Midnight Rising

If her black platform stilettos and tight miniskirt didn't give her away, the gravity-defying tube top she wore over her large breasts certainly would. The low-rent version of what Rio had just left behind glanced up and caught him watching her.

"Ich bin nicht arbeiten," she said, her voice a caustic snarl as she went back to massacring her nails. "Not at work right now."

He walked toward her undeterred, a wraith moving out of the shadows.

She snorted, getting annoyed. "My work tonight is done, ja ? No sex."

"That's not what I need from you."

"Huh," she scoffed. "Well, then, fuck off - "

Rio moved on her so fast, she didn't even have time to scream. He crossed the several yards' distance in a blink and flipped the woman around so that she was facing the bricks. Her dark hair was short, making easy access to her neck. Rio struck with viper speed, sinking his fangs deep into yielding flesh and drawing hard from her vein.

She struggled only at first, twitching through the initial shock. But then she loosened as his bite drew out and the pain gave way to pleasure. Rio drank quickly, gulping down what his body so desperately needed. He licked the wound he'd made, sealing the bite with his tongue. The mark would be all but gone in a few minutes, and as for her memory of what just transpired? Rio reached around her head and placed his palm over her eyes.

It took only a second to erase the last few minutes of her recollection, but it was time enough for a man to come around the corner of the building and see the two of them standing there.

"Hey! Was zur H?lle ist das? "

He was beefy and bald, and he didn't seem happy at all. Wiping his hands on a stained bar apron, he barked something at the whore in German - a stern command she jumped to follow. Evidently not fast enough for Big Man. As she scrambled away, he lashed out and cuffed the side of her head with his fist. When she yelped and ran off around the corner of the building, Big Man started approaching Rio in the alleyway.

"Do yourself a favor and leave," Rio growled in a voice that no longer sounded human. "This doesn't concern you."

Big Man shook his jowly head. "You want sex with Uta, you pay me."

"Then come and try to collect your piece," Rio said, low enough that anyone with half an ounce of sense would have taken it as the warning it truly was.

But not this guy. He reached behind him and withdrew a knife from somewhere at his back. It was a deadly mistake. Rio saw the threat, and he was still too far gone to let it slide. As the pimp came forward like he meant to cut some cash out of Rio's hide, Rio sprang at him.

He took the human down onto the pavement, his hands wrapped around the thick neck. A frantic pulse hammered against his palm, beat after beat of warm blood rushing beneath the rough skin.

Distantly, Rio registered the drum of the human's heart, but his mind was not fully his own. Not anymore. His blood hunger was temporarily appeased, but rage had him firmly in its grip. The squeeze on his mind, on his own will, was relentless, bringing on the darkness he feared the most.

Maldecido.

Monstruo.

He felt himself sliding into that oblivion...

The names he was called as a young boy rose up in his ears like a battering storm. He remembered the dark forest and the smell of spilled blood on rough earth. The cottage where his mother had been killed before his eyes...

As darkness descended over him, he was that wild foundling he'd been in Spain so long ago. A confused and frightened child with no home, no family, and no one like him to show him the way of what he truly was.

Comedor de la sangre.

With a roar, he bent over his quivering prey and bit into the fleshy throat. He was savage, not from hunger but from fury and an old anguish that made him feel like a monster. Like the accursed. A terrifying blood-eater.

Manos del diablo.

Those devil's hands were no longer his own. The blackout was rising fast now, swamping him. Rio could no longer see the street in front of him. Logic and control shorted out like wires popping in his brain. He could hardly think. But he knew the instant the human's heart went silent beneath his fingers.

He knew, as the darkness pulled him under, that he had killed tonight.

A loud thump in the adjacent room woke Dylan out of a fitful sleep. She sat up, completely awake now. More noises sounded next door, low groans and heavy-footed stumbling, like someone - or something - large was in a world of agony.

