Chapter 1: The Lesson in Human Desire
The thumping was a new sound.
Not the consistent, digital hum of the Wi-Fi router, or the occasional gurgle of the coffee maker in the kitchen. This was a rhythm. A living, pulsing beat that cut through the sterile silence of the safehouse and vibrated in the ancient marrow of Camilla’s bones.
She uncurled from her perch on the sofa, a motion so fluid it seemed to defy physics. Four hundred years of slumber had left her senses starved, and the modern world was a cacophony of wonders. She’d spent the last week just learning the names for things: smartphone, microwave, energy drink. The latter tasted like carbonated poison, but Ghost had watched, his dark eyes unreadable, as she’d drained the can in one go.
The thumping came again. Muffled, but insistent. It led her down the stark, concrete corridor, past the locked armory and the comms room with its blinking lights. It was coming from behind the last door on the left. Ghost’s door.
She knew she shouldn’t. He’d been very clear about boundaries. ‘Private’ was a new concept, one her old-world mind still wrestled with. But curiosity, a trait that had gotten her into trouble long before her slumber, was a sharper impulse than any rule.
She didn’t knock. She simply turned the handle and pushed, the door swinging inward without a sound.
The room was spartan, like all the others, but different. The air was heavy with the scent of him: gun oil, clean sweat, and something darker, earthier. A single framed photograph sat on the bedside table, but from this angle, she couldn’t see the subject. Her eyes, however, were not drawn to the photo. They were locked on the man on the bed.
Ghost was shirtless, his back a taut, mapped landscape of scar tissue and corded muscle, gleaming in the low light. His head was bowed, his skull balaclava pulled off, for once, and tossed aside. His shoulders were rigid, his entire body a bowstring pulled to its breaking point.
And in his hand, he gripped himself. A thick, flushed length of flesh, moving in a rough, frantic rhythm that matched the thumping she’d heard.
Camilla took a half-step forward, her head tilting. “Simon?” she whispered, his real name still foreign on her tongue. “Are you injured?”
He froze. The entire world froze. The air in the room turned to ice.
In one terrifyingly swift motion, he turned. His eyes, usually so guarded, were wild, dilated with a feral heat she’d never seen. They weren’t looking at her face. They were fixed on the low-level security monitor on his wall, the one that showed a grainy, black-and-white still from a perimeter camera. It was her. Her, from last week, caught in a moment of unguarded curiosity, her head thrown back, a hint of fang visible as she’d laughed at the moon.
Before she could process the image, he was on his feet. He didn’t grab her arm; he fisted a hand in the soft fabric of her shirt and yanked her forward. The force was shocking, absolute. She stumbled against him, the solid, heated wall of his chest.
“What—” she began, but the words died as his other hand closed around her wrist. His grip was like iron, unyielding. He forced her hand down, her cool, pale fingers splaying against the burning heat of his stomach before he dragged them lower.
Her knuckles brushed coarse hair. Then, he pressed her palm against the rigid, velvet-over-steel length of him. It was slick with sweat, throbbing with a frantic, human life.
She gasped, a short, sharp intake of air. This wasn’t pain. This was something else entirely. A raw, primal energy that vibrated up her arm.
His breath was a hot gust against her ear, his voice a low, graveled growl that brooked no argument. “Lesson one,” he snarled, his hips giving a slight, involuntary thrust against her trapped hand. “This is how humans mate.”