Masquerade (Vampires Realm Romance Series Book 10) (4 page)

And was gone.

Sophis’s senses blared the warning but she wasn’t quick enough to turn. He came up behind her, locked his hand around her right wrist and kicked her feet out from under her. She hit the rug face first and Vivek came down on her, knocking the air from her lungs.

She struggled against the weight of him across her backside and lurched up only for Vivek to shove his hand against her shoulder and press her into the floor. Pain ripped over the scar on the back of her left shoulder and she gritted her teeth to contain the cry that tried to escape her. Tears stung her eyes but she blinked them away, refusing to show weakness in front of her men and Vivek.

Vivek tugged her right arm back, bending it around until it felt as though it would pop free of her shoulder socket.

“Yield.” It was an order.

He wasn’t asking. He was telling her to give up the fight and concede defeat.

“Never,” Sophis spat out, forced her hips up and tipped him off her.

She rolled on top of him before he could move and straddled his stomach, her feet locked between his thighs and her hands pinning his wrists to the floor.

Sophis breathed hard and stared down into Vivek’s icy eyes. Strands of her brown hair had fallen down and grazed his cheek, shifting in the breeze of their combined breaths. His stomach moved beneath her, a steady rise and fall, muscles hard against the apex of her thighs.

The world disappeared for her this time, the jeers of her men fading a little more with each second that she stared into Vivek’s eyes.

The instinct to fight drifted away together with her consciousness of her surroundings as an awareness of only Vivek grew into existence. It shrouded her senses, forcing them to shift to him in their entirety. He lay beneath her, muscles strained and taut, gaze locked on hers, neither submissive nor aggressive.

Her breathing fell into synchronisation with his.

His gaze fell to her cheek. His pupils dilated again, hunger filling his eyes, sparking on her senses in a way that sent heat into her veins.

“Yield,” she whispered, too caught in the moment to put a firmer voice to that word. It should have come out strong and commanding, not so soft and full of desire that was nothing short of disturbing.

Vivek drew a long deep breath. His stomach pressed into her groin, sending a not-too-unpleasant shiver through her.

With a lightning-fast move, he twisted his wrists out of hers, caught her hands, and flipped her.

Sophis’s eyes widened when she found herself lying beneath him with his hips firmly wedged between her thighs. The spark of violence that had risen back into Vivek’s eyes flickered and died as he dragged his gaze over her, heating her with only a look until she burned hotter than she would have if the sun had touched her. What the hell was happening to her?

She struggled against his grip but it only made things worse. His fingertips pressed into the backs of her hands and she realised with horror that he had entwined their fingers, his palms against hers, and had them pinned to the floor on either side of her head.

Worse than that, he was using a part of his anatomy that she didn’t want to think about to keep her hips against the floor, immobilising her lower body.

Sophis swallowed and stared up into Vivek’s eyes as his gaze shifted once more to the cut on her cheek. His lips parted to reveal the tips of his fangs. His cool breath caressed her face. Her breathing hitched. She almost wanted him to go through with it and run his tongue over the line of blood.

Things couldn’t get worse than this.

“What in the Devil’s good name is happening here?”

Sophis cringed at the sound of Commander Tynan’s deep Russian accented voice bellowing into the room.

There was a flurry of activity around her during which she tried to take her eyes away from Vivek’s and failed. She couldn’t even muster the strength to push him off her. She lay there beneath him, dying inside, wishing the rug would swallow her and take her to Hell. Spending the rest of her days in the fiery pit of torment down there was preferable to facing her superior and explaining just why she was lying underneath Vivek in the middle of a public space in the mansion.

Tynan appeared in view above Vivek’s shoulder, leaned over and grabbed the back of his t-shirt. He tore Vivek off her and shoved him to one side. Sophis didn’t say a word. If she kept silent, Tynan might not unleash the fury blazing in his dark brown eyes on her.

They slid down to her and narrowed.

No luck there.

She flinched when his hand shot towards her, closed around her shirt, and he yanked her onto her feet. He pushed her aside and she bumped into Vivek, who snarled at her, flashing fangs. She snarled back.