The connecting suite was Rio's. He'd told her so earlier that evening, when he'd come back with a light dinner and her backpack of clothes, and told her to make herself comfortable for the night. He'd warned that he would be right on the other side of the wall, never more than a few seconds out of reach. Which hadn't exactly added to her comfort level in any way.

In spite of his threat, Dylan had suspected he'd gone out at some point. The neighboring room had been quiet for several hours, until this four A.M . wake-up call.

So much for Rio's claim that he was a deadly creature of the night. From the sloppy arrival going on over there, it sounded as if he was just another drunk, coming back from a hell of a bender in town.

Dylan sat there, arms crossed over her chest as she listened to him groan, knock into a heavy piece of furniture, curse ripely as his legs gave out beneath him.

How many nights did her father come home in similar condition? Jesus, far too many to count. He'd stumble in from the bar, so polluted it took her mom, Dylan, and both of her older brothers to haul him to bed before he fell and cracked open his skull. She'd developed a rigid lack of sympathy for men who let their weaknesses own them like that, but she had to admit that the noises Rio was making now seemed something other than your basic drunk-and-disorderly.

She climbed off the bed and moved quietly over to the connecting door. With her ear pressed to the cool wood, she could hear his breath rasping shallowly. She could almost imagine him lying on the floor where he crumbled, unable to move for whatever it was that he was dealing with over there.

"Hello?" she asked softly. "Um...Rio, is that you?"

Silence.

It dragged out, long and uneasy.

"Are you okay in there?"

She put her hand on the doorknob, but it didn't give at all. Locked, just like it had been all night.

"Should I call for someone to help y - "

"Go back to bed, Dylan."

The voice was low and snarly - Rio's voice, yet somehow very different than she'd ever heard it before.

"Move away from the door," came the strange growl of words again. "I don't need help."

Dylan frowned. "I don't believe you. You don't sound good at all."

She tried the knob again. It was old hardware; maybe she could jiggle it open.

"Dylan. Get away from the goddamn door."

"Why?"

"Because if you stay there one more second, I'm going to open it."

He exhaled sharply, and when he spoke again his voice was raw gravel. "I can smell you, Dylan, and I want to...taste you. I want you, and I'm not sane enough to keep my hands off you if I were to see you right now."

Dylan swallowed. She should be terrified of the man on the other side of that door. And yes, part of her was. Not because of his unbelievable claim that he was a vampire. Not because he had abducted her and seemed intent on keeping her prisoner, albeit in a gilded cage. She was terrified because of the honesty in what he'd just said - that he wanted her.

And as much as she wanted to deny it, deep down, that knowledge made her burn just a little to know Rio's touch.

She couldn't speak. Her feet started moving beneath her, pulling her back from the door. Back to reality, she hoped, because what she'd just been considering was not only unrealistic but downright stupid. She padded over to the bed and got in, sitting there with her knees drawn up to her chest, her arms locked tightly around her shins.

There would be no more sleep for her tonight.

Chapter Twelve

She didn't expect to see him in her room first thing that morning.

Dylan came out of the guest suite's spacious shower and dried off with one of the half dozen luxurious towels folded neatly on a built-in shelf in the bathroom. She rubbed out most of the water from her hair, then threw on the last of her clean clothes from her bag. The layered double camisoles and drawstring capris were rumpled, but it wasn't like she had anyone to impress. Barefoot, her damp hair clinging to her bare arms, she opened the bathroom door and padded out to the main room.

And there he was.

Rio, seated in the chair near the door, waiting for her to come out.

Dylan stopped short, startled to find him there.

"I knocked," he said, a strangely considerate thing, coming from her kidnapper. "You didn't answer, so I wanted to make sure you were all right."

"Seems like I should be asking you the same thing." She cautiously walked farther into the main area of the suite. Although there was no reason she should be concerned about the man who was holding her against her will, she was still rattled by what she'd heard in the other room a few hours ago. "What happened to you last night? You sounded like you were in pretty bad shape."

