The vibe she gave off almost felt human…vulnerable. The perceptions made him say, “I never took you for the domestic diva type.”
“Ah, you make a reference to your Martha Stewart, do you not?”
He nodded.
“How did you think we would eat?”
Mateo shrugged, face heating with a blush. Her superior tone made him feel like a student who’d asked a stupid question in class. “I just thought you’d do that trick with your fists.”
She grinned at him. “Admittedly, that particular talent comes in handy, but I…needed something to keep me occupied while you showered, and I like to cook.” She turned back to the stove with her pan and easily transferred the pancakes to a large serving platter that already contained several stacks of the fluffy cakes. “Speaking of which, it is about time you were done.
I was preparing to go check on you.”
“Where would I go? You’ve got this place locked down like Fort Knox.”
She smiled and said, “Just so long as you know,” then turned back to her chores, doling portions of pancakes, eggs, and sausages into two plates before bringing both to the island in the middle of the kitchen.
Mateo stood watching her, admired her movements. They were as easygoing and fluid when she engaged in something as mundane as preparing a meal as when she engaged in something as extraordinary as raising that imperial fist to shut him up, or when she pinned him to the wall like a butterfly in a display case.
He tried to get a fix on her emotions, her mindset, searching her aura for any cloudy, cold patches or dark spots that would indicate mental illness or just plain evil, but there was nothing of the sort, only the emerald green of her inner spirit bordered in vibrant red.
Unconvinced, he searched further, trying to elicit some guilt and regret at what she was 26
Predator’s Salvation
doing to him, some insincerity, but he could feel or read none of these from her thoughts.
Nothing about her was false or intentionally cruel. She was what she was and implicitly believed that the things she did were right and okay no matter who she hurt. She believed that if anyone was hurt because of her actions, then this is the way things were meant to be, the natural order of things, and one did not mourn the natural order of things. Like birth and death, people came and people went. If a person ‘went’ then it was just their time to go.
Like his brother.
How could he argue with or combat someone like her? There was nothing he could say to make her see that the things she’d done to him so far were wrong. That the things she
planned
to do to him, with him, were offensive and unwelcome.
He watched her profile as she set two places at the table. Her smooth mahogany face shimmered beneath the light of the kitchen. Her high pronounced cheekbones gave her beautiful face a stern look that was instantly balanced out by the soft fullness of her lips.
Mateo imagined what it would be like to kiss her. He was simultaneously repulsed and turned on by the idea of her lips on his throat, by her teeth biting him. His dick twitched with the idea of her biting him in other places, yes, even there. He longed for the scrape of those sharp fangs as she held him down, longed for her tongue to dip into the slit at the tip of his cock, lapping pre-come the way she had lapped his blood.
How could he condemn what she did when he wanted what she had to offer, when he needed to be her beneficiary as much as she wanted and needed to be his benefactor?
Mateo closed his eyes, and as before, he received a flash of her in a dungeon, this one stronger and more detailed than when she had chastised him for using the word to describe her home.
She had been so insulted, and when he’d peeked inside her mind he’d understood why.
He gave in to her memories now as he hadn’t before. He didn’t know when his ability had graduated from empathy to telepathy as he had never been able to read anyone’s mind before. He suspected his new gift had something to do with his link with LaMia.
At first he was so shocked by his new ability and perceptions he couldn’t enjoy his insight into the workings of the woman’s mind, although it was only a brief glimpse.
Suddenly, Mateo is awash in pain—her pain, her degradation—as he notices the heavy
iron shackles on her wrists and ankles. The cuffs are much heavier and more uncomfortable than
the leather cuffs with which he had been bound. The cuffs on LaMia are specially made for her
kind, the iron alloy they contain meant to enervate and incapacitate as well as restrain.
The walls and ceiling are made of stone. The room is bare of any furnishings or
amenities that might be found in a human prison of today. The chamber is unbearably cold and
damp and LaMia lies on the floor in the fetal position, back against the wall farthest from her
cell’s bars, shivering uncontrollably.
She has not eaten in days and she has been mercilessly interrogated and beaten by her
captors, the Sebitu, for the entire length of her captivity.
Mateo shook his head at the images and information flooding his brain, braced himself 27
Gracie C. McKeever
for a new barrage as he was whisked from the cell to a lavishly appointed room, miles and miles away from the squalor of LaMia’s prison.
She is arguing with an elegant and much older woman about LaMia’s parents going off
to war.
“You can stop them if you wanted to, Grandmother Nahemah. They do not have to be
sacrificed to these useless, wretched border wars like mere—”
“Are you going to say commoners?”
“You know what I mean.”
“Unfortunately, I do, Mia. But it is your parents’ choice that sends them off to fight the
Sebitu. They are duty bound.”
“Stop them!”
“I cannot.”
“Yes you can. You just do not want to. You want to see them die.”
“Why would you say such a thing, child?”
“You never loved my mother as much as you loved Kalika’s father. And ever since he
died in the wars you have been waiting for your chance to send my mother to her death, too.”
“That is a hateful accusation, Mia, and you know it is not true.”
“I know nothing of the sort. I only know that I will never forgive you if you let my parents
leave for Gaiam.”
LaMia talked a tough game, but Mateo was no longer fooled.
He saw and felt the scared little girl buried beneath the Amazon dominatrix act, saw the resentful young woman who could not control the fate of her parents and so tried to control everyone else around her to compensate.
He’d never felt the sort of emotional pain from anyone the way he felt it from LaMia—so piercing and all-encompassing.
When his own parents had died, he and Julian had shared their grief. Since both he and his brother were empathic, neither one had to take the full burden of their grief at any given time, each taking turns buffering the grief and transmitting solace.
