Until the Sun Falls from the Sky (The Three #1)(44)

I took it, lifted it to my lips and sucked back a healthy sip mostly because I needed it.

I should have taken a larger sip because his mouth came back to my ear and he asked, “Do you want to dance?”

My eyes shot to the writhing dance floor and my legs wobbled.

There it was. To be Obedient Leah, I was going to have to do something I really didn’t want to do.

“If you want to.” I tried to sound respectful and subservient like his wish was my command but I wasn’t sure I accomplished this feat.

My fears were proved correct when I felt his body move with his chuckle at my back.

“We don’t have to do anything you don’t want to do, Leah.”

We didn’t?

Boy, that was a first.

I stared at the undulating bodies on the dance floor, trying and failing to imagine Lucien’s powerful frame among them and gulped before asking, “Um, do, you, er, dance?”

“Not publicly, no. However, privately, yes.”

I twisted my neck to look at him. “Privately?”

He grinned. “Drink up, pet, and I’ll show you The Feast.”

I felt my brows knit. “I thought we were at The Feast.”

His fingers wrapped around my wrist and lifted my glass to my lips. “Drink,” he ordered.

I drank and he took my glass, put it next to his on the bar and then captured my hand.

Again, he moved us through the crowd, his hand secure in mine, anchoring me to him as he pushed through. The bodies seemed to close in this time, the eyes no longer averted, the curiosity now explicit.

Lucien either ignored it or didn’t notice it (likely the first). He led me to a back wall where there was an open doorway that led to a shadowed hall. What looked like an overdeveloped bouncer was standing just outside the doorway.

Without hesitation or even glancing at the bouncer, Lucien guided me in.

The hall was long and snaking, turning this way and that, not with corners but with curves. There were no doors which I thought was way weird. It was shadowed, creepy and strangely threatening and if I wasn’t with Lucien there was no way I’d have been there. The music and the hum slowly died as we moved forward and followed the snake.

Finally, with the club just a soft, nearly indistinct buzz behind us, we turned an actual corner.

And I was confronted with A Feast.

My first instinct was to look away.

But it was like a car crash and I couldn’t, no matter how much I wanted to.

It was different here, like night and day. The walls weren’t cement but painted a deep, rich red. The floor was covered in thick pile carpets and pillows. Some of pillows huge, the size of double beds. Some of them smaller. All of them covered in velvet in different rich shades, plum, scarlet, sapphire, ruby, forest green, wine and blood red. There were enormous mirrors on the wall framed in heavily carved, dark wood reflecting the activity on the pillows, against the walls, on the floor.

Feeding and lots of it.

On a double-bed-sized pillow was a woman so stunning she looked like a model, her alabaster skin exposed in a low-cut black dress. Three vampires were attached to her. One at her neck, one at her ankle and one whose mouth was at her cle**age suckling at the side of her breast.

My gaze floated, horrified at the raw, brutal sensuality of it. It was everywhere. I couldn’t escape it.

I tore my eyes free, trying to find a safe place but caught an image in a mirror, a vampire nearly as big as Lucien had a tiny woman pinned to the wall. Her head was lolling on her shoulder, her arms limp. He was holding her to his mouth with his hands under her armpits, her feet clean off the floor, legs dangling. Her face was a picture of ecstasy as blood dribbled down her neck, escaping his mouth.

With nowhere to put my eyes, I turned into Lucien and shoved my face in his massive chest. My hands lifting, fingers curling into his lapels, I pulled the fabric to my cheeks so no vision could penetrate even accidentally.

His arms came around me, a hand drifting up my na**d spine, under my hair to rest warm on my neck. I felt his body bow so his mouth could be at the top of my head and my face and torso arched into his to keep the contact.

His voice was low when he asked quietly, “You don’t think it’s beautiful?”

Oh my God.

He thought this was beautiful?

A thought occurred to me and, panicked, my head snapped back and his jerked up to avoid a collision.

“Don’t feed from me here,” I blurted out my plea.

I felt his body jolt then saw his eyes narrow before he asked, “Pardon?”

“Please. I’ll do anything you say. Just don’t feed from me here.”

“Leah –”

I shook his lapels roughly and pressed closer, going up on my toes, so much in a state I didn’t measure my words. “Promise me, Lucien. What happened last night is something special, something that should be between us, not reflected in a f**king mirror for anyone to see.”

At my words, his face gentled, his fingers came to my hairline at the side of my head and slid in, stopping, curling and holding me there before he whispered, “Sweetheart –”

I was too rocked by what I just witnessed, knowing how it felt, seeing what was likely my ecstasy of last night on that woman’s face, I didn’t let his actions register. Or his tone. Or the endearment he’d used last night and this morning which I thought, regardless of the outcome of both events, was achingly sweet.