The Seductive Pretty Chapter 107: Midnight Madness

Chapter 107: Chapter 107: Midnight Madness

Chapter 107: Midnight Madness

Elias was not calming down.

The blanket had cut off his air for barely a moment, but it had been enough. The instant Serena hauled it over his face, his eyes flew open. He ripped it back down at once, freeing his head with a violent motion, then stared up at her as if he had been dragged out of a nightmare and dropped straight into another one.

His first instinct was to swing.

Only experience stopped him. Someone jolted awake in the middle of the night was not supposed to look composed, let alone clear-headed enough to throw the first punch without a pause. So Elias held it in. His eyes stayed wide, his breathing sharp, his face full of that half-dazed fury only made sense on someone who had been ripped out of deep sleep.

A few seconds passed before he finally found his voice.

"Serena Blackwood," he said, every word edged with disbelief and anger, "what kind of lunatic loses her mind in the middle of the night like this?"

Serena stood over him, looking down with the cool authority of someone who thought the question itself was ridiculous.

"This is my house."

Elias stared at her.

For one brief, incredulous second, he tilted his head to the side.

That answer only came out of the mouth of someone who had been drinking. Not enough to slur, not enough to stumble, but enough to drag the logic straight out of her head and leave behind only the arrogance.

He pushed himself up on one elbow, blanket bunched around his waist. "You were the one who told me to move in."

Serena nodded once, as though this supported her point instead of ruining it.

"You’re mine too."

There it was.

The logic was cracked, but the meaning behind it was perfectly obvious. This was her house. He was in her house. Therefore he was hers. Since he was hers, she could do whatever she pleased. That was the line her drunk mind had drawn, and she seemed very satisfied with it.

Elias laughed inwardly.

Amazing. She had drunk herself all the way down to the kind of reasoning only somebody with one surviving family register page would think sounded profound.

Then he moved.

"Fine," he snapped. "Then I’m leaving."

He twisted to get off the bed.

Serena moved faster.

The instant he struggled upright, she came down on him, pinning him back against the mattress with startling force. Her arms locked around him and the blanket together, trapping both against his body in one tight hold. Her weight followed a second later, enough to make his breath hitch. A muffled sound escaped him before he could stop it, and his brows drew tight.

To her credit, Serena shifted a little when she heard it, lifting just enough to ease the worst of the pressure.

Elias used the opening at once.

He drove one knee upward, aiming hard, but the strike landed wrong. The blanket got in the way, and the angle was bad. It thudded against her without doing any real damage.

Serena’s eyes cooled another shade.

She remembered.

That was obvious from the way her expression changed, from the flicker of memory that crossed her face. She had not forgotten the earlier blow he had given her, the one that had landed clean and left her doubled over and furious.

This time she corrected for him.

She shifted his legs apart, planted one knee between them, and braced both hands beside his head. Then she lowered herself just enough to force him flat and looked straight into his face.

For a moment neither of them spoke.

The room was dark. The air held the faint smell of alcohol and roses. The mattress dipped beneath both their bodies. There was more heat than there should have been between two people who were, by every sane measure, in the middle of a fight.

That change in the atmosphere hit Elias before he could stop it, and with it came a small, cold note of danger.

He narrowed his eyes.

"Serena," he warned, voice sharp despite the fact that he was still half on his back beneath her, "if you even think about throwing up on me right now, I swear I’ll kill you."

The line was so immediate, so sincere, that it almost made her laugh.

And then it did.

Serena’s mouth curved.

In front of him, she bent down further, slow and deliberate, until their noses brushed. Her breath touched his face. The alcohol on it was faint rather than overwhelming, but it was there, clean and expensive instead of foul, which annoyed him for reasons he refused to examine.

"You’ve been drinking," he said, frowning. "Get off me."

"You don’t like it when I drink?" Serena asked, voice low, with the trace of a smile still in it.

To her, the question sounded different than it did to him. To him it was provocation. To her it sounded dangerously close to concern.

That thought pleased her.

So she kissed him.

Not his mouth.

Her lips touched his forehead first, soft and surprisingly careful, the kind of touch that would have felt almost gentle if it had not come from the woman currently holding him down against his own bed.

She lifted her head.

The next kiss aimed for his cheek.

Elias turned away before it could land properly.

Serena’s expression hardened at once. Under other circumstances she would already have made him regret that. Tonight, instead, she bent down again. He kept turning his face aside, dodging where he could, but there were limits to what he could do with his shoulders pinned and half his body trapped in bedding.

Eventually, one kiss got through.

Then another.

She caught his temple. His jaw. The side of his face. The edge of his ear. The line beneath his eye. None of it was frantic. None of it was clumsy. The infuriating part was that she seemed perfectly content to take her time, as though she had decided his whole face belonged to her and meant to prove it one place at a time.

Elias finally yanked one hand free from the blanket and scrubbed hard across the last place she had touched, enough to drag his own skin sideways.

"Disgusting," he said coldly.

If she had woken him up in the middle of the night, she could forget about getting a pleasant reaction out of him.

Serena’s voice cooled too. "You can hate it and still take it."

What followed felt less like seduction than punishment.

