Chapter 1: The First Night's Game
The air in the penthouse tasted like stolen things. Jasmine, expensive whiskey, the faint metallic whisper of blood from the cut on Stefan’s lip. It clung to the back of Hannah’s throat, thick as the velvet drapes pooling on the floor.
Klaus had Stefan tied to an antique dining chair, thick ropes biting into the forearms he’d stripped of his jacket and shirt. Stefan’s chest rose and fell in a controlled rhythm, but the green of his eyes was a wild, churning sea. He didn’t struggle. Not yet. He was calculating the angles, the weaknesses in the rope, the distance to the door. Hannah knew that look. It was the same one he wore just before the ripper took the wheel.
“Comfortable, mate?” Klaus asked, not turning from the window overlooking the Quarter. He swirled amber liquid in a crystal glass. “I’d offer you a drink, but you seem rather… tied up.”
“Let her go, Klaus.” Stefan’s voice was low, graveled. “Your issue is with me.”
“My issue,” Klaus said, turning finally, a shark’s smile on his lips, “is with entertainment. And you two are tragically dull at the moment.” His ocean-blue eyes landed on Hannah, who stood stiffly by the grand piano. “She’s starving, you know. Can you smell it? That particular sweetness that gets just a little sour around the edges when the hunger sets in?”
Hannah could feel it, a hollow ache blooming behind her navel. It had been days since she’d fed properly. The energy in the room—Stefan’s guilt, Klaus’s predatory amusement—itched under her skin, but it wasn’t food. It was static. She needed contact. She needed release.
“I’m fine,” she lied.
Klaus laughed, a rich, dark sound. He set his glass down on the piano with a definitive click. “Such a loyal little thing. Even now.” In a blur of motion, he was behind her, his hands closing on her shoulders. His breath was cool against the shell of her ear. “Let’s show your brother what you really are.”
He propelled her forward, toward the vast bed with its black silk sheets. She stumbled, but his grip was iron. Behind them, she heard the wood of Stefan’s chair groan in protest.
“Klaus, don’t you fucking touch her—”
“Oh, I’ll do more than touch,” Klaus sang, pushing her down onto the bed. The silk was cold. He followed her down, a knee between her thighs, pinning her in place. His weight was immovable, a mountain of casual cruelty. One hand fisted in her blue hair, tilting her face toward Stefan. “Watch, Ripper. Watch closely.”
His other hand slid up her thigh, pushing the fabric of her dress. His fingers were deft, impersonal. He found the damp warmth of her through her underwear and his smirk widened. “See? Starving.”
Hannah turned her face away, shame heating her cheeks. But her body, her traitorous, hungry body, arched into his touch. A soft, broken sound escaped her lips as he rubbed slow, torturous circles over the soaked cotton.
“Stop,” Stefan growled, the word a physical force in the room.
“Beg,” Klaus replied, his voice conversational. He hooked his fingers into the side of her panties and tore them away. The sound was obscenely loud. Cool air hit her wet skin, and she flinched. Klaus’s fingers returned, skin on skin now, and she gasped. He traced her slit, parting her, testing her readiness. “Beg me to let her feed. She needs it. You can feel her need, can’t you? It’s practically humming in the air.”
He plunged two fingers inside her without warning.
Hannah cried out, her back bowing off the bed. It wasn’t pain. It was a shocking, brutal fullness that her hunger latched onto, her inner muscles clenching around the invasion. Pleasure, sharp and immediate, began to coil in her core.
“She’s so tight,” Klaus mused, watching Stefan as he began to fuck her with his fingers in a steady, rhythmic pace. “And so very, very wet for me. Is this what you remember, Stefan? Chicago? The parties, the blood, the pretty little creature between us who couldn’t get enough?”
Stefan was straining against the ropes now, the veins in his neck cording. “I don’t remember Chicago.”
“Of course you don’t. I compelled you to forget. A tidying-up exercise.” Klaus curled his fingers, brushing a spot that made Hannah see white behind her eyelids. A moan was torn from her. “But she might. In her cells. Her body remembers being shared. Doesn’t it, sweetheart?”
He added a third finger, stretching her, the burn a bright counterpoint to the building orgasm. Hannah’s hips began to move of their own accord, fucking herself on his hand, the silk scraping against her skin. The hollow ache was being filled, not with energy, but with raw, degrading sensation. She was losing herself in it.
“Look at her,” Klaus commanded Stefan. “This is her nature. You awakened it. You put this hunger in her. And now you’d let her wither to spare your pride? Beg.”
Stefan’s chest was heaving. His eyes, locked on Hannah’s face, were filled with an agony that dwarfed her own. He saw her shame, her helpless response, the way her legs fell open wider. He saw the slick gleam on Klaus’s fingers as they pistoned in and out of her.
“Please,” Stefan rasped, the word a shattered thing.
Klaus stilled his hand. “Please, what?”