LaMia did not seem to have had this option. She’d had no one to absorb her grief, too busy alienating all around her who might have, choosing to shut herself down and feel nothing but intense desire and hunger.
Just now, however, he had gotten the full brunt of all that pent-up emotion—the hate, the fear, the frustration—and not just the hankering and lust.
Emotional pain was so much worse than physical pain. It was easier for a body to recover from most physical pain. Physical pain was transient, finite, but emotional pain stayed with a psyche forever, left scars for life.
His favorite Ms. Nubian Queen was a perfect example of not practicing what she preached, carrying around a full load of emotional burdens she was either unwilling or unable to 28
Predator’s Salvation
let go of.
From her thoughts he knew Nahemah was her grandmother and Kalika her cousin. But who and what were their kind and the Sebitu? What did the Sebitu have against LaMia and her people? What crime had LaMia committed? Had she been a prisoner of the same border wars in which her parents had perished?
Mateo gasped, gritted his teeth, and squeezed his eyes tight as she psychically struck him, not hard enough to hurt him, but enough to warn him. It felt as if she had reached into his head and pinched a piece of his brain between her forefinger and thumb the way a mother might pinch an unruly child on the arm to stop him or her acting up in church.
“The last man who invaded my privacy like that lived to regret it.”
“All right. I get your point.”
“See that you do.”
“Although you have no problem invading
my
privacy.”
“You are not me. You belong
to
me and therefore have no privacy
from
me.”
Mateo scowled at her logic, biting his tongue since he was
this
close to losing his temper, but good. Just where the hell did she come off? She sounded like his father whenever Julian used to complain about the old man opening up his private business mail. Their dad had shot right back that Julian didn’t have any private business as long as he was living under Dad’s roof.
“What happened?” he asked her.
She turned to face him full and arched a brow.
“To the other guy who ‘invaded your privacy.’ What did you do to him?”
“The other guy was your mentor, Alex Ryan, and I psychically—as you humans call it—
bitch-slapped him.”
“Alex…?” He gawked. “What does he have to do with you? What does he have to do with any of this?” Mateo waved a hand to indicate her, him and the loft.
She looked him up and down, licked her lips when she got to the hard ridges of his abdomen and the blatant bulge beneath his towel.
When she returned her gaze to his, he could have sworn her eyes reflected flames. Just a flicker of golden fire, then it was gone.
Mateo did a double-take before LaMia pointed him across the room to the bed where clean clothes—a fresh pair of blue jeans, a white T-shirt and boxer briefs—were laid out for him.
“Get dressed. Then we will talk over breakfast.”
29
Gracie C. McKeever
LaMia did not know how she had managed to set the table and let him stand behind her in that revealing towel—though surely no more revealing than when he had been spread-eagle on her bed in just his shorts—to read her mind as long as she had before acting.
She could not have explained the pleasant liquid warmth that flooded her center at his mental invasion. Could not have explained it if she were back in that cold, dark cell and the Sebitu were administering another vicious round of interrogation and their special brand of mental and physical torture.
She had not wanted his connection to end, had reveled in it until his mental caress had become so pervasive she’d no choice except to stop him.
Normally, she would have been so much rougher than she had been, might have mentally back-handed him as she had Alex, but something had made her restrain her natural instincts.
LaMia watched as, finally clad in jeans and T-shirt, he crossed the loft floor from her bed to the island now. She was unaware of holding her breath until he paused in front of where she was seated in the high-back barstool and leered.
The combination of his full sensual lips poised in that lopsided, dimple-revealing grin, and his gleaming chocolate eyes following her every move was devastating, a silent unprecedented assault on her senses that had her leaping to her feet for a respite.
She stumbled to the range, snatched an oven mitt from where it was hanging over the range, donned it and opened one of the warming drawers to retrieve the two plates of food.
“Anything I can help you with?”
“Nothing, no.” How could she let this human, a veritable child, unsettle her so? She was an Enlil, Emsharra royalty, a member of the elite military guard, and a master huntress. He should not be able to breach her emotional defenses as effortlessly as he had.
Lilith
, this coddling could not continue.
Fah,
no!
LaMia brought the two plates back to the island where Mateo was sitting in the chair 30
Predator’s Salvation
adjacent the one she had just vacated and placed an overflowing plate of food in front of him and one at the adjacent place setting before taking her seat.
She stared at him, found it difficult to get into his mind since he had broken through her mental defenses, as if he were somehow using her energy and abilities against her.
He was as quick a study as she had first surmised, like most Inanna, a chameleon who could easily assimilate. It was a dangerous combination with which to be faced in an enemy, but facing it from a slave was a truly unparalleled and unacceptable circumstance.
She supposed it was just as well that she could not read him since she would have been sending out an unwanted spirit signal to her people just by engaging in the telepathic energy reading him would have involved.
For her purposes now, entertaining and re-educating a new slave in her lair, the Inanna tracking practice was an unwanted hindrance.
Already she had released her spirit signal more than she cared to by reading Mateo as frequently as she had since his capture. She had used her spirit light more in the last twelve hours—erecting her force field, mind-reading and shapeshifting—than she had during most of her time in exile.
She guessed she would just have to break down and communicate with Mateo the old fashioned way since, after that ill-advised bite, she knew she needed to address his obvious misconceptions. She certainly could not have him functioning under the misconception that she was in any way related to the primitive bloodsuckers his kind called vampires.
LaMia preferred obtaining her energy the progressive way, drawing it from a human’s inner spirit light. But Mateo’s blood…ah
Lilith
, his blood had been delectable. She had never been tempted to suck the blood of any of her prey before. Never, not even with Mateo’s father and brother, and spirit-boost had been just as concentrated in their blood as it was in Mateo’s.