She kept him there and kept kissing him, methodically enough to drive him up the wall, until the whole thing crossed from infuriating to absurd. She avoided his mouth on purpose, which only made it worse. She treated that one place as though it were being saved, preserved, set aside for later, and that, more than the kisses themselves, made Elias aware that she was still operating according to some private script of possession he had not been allowed to read.

He was in the middle of wondering whether that meant she still thought he was too dirty to kiss properly when her thumb brushed his lower lip.

She paused.

Then she kissed him.

This time, on the mouth.

Elias’s eyes widened a fraction in surprise.

Had she really drunk enough to short out whatever hesitation she had left?

But Serena had already pulled back.

Her thumb dragged across his lower lip with far more force than necessary, enough to make him hiss. Then she lifted her hand to her own face and ran her tongue once over her thumb.

She stopped.

"Blood," she said.

The word dropped into the room with unnerving calm.

The moment it left her mouth, the air changed again.

She looked at him the way a judge might look at a witness who had just made the wrong choice under oath.

"Whose is it?"

Elias hadn’t opened his mouth yet when Serena answered herself, as if she had already excluded one possibility and moved on.

"Not yours. I checked. There’s no cut on your mouth."

[She found it.]

System Theta sounded as if it might crash from stress.

Under Serena’s stare, Elias remained infuriatingly unbothered.

"Someone else’s," he said.

Serena’s expression gave nothing away at first, but something in it shifted, a quiet confirmation instead of surprise, as though that answer had only verified what she already suspected.

[Host!] System Theta sounded panicked. [Why would you just tell her?]

To the system, this was catastrophe stacked on top of catastrophe. Two sisters, one secret, one betrayal. That kind of thing did not end cleanly in any world.

Elias kept his eyes on Serena and added, "Not just one person’s."

That got her.

For the first time, Serena’s face changed outright. It wasn’t dramatic, but the stillness broke. Then her hand came up and caught his face, fingers digging into his cheeks just enough to make him part his lips.

"Do you think I’m stupid?" she asked in a voice so quiet it felt colder than shouting would have.

Elias laughed.

"I’m a vampire," he said. "Isn’t it normal for a vampire to drink blood?"

"A vampire?"

Her fingers slid from his cheek to his mouth. She forced his lips apart and then his teeth, working with the patience of someone too focused to care how humiliating the position was. Her fingertips found the points of his canines. Not true fangs, only those slightly too-sharp teeth of his that kept ending up in women’s thoughts long after they had any business staying there.

"So these are your vampire fangs?"

"Not even close," Elias said, words slurring around her hand.

Saliva had already gathered at the corner of his mouth, but he did not care enough to be embarrassed. If anything, the lack of embarrassment seemed to provoke her further. He bit lightly at her fingers as he spoke, slow and insolent rather than truly resistant.

"Sharp teeth don’t prove anything. And not having them doesn’t mean someone isn’t one." He let his eyes half-lid as he looked at her. "Take you, for example."

Something almost like amusement touched Serena’s face.

"Me?"

Elias bit down harder.

This time he put enough force into it to break skin.

Her fingertip opened under the pressure of his teeth. The taste of fresh blood hit his tongue at once.

He held her there long enough to make the point, then looked up at her with bright, unrepentant eyes.

"You," he said. "You’re the vampire."

A capitalist vampire, he thought.

Serena did not argue.

Instead, she pushed her hand deeper against his mouth, forcing him to take more of that bright metallic taste.

"Then let me feed you," she murmured.

The rest of the sentence remained unspoken, but its meaning was plain enough.

So you stop going elsewhere.

She had not come tonight to interrogate him and leave. That much was obvious now. The blood on his mouth had only shifted the shape of what she already intended. The jealousy did not stop her. It sharpened her.

The blanket dragged with them as they moved.

At some point it covered both of them, leaving the room only the blurred outline of bodies and the restless rise and fall of cloth. Motion showed there first, slow and then sharper, then slow again. The rhythm of it changed without warning, like an argument slipping into something rougher and less verbal.

Once, part of Elias’s bare leg kicked free into the cold air, pale against the dark sheets, and Serena’s hand caught it at once and drew it back under.

Neither of them wasted breath on words after that.

There were sounds, but not speech. Breath gone ragged. The quiet drag of bodies against fabric. A stifled sound that might have been anger and might have been something else by the time it escaped him. Serena gave nothing away except in the firmness of her hands and the relentless steadiness of her attention, as though she had decided the entire matter would end on her terms and saw no reason to rush the proof.

By the end, the blanket had slid halfway off the bed.

Elias lay beneath her with tears caught at the corners of his eyes, his face flushed, his expression caught somewhere between fury and something far harder to name. Sweat had darkened the hair at his temples. Serena leaned above him, breathing more heavily than before but otherwise still composed, as if she had merely finished a task that required concentration.

She bent once more over his face.

This time she did not kiss him. She only breathed in at his mouth, testing for that earlier scent.

The strange trace of someone else’s blood was gone.

In its place was the clean, unmistakable taste of a fresh bite. Elias had cut his own lip on his teeth at some point during the struggle. A tiny bead of blood welled there now, bright and round.

Serena looked at it for a long moment without touching it.