Hannah whimpered at the loss of motion, her need a living, screaming thing inside her.
Stefan’s head dropped. When he lifted it, his eyes were desolate. “Please. Let her feed.”
Klaus’s smile was triumphant. He withdrew his fingers, shining with her arousal, and brought them to his mouth, sucking them clean without breaking eye contact with Stefan. “See? Was that so hard?”
He unbuttoned his fly with his clean hand. The sound of the zipper was deafening. Hannah watched, hypnotized, as he freed his cock. It was thick, erect, the head flushed and eager. This was no longer just a lesson for Stefan. This was a claiming.
He positioned himself at her entrance, not bothering to remove her dress. He just pushed the hem up around her waist. The broad tip pressed against her, a blunt, impossible pressure.
“This is how she feeds,” Klaus said, and slammed his entire length into her in one brutal, shearing thrust.
Hannah screamed. It was a sound of rupture and raw ecstasy. He filled the emptiness, split her open on a sharp edge of pain that instantly melted into a pleasure so profound it felt like dying. Her nails scrabbled at the silk, her vision blurring.
Klaus set a punishing pace immediately, each drive of his hips hammering her deeper into the mattress, the bedframe hitting the wall with a rhythmic thud. He fucked her with a concentrated, ruthless efficiency. There was no kiss, no caress. Just possession.
“That’s it,” he grunted, his gaze on Stefan. “Take it. Drink it down.”
And she could. As he moved in her, a torrent of raw, dark energy began to flow into her. It was unlike anything she’d ever tasted from Stefan or Damon. This was ancient, potent, laced with a thousand years of violence and cunning and bottomless want. It was addictive. Her body began to milk his, her internal flutters becoming greedy, pulling pulls, drawing the essence from him with every drag of his cock.
She came, suddenly, violently. Her scream was muffled against his shoulder as he held her down, her body convulsing around him, sucking him deeper. The climax ripped through her, fueled by his power, and for a second, the world was just light and hunger and fulfillment.
Klaus groaned, a low, ragged sound. “Fuck. Yes. Like that. Drain me, you beautiful bitch.”
He was losing his detached composure. His thrusts became erratic, animalistic. He was chasing his own end now, using her body for it, and she welcomed it, her legs locking around his hips to take him deeper, to get more.
Across the room, Stefan made a sound like a wounded animal. The ropes bit into his skin so deeply that dark blood welled up and began to trace paths down his arms. His eyes were black with rage and torment, fixed on the place where Klaus’s body joined with Hannah’s.
With a final, brutal snarl, Klaus came. Hannah felt the hot rush inside her, and with it, a flood of energy so intense it was blinding. She came again, a secondary, shockwave orgasm that left her limp and gasping.
Klaus collapsed atop her for a moment, his weight crushing, his breath cold on her neck. Then he pushed himself up, withdrawing from her body with a slick, empty sound. He tucked himself away, his movements once again precise, composed.
Hannah lay wrecked, the taste of his power like ozone and old coins on her tongue. She was sated, physically. But she felt filthy, exposed.
Klaus walked to Stefan, cupping his face. Stefan flinched as if burned.
“Remember this,” Klaus whispered, his voice intimate. “Remember who holds the leash. On her. On you. I own the pretty little monster you created.” He leaned closer. “And Chicago? The parties were magnificent. You fucked her on a pool table while Rebekah and I placed bets. You loved it. You were yourself. No guilt. No pretense. Just hunger. I can give that back to you.”
He straightened, patted Stefan’s bloodied cheek, and strolled toward the balcony doors as if he’d just finished a casual drink.
“Untie him, Hannah,” Klaus called over his shoulder without looking back. “We have plans tomorrow.”
The door clicked shut behind him.
Silence, broken only by Hannah’s ragged breathing and the faint, shaky strain of the ropes as Stefan finally moved. She forced herself to sit up, her body aching, the evidence of what just happened cooling on her thighs. She couldn’t meet his eyes.
She stumbled off the bed, her legs barely holding her, and went to him. Her fingers trembled as she worked at the knots. The smell of his blood, of her own scent on the air between them, was sickening.
The last rope fell away.
Stefan’s hands shot up, not to hit, but to cradle her face. His thumbs stroked her cheeks, his gaze searching hers, desperate. The anger was gone, replaced by a devastation so complete it stole her breath.
“Hannah,” he whispered, his voice raw.
She saw it then, in the depths of his green eyes—not judgment, but a shared fracture. A memory, long-buried, flashing to the surface: laughter, the smell of cigar smoke and gin, her own breathless cry echoing in a crowded room, Stefan’s mouth on hers, taste of blood and bliss, and watching from a velvet chaise, Klaus’s approving, hungry smile.
The compulsion was crumbling.
She didn’t know what to say. ‘I’m sorry’ was ash. ‘It felt good’ was a betrayal.
So she just stood there, in the ruins of what they were, his blood on her hands, another man’s come inside her, and let him look.