Triangle

Alan Wolfe lay in bed, one arm resting under Sasha’s shoulder, her head pillowed on his chest, spilling her dark hair over his neck and shoulder. He smiled, grateful that as a vampire, his arm wasn’t even capable of falling asleep under her.

Their second bout of love-making had been more careful, but equally intense. Alan wondered if he was going to end up spending four hours a night having sex again. Well, if that was the case, he certainly wasn’t going to complain, and at least he and Sasha could be intimate during the daylight hours when there wasn’t much else for a vampire trapped by the sunlight outside to do.

But what was important were the words whispered into each other’s ears during the act, or moaned out during climax. I love you. Alan had dared to say it to Sasha, and he had been surprised to hear her say it back. He’d expected it to turn her off, to make her pull back and dash all chances of sleeping with her. When a girl asks you to take her virginity only so that she is not stuck with it for eternity in the event she is turned against her will, you don’t expect her to react well to “I love you.”

Only it turned out that Sasha was in love with him as well, and maybe taking her virginity had less to do with the embrace, and more to do with love. He doubted that Alex would understand.

And that was something to consider. The elder Ventrue seemed….infatuated with Alan. Or maybe obsessed was the word. The word Wolfe would have used was love, except that Alex fanatically denied it, and professed that she was incapable of love. She had even offered to share the blood bond, an act that would put her in Alan’s power as much as it would place him in hers. But still, she all but vowed that she would have Alan, and that she would wait only so long before she….well, he wasn’t sure. Take steps is what she’d said, but he wasn’t sure what that meant. Would she blood bind him by force? Was she willing to dominate him into being her lover? Would she lever his life boon into the same kind of service that he tangled them in sweaty sheets for the last month?

The one thing he was sure she wouldn’t do was kill Sasha. She knew it would hurt Alan, and it seemed that she wasn’t willing to do that. In fact, she was going to have to work with her.

Alan was too independent to go on blind faith where this prophecy was concerned, but he’d been raised on stories foretelling the Apocalypse and featuring the wisdom of spirit guides. Besides, he was a vampire, and vampires weren’t supposed to exist any more than werewolves or the mysterious power of fate. And there had been two women helping him since the Red Robin returned, just as Brightwind had told Johnny there would be.

Alex listened as Alan spun the tale, adding flourishes of detail and description that weren’t truly necessary, but that Wolfe tended to provide when the moon was gibbous. She agreed to go over Sasha’s notes, and he watched with no small amount of tension as the two women converse in terms so scientific as to be another language. Alex looked down on Sasha as an insignificant mortal, unworthy of notice, and as competition for Alan’s affection. Sasha disapproved of Alex, maybe even feared her as an inhuman monster and a manipulator. But damn if they didn’t work together well. Alan was embarrassed and ashamed that it occasionally spun his thoughts along unsavory lines. Alex had asked him if he would take them both into bed with him. If they worked together half as well in bed as they had in the lab… Alan had shaken his head to banish the thought. It wasn’t like him, a testament to the desirability of the two women.

But he was happy. Content. For the first time in more than a century he was not alone. He had love again. Since discovering that he was lonely the ache had grown more and more powerful, until Alan thought that it might be the death of him more than any Kindred plot. Sasha shifted beside him, throwing a long naked leg over his and pulling herself more tightly against him. He curled his arm around her, holding her close and kissed the top of her head. “I love you,” he whispered to her, even though she couldn’t hear him.

He wondered if this was a part of the prophecy. If it was in his destiny to fall in love with Sasha and to be with her, then he would embrace that destiny fully.