He didn't offer an explanation, just stared at her from across the dim room. Looking at him now, she had to wonder if she'd imagined the whole thing. Dressed in a dove gray tee-shirt and tailored charcoal pants, his dark hair perfectly swept back from his face, he looked well rested and relaxed. Still his broody man-of-few-words self, but less on edge somehow. In fact, he looked as though he'd slept like a baby for a full night straight, while Dylan herself felt like roadkill after lying awake speculating about him since the predawn hours.

"You might want to tell your friends that they need to fix the timer on the blinds in here," she said, gesturing to the tall window that should be bathing the room with daylight but was instead blocked by the remote-controlled window shades. "They opened on their own last night, then closed before sunrise. Functionality's a bit backward, don't you think? Nice view, by the way, even in the dark. What lake is that out back - the Wannsee? It's kind of big to be the Grunewaldsee or the Teufelssee, and based on all the old trees surrounding this place, I'm guessing we have to be somewhere near the Havel River. That's where we are, right?"

No reaction from the other side of the room, except for a slow exhale as Rio watched her with dark, unreadable eyes.

He'd brought her breakfast. Dylan strolled over to the squat table and dainty sofa in the center of the parlor area, where a bone china plate containing an omelette, sausage links, roasted potatoes, and a thick slab of toast waited. There was a glass of orange juice, coffee, and a starched white linen napkin tucked beneath a gleaming set of real silver flatware. She couldn't resist the coffee as she wandered over to have a look at everything he brought her. She dropped two sugar cubes into the cup, then poured in enough whole cream to turn the coffee a light shade of tan, sweet and milky, just the way she liked it.

"You know, apart from the incarceration portion of my stay, I have to admit that you folks certainly know how to treat your hostages."

"You're not a hostage, Dylan."

"No, a prisoner is more like it. Or does your kind , as you put it, prefer a less obvious term - detainee, maybe?"

"You are none of those things."

"Well, great!" she replied with mock excitement. "Then when can I go home?"

She didn't really expect him to answer. He leaned back in the chair and crossed his long legs, one ankle propped on the opposite knee. He was thoughtful today, like he wasn't quite sure what to do with her. And she didn't miss the fact that as she took a seat on the sofa and began nibbling at the buttered toast, his gaze lingered hotly on her body.

Not to mention her throat.

She flashed back to what he'd said to her several hours ago: I can smell you, Dylan, and I want to taste you. I want you...

She definitely had not imagined that. The words had been playing in her mind, practically over and over, since he'd growled them at her through the door. And as he watched her so closely now, with a broody interest that was all male, Dylan could hardly breathe.

She dropped her gaze to her plate, suddenly very self-conscious.

"You're staring at me," she murmured, the silent scrutiny driving her crazy.

"I'm merely wondering how it is that an intelligent woman like you would choose the line of work you're in. It doesn't seem to fit you."

"It fits well enough," Dylan said.

"No," he said. "It doesn't fit at all. I've read some of the articles on your computer - including a few of the older ones. Articles that weren't written for that rag that employs you."

She took a sip of her coffee, uncomfortable with his praise. "Those files are private. I really don't appreciate you excavating my hard drive like you own it."

"You wrote a lot about a murder case in upstate New York. The pieces I read on your computer were a few years old, but they were good, Dylan. You are a very smart, compelling writer. Better than you may think."

"Jesus," Dylan muttered under her breath. "I said those files are private."

"Yeah, you did. But now I'm curious. Why did that particular case matter so much to you?"

Dylan shook her head and leaned back from her breakfast. "It was my first assignment fresh out of college. A little boy went missing in a small town up north. The police had no suspects and no leads, but there was speculation that the father might have been involved. I was hungry to make a quick name for myself, so I started digging into the guy's history. He was a recovering alcoholic who never held a steady job, one of those class-act dead-beat dads."