“You both want to explain what I just walked in on, because it had sounded like a fight from the training room... but that wasn’t what I just saw.” Tynan moved to stand in front of them and Sophis realised with dread that he was only wearing a pair of loose black sweat pants. His torso was bare, revealing his broad physique and a few new cuts and grazes. He had been training. The last person who had disturbed Tynan in the middle of one of his intense training sessions had spent a day locked in the cells in the lower basement.

“You
were
fighting, weren’t you?” His eyes shifted from Vivek to her.

Sophis inched her head downwards, afraid of admitting it but unwilling to have Tynan believe that what he had walked in on was anything other than one of their usual scuffles.

Tynan sighed wearily and scrubbed a hand over his short dark hair and down his face, causing his muscles to bunch and twist under his pale skin. Her gaze caught on the sweeping curves of the tribal tattoos that adorned his arms. She traced the beautiful decoration downwards, following the ribbons of it that snaked around his shoulders and then caressed his lower abdomen and hips before disappearing under the waist of his sweat pants. It was enough to spark any woman’s imagination and have them wondering just where the markings went down there and what they looked like.

Every woman in the guard and even some of the high-ranking women in the bloodline knew that Tynan was single and a lot of them had their eye on him. He was handsome, strong for his young years, and held a good rank within the bloodline, but he wasn’t quite what she was looking for.

Vivek’s eyes burned into her. The intent behind his stare caused her senses to flare into life. She focused them on him, curious as to why he was watching her now. Anger dominated his scent. She glanced at him out of the corner of her eye. She wanted to end their fight. Is that what he was angry about too?

Tynan wasn’t the only vampire in her bloodline with tattoos. Green and blue dragons covered Vivek’s arms, elaborate and beautiful. Tattoos that she knew he’d had done after becoming a vampire. Why someone would do something so permanent when they had a potential eternity ahead of them was beyond her, even if they were breathtaking.

She had seen them several times in the past when they were fighting or when he had been changing after his shift. The sight of them now took her back to when she had first entered the guard and he had trained her, teaching her everything she needed to know in order to defend herself and quickly dispatch hunters. He had been kind to her back then. Never a cruel word in her direction. Only smiles for her and encouragement.

Something had changed him.

How many times had those four words crossed her mind or kept her awake during the day? She had spent years trying to figure out what had happened to make him act so coldly towards her when she had once been able to call him friend and she was no closer to understanding him.

It confused the hell out of her.

“You do know where the training room is, don’t you?” Tynan said and she cast her gaze down at the Chinese rug, too ashamed to look him in the eye.

“Yes, sir,” Vivek answered, his voice steady and calm, but thicker than usual. The hunger that had shone in his eyes still laced his signature on her senses, speaking to her of desire for blood.

He had wanted to taste that which he had drawn.

Sophis touched her cheek. Tynan’s attention shot to her. He roughly caught her jaw and raised her head, his near-black eyes narrowing on the cut.

“Explain to me what happened here then,” Tynan said and released her jaw. “In my office. Now!”

Sophis flinched from the volume of that word and saluted at the same time as Vivek. Tynan turned and stormed from the room. Sophis followed him without looking at Vivek, grabbing her jacket on the way, and hurried to keep up with her commander. She could feel Vivek following her, his eyes boring into her back, focused so keenly that she could pinpoint the exact spot he was looking at.

Her left shoulder.

It still stung from the fight. When he had been on top of her, pinning her face first against the floor, and had pressed his hand into that area of her shoulder, it had hurt like hell. A second later, the pressure of his hand had lightened, as though he had realised that he was hurting her and didn’t want that. Why? She had felt his hesitation before he had twisted her arm back too. He had never hesitated in a fight with her before. Was it because of her injury? It didn’t make her weak, if that’s what he was thinking. She could still fight him. She would still fight him if Tynan let her. She was sure he wouldn’t mind as long as it took place in the training room instead of somewhere the high-ranking vampires of the household could see them.

Sophis put her black uniform jacket back on and fastened the gold buttons that formed a V down the breast as she followed Tynan across the pale yellow entrance hall and then descended the stone steps to the basement. The guards there whispered as she passed, loud enough that she knew word had already spread about her fight with Vivek and how things had ended.

