the bedside lamps.
“The apology is a wondrous thing, mon ami, but forgive this old vampire if he asks, what exactly are you sorry for?”
“What he said,” I said.
“When you and I first met, Anita, I’d just gotten away from Raina and Gabriel.”
“The vampires still speak of Raina, the old Lupa of your pack, and Gabriel, the ex-leader of the wereleopards. They make some of Belle Morte’s court sound kind, and they are not kind,” Asher said.
Richard nodded. “They were both true sexual sadists.”
“In that real serial-killer sort of way,” I added.
Asher turned his head to look at me. “I heard you killed them both while they were trying to make a rape-and-snuff film starring you and Gabriel. I thought the story had grown in the telling.”
I shook my head. “I don’t know if the details have grown, but the basics are true.” I shivered. Gabriel and Raina had been the couple from hell, and it had been part luck that helped me kill them and save the others. I had some scars from Gabriel that I’d have for the rest of my life.
Asher reached out and took my hand in his. “I am glad you killed them.”
“We all are,” Richard said.
“They are not a loss,” Jean-Claude said.
“Like I said, when I met Anita I’d just gotten away from them. They’d tried to make me into a more dominant version of Nathaniel, just another pet.”
“They never understood that you would never be that,” Jean-Claude said.
Richard nodded and said, “I fought high enough in the pack structure to have more choices, and I beat the shit out of Gabriel one night. But that didn’t stop Raina from trying to hurt me in other ways. She made our Ulfric, Marcus, give me to Jean-Claude. I had fought my way into dominance enough to stay out of the beds of people I didn’t want to sleep with, and then they give me to a vampire whose power is all about sex. Raina told me that you’d seduce me eventually and she’d get to watch us together.”
“I was Master of the City by then, Richard; I would not have let her do that to me, or to you.”
Richard sat up, drawing his knees in, his strong, summer-tanned arms hugging them to his chest, making the muscles in his arms work. “I know that now, but she’d been my Lupa for six years. I believed her. So I looked at Jean-Claude as just one more person who was trying to corrupt me. I realize that he was just as trapped as I was, but I couldn’t see that then.” His eyes looked haunted.
I sat up, still holding Asher’s hand, and reached across him to touch Richard’s arm. That made him smile, but he turned those serious, haunted eyes to Jean-Claude. “You were the only one left of the three of them. Almost every time I looked at you I thought of them. Then I blamed you for stealing Anita away from me. I know now that I drove her to you. I made her watch me eat Marcus.” He sat up a little straighter as if he’d realized he was hunching. He held my hand against his arm and looked at me. “I did everything I could to make sure the first time you saw me shift to animal form that it was frightening and terrible. I am sorry about that.”
“You hate being a werewolf. You wanted me to hate it, too.”
He nodded. “I did, I just didn’t realize that’s what I was doing at the time.”
“Your doctor must be very open-minded,” Jean-Claude said.
Richard looked at him. “My therapist, yes, she is open-minded. We didn’t really make a lot of progress until Anita was able to take back her anger this past summer.”
One of the things about being a triumvirate of power is that you share parts of yourself and not just power. I’d gotten the ardeur and a craving for blood from Jean-Claude. From Richard I’d gotten his beast and a taste for flesh. Jean-Claude had gotten a certain ruthlessness from me; I wasn’t sure what he’d gotten from Richard, or what Richard had gotten from him, but what Richard got from me was my rage.
I’d gained the ability to feed on anger, the way Jean-Claude could feed on lust. I could feed on sex, but found it harder to feed on the “emotion” of lust. Anger, though, I understood that. That had been my emotion of choice for years. Last summer I figured out how to call my rage back home from Richard. It was the one thing we’d shared with each other that one of us knew how to feed on. The other hungers were literally hungers for flesh, blood, and sex. You can feed a hunger, but you can’t feed on a hunger.