Everything else faded away, until there was only a vein, and his hunger.
He opened his mouth and bit.
~*~
The bite seemed to touch every nerve, all the way down to his fingers and toes. The sensation of fangs breaking his skin moved through Sasha like a body blow. He gasped, and shut his eyes, reeling.
Nikita’s mouth closed around the wound, and Sasha went boneless. This. This was what he’d craved.
To be needed.
Touching head to toe, heartbeats echoing one another, Nik’s arms tightening around him with every pull, he rested his forehead on Nik’s shoulder and just breathed. Drank in the scents of home, and safe, and pack, and Nik. Mate, he thought with a painful inner pang. Because he knew now, after meeting the le Stranges, that wolves could mate, that they did. And he didn’t know of any other word that better described what Nik meant to him. Nik called him bratishka – little brother. And maybe that was all it was to Nikita, but it was so much more than that to Sasha.
Tears built behind his closed eyelids, and his breath came in rough, hitching little starts that pressed their chests together, because he didn’t know how to put that into words. How did you tell someone that you loved them so much, so hopelessly, that you wanted to melt together, until you were no longer two separate beings, but one? That even if you cherished the closeness you already had, you wanted more?
Selfish. It was so selfish, and Sasha was ashamed of himself for wanting something that Nikita didn’t.
He didn’t…did he?
As he fed, Nik grew hard against Sasha’s hip. His pulls came harder; he made low, deep rumbles in his throat, like a lion purring, and his hips began to move in shallow, unconscious twitches. Natural, mindless; a reaction to the live blood filling his belly.
Sasha’s own stomach clenched with want, though. An inexpert, vague sort of urge to grab, to touch what skin he could, to hold. Virgin or no, his hips knew the rhythm, old as time. A dance he longed to join.
He’d tried, once, decades ago, the first time Nik fed from his vein. The two of them alone, denned up in a hollow in the snow. Sasha had felt his desire, and offered to touch – but Nikita had brushed him away. Disgusted, he’d thought, or simply uninterested.
But now, tonight, fueled by weeks of distance, tired, and frustrated, and his head still full of that woman’s face. The cold threat in Nikita’s eyes in the club bathroom; show you the ropes.
Now, he ventured again.
He slid a languid hand down Nikita’s torso, the firm swell of pectoral, and the too-flat washboard of his sunken stomach, warm even through the cotton of his shirt. Reached down between their bodies, and pressed his palm over the growing bulge in Nik’s jeans.
Nikita moaned, and he lifted up into the touch, a full-body arch.
But a moment later he pulled off Sasha’s vein with a gasp. “Sasha–”
“Drink,” Sasha ordered. He pressed his hand down harder. “Please. Please–” His voice broke. “Nik…I want…” He panted into the collar of Nik’s shirt, not daring to pull back and meet his gaze, afraid of what he’d find there.
It was silent a moment save the rough scrape of their breathing.
And then Nikita sighed, and he nuzzled into Sasha’s throat again; Sasha felt the hot trickle of blood running down his neck, just before Nikita’s tongue traced the droplets back to the wound. He lingered there a moment, lips moving over the punctures: small, wet touches like a kiss.
Voice rough, wet, deep: “What do you want, lyubimyy?”
Sasha shivered. Tears slipped hot down his cheeks, and he pressed his face into Nik’s throat. “You. I just want you.”
Nikita purred a comforting sound. “Sweet baby, don’t shake. It’s alright.” He went back to the wound and started to drink again.
His arms closed more securely around Sasha, and he rolled them onto their sides. One hand smoothed down Sasha’s bare back, comforting and electrifying at once, and kept going. Past his waistband, over his ass – Sasha shifted forward with a whine, wanting more – and down to his thigh, pulling his leg up and over Nik’s hip. He urged him in closer, and rolled his own hips.
“Like this,” he murmured against Sasha’s skin. “Move with me.”
Sasha gasped and kept gasping, head tipping back. He couldn’t breathe, and his heart raced, but he could move, and he did. Grinding his hips against Nik’s, forward and retreat. Even through their jeans, he could feel the shape and heft of Nik’s cock, pressed up right against his own.
Nik drank, and they moved together, and the air between them grew hot, and close. Sasha clutched at him; pushed up his shirt and passed shaking hands over sweat-sticky bare skin. Wriggled closer and closer until they were flush, too hot, too close for Nikita to keep feeding.
A high, keening whine left his mouth as he came, starbursts wheeling behind his closed eyelids, every nerve on fire.
“God, God, oh God,” Nik murmured against his throat, and kissed him there, smearing hot blood.
Mate, Sasha thought, mine. And lost consciousness.
5
The Lion’s Den had become the informal gathering place for their little group. Their pack, Alexei supposed. He wouldn’t let himself think family yet. Not when Nikita still hated him a little bit, and not after the fate that had befallen his real family, over a century ago.
It was a pub that managed to be both sprawling and cozy, full of nooks, allowing for privacy even on crowded nights. No one there cared that Nik smoked, nor that Sasha didn’t exactly look twenty-one in his fake ID photo. Alexei liked it – mostly because it was a place where he could go to keep company other than his own.
But some nights, he craved something a little different.
The fights broke up around ten-thirty – early for a Friday – and after there was the usual period of bets changing hands; Jamie’s hands had almost been too small to hold their night’s winnings.
Lanny had left to go see Sasha at the club for reasons he hadn’t wanted to relay to Alexei. Jamie had said something about a painting he was working on.
That had left Alexei alone. Not that he minded; he was overdue for a trip to Nameless anyway.
Because here was the thing: Alexei liked his new little pack. Truly he did. And he respected Nikita, even if the other vamp still mistrusted – and maybe hated – him. But Alexei wasn’t ready to commit to the kind of isolationist attitude to which Nik ascribed. Not quite yet. He still, occasionally, craved the company of those that haunted dark places.
The bar that he went to occupied a basement beneath a warehouse. You had to access it via a hatch, and a ladder, and once down had to pass the inspection of a hulking werewolf doorman whose name Alexei hadn’t been able to gain yet. The bar itself was mostly just that: a bar, poorly-stocked, a few scattered tables tucked along the cold, windowless concrete walls. It stank of spilled beer, urine, unwashed bodies, and immortals. It wasn’t called Nameless, exactly, but it had no name, and so everyone had to call it something.
It was crowded tonight. Alexei slid onto an end stool beside a female vampire who smelled like a fresh kill, and like a distaste for small talk. The bartender, a bound wolf, strolled over, expression bored.
“Vodka?”
Alexei was something of a regular. “Please.”