“Strip,” I said.

“What?”

“When the ardeur raises, the clothes will come off. We can either take them off now, or we can rip them off each other and have nothing to wear afterward.”

He frowned at me, looking skeptical, but he went to his knees again and lifted his shirt off in one motion. He looked better out of the shirt than in it.

I glanced away while I started getting out of my clothes. I did not want us to rip up another custom-made holster. I also wanted clothes after we finished. It was not the way I wanted to be naked in front of a man for the first time, but Jacob wouldn’t wait all night. I needed to finish this before he came back and checked on us. I needed to finish this before he figured out that I was going to do more than feed off of his lion. Because I had decided that I was going to roll Nicky like any good vampire, except because I wasn’t really a vampire, but something else, something more and less. I couldn’t use my gaze to make him do what I needed, but I could use the ardeur to tie him to me. I could put him in the place that Haven had been trying to get to all these months. I could make him my lion to call.

It was supposed to be an honor, something done with deliberation and care, like a marriage, but I didn’t have time for the niceties. It was going to be the metaphysical equivalent of a shotgun wedding. I wanted to ask Micah’s and Nathaniel’s opinion of it. I wanted Jean-Claude to talk to me first. I wanted my men, but in order to have them alive at the end of the night, I needed help now. That help was nude in the moonlight, and seeing him nude almost made me forget there was a plan. He was beautiful, all that muscle and eagerness painted in stark light and shadow, my moon and stars and darkness. I realized something I hadn’t before, the process had already begun. It was about to the point where Haven had stayed. I wanted him, and touching him felt unbelievably good, but I’d kept the Rex out of that last bit of me. It was almost as if by holding the spot open so long I’d left a vacancy sign, and the first new dominant lions I met had both tried to fill it. Shit.

I held my hand out to him. He didn’t need any more encouragement. He just came to me, wrapped his hand around mine, and let me lead. For tonight that was nearly perfect.

I opened the ardeur and realized that there was a thread of it attached to him already. I even felt another thread out in the night hanging on to Jacob. He was fighting it so hard. There was a small part of me that wanted to force him to come to us, but he didn’t share. He would never be able to fit into our lives. He would always have to be king, and I had enough kings in my life. I needed men who were okay with being the power behind the throne, not the ass on it.

Nicky’s mouth found my breasts, lifting me in his arms so he could suck them while still on his knees. He sucked and bit until I cried out. Then he let me slide down his body, and I felt him so hard, so eager, that even him brushing against me made me cry out again. He stood up, and it forced that soft, girl sound from me; half startlement and half the feel of his hardness pressed against my body. He sat down with the wall against his back, put his hands on my thighs, and tried to angle me onto him, but in the end I was too impatient for it and wrapped my hand around him. I squeezed just enough for him to make a sound for me, then I guided him between my legs, and he began to push his way inside. The ardeur made me wet and ready but only real foreplay made me open.

“So wet, so tight, God!” he said, and his hands let go of my legs and went to my waist, my hips, helping guide me where he wanted me. The sensation of him sliding inside me an inch at a time was the pleasure it always was; there was something about that first entry, that first hard push deep inside me that just did it for me. When he was as deep into me as he could go, so that I felt our bodies wedded as close as they could be, I shuddered around him, my fingers finding the rough of the wood wall that was at his back.

The shudder had thrown my head back. I had to recover enough to look at him. I put my hands on either side of his face at the same time that I began to move in his lap, with him inside me. His hips moved with me, his legs pushing into the ground to give him more movement, and we began to dance together up against the wall in the summer dark.

“Your eyes, they’re glowing. Brown and black, like brown glass with light behind them.”

There were other colors he could have said that would have scared me, too, because I’d been possessed by a vampire or two in my day, but he’d described my eyes with power in them. It had only happened a time or two, but it was my power and tonight I needed it. Tonight it didn’t frighten me. He stared, mesmerized, into the dark diamonds of my eyes as his body went in and out of mine, and my hips rose and fell with his movements. His rhythm became more frantic, and I ground my hips into him, helped him fuck me as hard and deep as he could. It felt so good, so good, so good.

I breathed his name over and over, as that warm pleasure built deep in my body. “Nicky, Nicky, Nicky, Nicky, Nicky.” One last thrust and he spilled me over the edge, bowed my spine, and made me scream my orgasm to the sky. But my pleasure didn’t let me feed; it was only as his body released inside mine that the ardeur fed. And then that was when I truly fucked him. I fucked him in every sense of the word. I fucked him until he brought me screaming again and his body shoved itself one last deep thrust, and the ardeur did what it did best, brought him again, made him mine as he cried out my name.

I felt his power, his beast, his essence, his everything offered up in that moment, and the darkest of thoughts came to me. That I could take all he had and leave him dead underneath me in one massive feeding. I fought the urge, because killing him wouldn’t help me save the others. Then a thought, not so dark, came-that he could be ours. Ours not just for this moment but for as long as we wanted to keep him. The ardeur had accidentally bound men to me before, but I’d never done it on purpose, until now.

I’d meant to make him my lion to call, but in that moment the ardeur of the vampire in me understood there was another option, an option that would make him my slave. Animals to call had free will to a point, they had choices. I needed Nicky’s choices gone. I needed his choices to truly be mine. I did to Nicky what I’d had vampires do to me when I was just beginning to hunt them. I did to him what I’d seen vampires do to police officers and other executioners. I chose my free will over his. I chose the lives of the men I loved over Nick’s freedom. I chose my life over his, and I took him. I took his body, his mind, the heat of his beast, and all the power that gave him. I drank him down through the sweat of his body, the release of him inside me. I drank him down. But there in the dark there was his need. A need to belong, to be held, a need for gentler things than Jacob had ever allowed him. Belle Morte’s line deals in sex, love, and power. I was still too new at it to guard myself from the one weakness. We could only control as much as we were willing to be controlled. Only love as much as we were willing to love. Satisfy lust only as much as we were willing to be satisfied. If I had been thinking better, I would have kept to the sex. I knew how to do that now, but I needed him to risk his life for me. I needed him to maybe kill his king, his friend. Men don’t do that just for sex, but for love… for love people will do terrible things. I needed Nicky to be willing to do anything I asked, and for that I was willing to damn us both.

When it was done, we got dressed. Nicky said, “Jacob will kill me before he lets me go.”