Deep in her soul, Jessica Tyson knew what she wanted. As unlikely as it seemed, as fraught with peril and stupidly impulsive as every brain cell told her it was. But she’d gone down far more frightening roads than this one, with no hope at all. For the first time in a very long time, she allowed herself a spark of hope, allowed herself to believe the choice she was making was truly hers.

Amara had picked up the top paper and was staring at the design she’d chosen. The servant looked up, met Jessica’s eyes. Amara didn’t smile, but something powerful and reassuring emanated from her as she cupped Jessica’s face, leaned in and kissed her mouth.

“Yes,” she said. “This is perfect.”

When she readjusted herself for Robert, she realized the purpose of the portable refrigerator. Given the reason for the tattoo design, she should have remembered—vividly—that scars on a third-marked human servant disappeared unless the wounds were mixed with the vampire Master’s blood. Though she’d been only second-marked with Raithe and therefore could still scar on her own if the wound was grievous enough, he hadn’t taken any chances. When he stripped the skin from her back, he’d marked her with his blood, and it had burned like acid.

A panic attack surged to life at the thought, while Robert prepared his needles and took the small vials of blood out of the fridge.

Mason’s blood. The panic was replaced by another feeling, not exactly unpleasant, as she imagined Mason drawing it from his body for her, for this. Reaching out, she touched the lip of the now open vial, enough to get a drop, brought the finger back to her mouth and tasted Mason.

“Jessica?” She shifted her gaze to Robert and noted he’d lifted a different vial and syringe. “Lord Mason wants you sedated during the procedure, so you will feel no pain.”

She shook her head. “No, I want to be awake.”

“With his blood, it’s going to be quite painful.” Amara’s hand touched her head.

“I know. But that’s okay. I want to feel it. I’m not afraid.” She turned her face so she could look up at the other woman. “I know he told you to make me, but he did it so I wouldn’t feel afraid or hurt too much. I promise, if either of those things happens, I’ll ask you for the sedative. Please. Let me have this choice.”

Amara’s gaze rose, obviously meeting Robert’s over her body. “Let’s respect her decision on this, Robert. I’ll take the consequences if Lord Mason is displeased.”

Shallow breaths, shallow breaths. As Jess heard the whir of the needles being tested, she gripped the metal table frame beneath the cushioning. A burr in the steel cut into her finger.

The cuffs on her wrists and around her throat warmed, sending their intertwined strands of pleasure and reassurance, a mild electrical jolt of rebuke. Her lips curved. Even better than sedation. It reminded her of his hand in her hair, his mouth so close to her throat. I will demand your surrender . . .

There were two ways to surrender. One was by coercion, as Raithe had done. Taking her by brutal force, threatening those she loved, subjecting her to unspeakable pain and humiliation. The other way was by willing desire, knowing being enthralled to a particular Master held something that could not be found somewhere else. A fulfillment, and oddly, a tranquil peace. She saw it in Enrique and Amara, and though she’d never experienced it directly, the understanding of it was there, in a culmination of things. The activation of her restraints, the design she’d chosen, the choice Amara let her have.

She tried it again, pressed her finger against the sharp edge, a patient administering her own morphine, a tiny, secret dose of pain followed by pleasure. As the shiver went through her body again, she imagined his touch, comforting and demanding at once.

Amara rubbed Jess’s shoulder. “I’m going to fold back the sheet for Robert. Are you ready?” Jessica nodded. She heard Robert draw in a breath. While she’d sketched what was there, this was the first time he’d seen the reality of it. Please don’t ask me, don’t ask me . . .

“The world is a terrible place, cherie,” he murmured at last. His gentle fingers lighted on the center scar. The emotion pouring from his voice wasn’t sympathy, but rather cold outrage. “If whoever did this is not dead, I hope to God that Lord Mason leaves no strip of skin on his cowardly body.”

If Raithe still lived, she believed Mason would have done exactly that. She’d seen it in his face, more than once, when he’d tapped her memories. As gratified as she was by that, she wanted more than his vengeful honor toward a damsel in distress.

As Robert bent to his task, began to wipe her down with a cleansing solution, she turned her head back toward Amara with an expectant look.

“Yes, love?” Amara leaned forward. “Have you changed your mind?”

