Bite Marks (The Lycans 5)

PROLOGUE

Adryan

I felt something in my body shift, come alive. Although my heart had been beating for nearly a century and a half, this was the first time it functioned other than keeping me alive. It beat for her. The air I took into my lungs was for her. Every single thing I did from this point on would always be with her in mind, for her protection, her happiness… her pleasure.

My eyes turned red, illuminating my office in a hazy ruby glow as I tracked her through the club, took in every single inch of her as if I hadn’t consumed a drop of blood in a millennium and was so starved I was a dried-out husk inside.

My dick hardened, the first time I’d ever had any kind of arousal, the ache in my balls painful. I panted and braced my hands on the glass, curling my fingers against it until I worried I’d crack the partition separating me from everyone else, like releasing a beast on the vulnerable.

Mine. Mine. Mineminemine!

That one word was a roar in my head, filling my body, coursing through my veins. I’d never known bloodlust like this, never felt desire like what was licking at my fingers and toes and spreading inward to consume my very dark and dangerous soul.

Things had gotten exponentially more interesting.

1

Kayla

A liar. That’s what I felt like I was.

A sinner. That’s who I wanted to be.

I stared at my reflection, the girl looking back at me a faux version of myself.

Good Girl Kayla. That’s what everyone had always called me. I could envision that's what my mother and father would have said about me if they were still alive. But not knowing them left this hole in my body that could never be filled. It wasn’t an aching wound, but it was just… there.

But there was my uncle, who’d been like a father to me. “Beautiful like a sunset.” That’s how he’d described me. He’d been one of those people who always saw the glass half full. The optimist. The positive thinker.

Thinking about him, the man who raised me after my parents passed away, always brought a sharp pain to my chest, deep in my heart, until all I felt was that gnawing presence.

Because he’d been taken from me, just like my parents had been.

I didn’t know if it was fate or destiny, God or a higher power that decided when a person's time was up. Or maybe it was just… life. We were like a piece of machinery, bound to break down before becoming obsolete.

“Way to bring down your whole mood before the night even starts,” I said to myself in the same cynical, depressing tone that clung to me like a second skin.

I wondered what people would really think if they knew the darkness that played at my frayed edges, those coal-colored tendrils snaking their way through me, trying to wrap tightly around my body and pull me under until I was totally lost.

It was easy to pretend to be someone you’re not, like everything was fine, the same smile on my face giving the fallacy that I was happy, that I didn’t think of all the deviant things to do with a man, the one I envisioned who was faceless, who came to me in the night.

He wasn’t there to rescue me. He wasn’t my hero. He was the one who’d stain my skin with handprints, who’d force me to call out his name as he did things to me that I only ever thought up in my filthiest dreams.

I felt a flush steal over me even harder as those thoughts and images coursed through my mind like a record player, that turntable going round and round and round and round.

A sinner… is what I really was. The real me.

I shook my head, as it was almost an oxymoron. Could a virgin really be a sexual deviant?

I closed the tube of the lipstick, the one called Blood Red, and stared at my now red-painted mouth. The sound of the tube hitting my vanity and rolling across the smooth top before clanking to the hardwood echoed off my bedroom walls.

Blood Red. That’s what this shade was named. I only ever wore Pretty Pink in front of everyone… except when I went out. Except when I left the comfort of the suburbs and ventured deep into the city of Ryeka, New York.

It was like having twin beings trapped in one body.

The good-girl college student who didn’t have to work right now because her uncle had left her not only his Tudor home outside of Ryeka on five acres of land, but also a sizable estate.

That woman kept her cardigans buttoned up and her pencil skirts pressed clean. Her hair was straightened and pinned out of her face. And she always wore Pretty Pink lipstick.