With her pinned under him in the most intimate of positions.

Why had fate sent her commander into the room at that exact moment?

She didn’t want Tynan to start believing she was a weak female too. He was one of the few guards in the household who believed in her and in having women in the ranks. He had commended her several times on her abilities. She doubted he was going to be commending her this time or that he would be as understanding and supportive as he had been when reading Vivek’s report to her. He led the way into his small cream-walled office near the armoury in the dingy basement of the mansion. The bright lamp on the oak desk struggled to add warmth to the windowless room and the sparseness of the furniture lent it a cold empty air.

Sophis stopped on the other side of the desk to him, her back to the door. Vivek filed in behind her and came to stand on her left. He pressed his right hand to his broad chest and she noticed that he hadn’t put on his jacket. It wasn’t like him to be so disrespectful around Tynan. As an officer on duty, he should be dressed appropriately, especially when in the presence of their commander. Sophis’s gaze caught on the dragons dancing down his right arm, entwined with each other and so detailed that she could have spent hours studying them, picking out each lily or thorny rose in the gaps between them, and each scale on the dragons’ multi-hued backs. Tynan’s tattoos sparked curiosity because of the way they disappeared from view but Vivek’s were beautiful, breathtaking, and fascinating. They were art that enhanced the allure of his honed muscles and had always captured Sophis’s attention.

She dragged her gaze away from them to find Tynan watching her, one eyebrow raised high. There was a look in his eyes that she couldn’t interpret. It had an edge of disbelief to it, a hint of shock, and a smidgen of amusement. Why?

Her eyes widened.

No. It was nothing like that. He was wrong. Just because he had found her underneath Vivek and had caught her looking at him just now, didn’t mean that she felt anything for him. Vivek’s tattoos had always interested her. Her staring at them was like her looking at a painting. It was an appreciation of the skill of the artist and the beauty of the design, not an appreciation of the canvas. Tynan had it all wrong. If Vivek hadn’t been standing beside her, she would have told him that too, regardless of how much trouble she would get in for speaking out of line to her commander. The days when her appreciation might have been more about the body the art was painted on were long past.

Tynan looked as though he was going to settle himself in the black leather chair behind his large desk and then turned his gaze on her and Vivek instead. He frowned and his already near-black eyes darkened further.

He plucked his white shirt from a row of coat hooks on the back wall near a large corkboard crammed with what looked like rosters and other snippets of information and slipped his arms into it, leaving it hanging open.

His gaze worked over both her and Vivek, scrutinising and assessing, slowly filling with shame that eventually had him shaking his head. He ran his fingers through his short dark hair and then took his seat, leaned back into it and loosed a long sigh.

“What am I supposed to do with you two?”

Neither she nor Vivek answered. Tynan didn’t want them to respond. It was written in the hard set of his jaw and his brown eyes.

Sophis straightened, standing tall with her feet shoulder width apart, and placed her hands behind her back, locking them together over her bottom. Vivek mimicked her pose, bracing his feet so his right foot was close to her left and tipping his chin up. He made her feel small when he stood like that, towering several inches over her. She fixed her eyes ahead, on the dull cream wall and corkboard behind Tynan, and waited for him to explode.

She could sense it coming.

Tynan shook his head again. “The leaders of our bloodline are starting to hear rumours and I do not like being questioned by Lord Timur about my ability to lead his guard. If your behaviour continues, I will be forced to kick you both out. No demotions or punishment. You will be dropped to the rank of servant of this bloodline or you will leave it completely, whatever path your pride allows you to choose.”

Sophis’s heart fell into the pit of her stomach. Her gaze ate the flagstones under her feet, shame burning her cheeks even though they couldn’t colour. She scuffed the grey stone slabs with the toe of her right boot. Her life was the guard and she had worked hard to achieve her position within it. She didn’t want to throw that all away because of petty arguments with Vivek, but more than that, she didn’t want to jeopardise Tynan’s position as commander. It was one thing when only her and Vivek’s positions were on the line, completely another when their lord was going to pin blame for their actions on Tynan too.