Jessica shook her head. Letting go of the table on the nonburred side, she threaded her fingers into the beautiful fall of Amara’s tresses, enjoying the pleasure of touching it, almost as much as she enjoyed Amara’s pleased expression when she offered the spontaneous affection.

“The night we go to the club, I’ll need help, getting ready.”

She might not be sure what she wanted long term yet, but she was quite sure what she wanted short term. And she wasn’t going to wait for it anymore. For five long years she’d waited for her life to change, until she’d given up that it would ever happen. She wasn’t going to waste any more of it agonizing.

When Amara nodded with a knowing look, Jess closed her eyes and let Robert take her a step closer to owning her life again. Or having the ability to give it to whomever she chose.

20

MASON rubbed his eyes. “I hate politics,” he stated emphatically. “All politicians should die lingering, torturous deaths. Ants should gnaw living flesh from their bones.”

Lord Brian, barricaded by racks of test tubes and microscopes, glanced up from his notes. A faint smile crossed his usually serious features. “Then you have placed yourself in a masochistic position, my lord. Taking over in Lady Lyssa’s capacity, and now challenging Council law regarding human servants who take the lives of their Masters. However, I still don’t understand why you’d want to know about our Cleves research.” He nodded to a sheaf of papers. “If the girl’s Master is dead and she wasn’t third-marked, research on reversing the third mark wouldn’t be relevant.”

“I third-marked her to save her life.”

“Oh.” Lord Brian considered that. “And you do not wish to keep her for your own. Understandable. Keeping a servant who’d staked her previous Master could be discomfiting, to say the least. You’d feel compelled to stay in her mind constantly, afraid she might get in a pique and stake you for a glass of wine demanded at the wrong moment.” At a delicate cough from the other end of the room, Brian sent a narrow look toward Debra, his research assistant and third-marked servant. “I’m sure that was lab dust.”

“Of course, my lord.” She sent him a beatific smile and bent to her work again.

“That’s not why I’m interested,” Mason snapped. He slid onto one of the stools across from the vampire scientist. “She deserves a choice. She didn’t choose this life.”

He waved a hand at Brian’s raised brow. His annoyance wasn’t with the scientist. As Enrique had predicted, word had leaked out, and the halls were crawling with the fifteen made vampires Raithe had sired. While, in recent years, the Council had severely curtailed the practice of making vampires, it was a few decades too late, in Mason’s opinion. Made vampires were notoriously more volatile, with far less impulse control.

Mason understood that the incidence of born vampires was dwindling, so population concerns were not entirely unjustified. Still, he didn’t see that any vampire needed more than a dozen “offspring,” particularly when it seemed they didn’t have enough brain cells between them to constitute one intelligent being.

Mason gestured to the papers. “What does the name mean?”

Debra lifted her head. “Cleves, after Anne of Cleves, the wife Henry VIII divorced after six months because she was too ugly.” A smile touched her lovely pink mouth. “He thought she looked like a horse.”

“Debra came up with the name for the serum. Clever, if a bit impudent.” Brian’s eyes glinted, but his gaze lingered on the slim nape of his assistant as she measured a viscous substance from a beaker. It reminded Mason that Brian was still fairly young. Debra was likely the first servant the born vampire had chosen without his parents’ input.

However, while Brian was not yet a century old yet, his dedication to scientific inquiry for their kind, begun when he was little more than a teenager, had led to an entire division of the Council’s headquarters being committed to his research. He was now spear-heading at least eight different projects, handled by a variety of like-minded vampires, their servants and even some humans carefully recruited from the scientific community, an unprecedented step.

“Can you tell me how it works in a way I’ll understand?” Mason’s dry tone brought the younger vampire’s attention back to him.

Brian slanted him a grin.

“Probably not. Suffice it to say, we use different composites to remove the three different marks, essentially washing the blood clean of the vampire’s presence. No bond left between him and the human. So far it has shown guarded success in the cell modeling, but it will only be effective on third-marks during their first ten years.” Brian frowned suddenly at something in his notes, lifted a test tube to the light and made another note. Mason waited through several minutes of scribbling. Debra glanced up a few minutes later and cleared her throat, a faint amusement in her expression.

Brian’s gaze came up, and Mason realized the male had gotten lost in his research again and forgotten he was even there.

“How soon can it be used, Lord Brian?” He couldn’t help the edge in his voice, but since it focused the other vampire’s attention, he didn’t regret it.