Free Obey Me by Paige Cuccaro

him sitting on our bed.”
    “Our bed? So…you were lovers?” Yeah, I know, bigger picture and all, but a girl likes to know.
    Alex nodded. “We’d become very close. Until that night Octavius was able to hold fast to the fantasy that he and Elizabeth were meant to be. That night he knew he’d lost her long ago.”
    “So what, did he just leave?”
    His brows hiked high beneath the swag of his blond bangs, a ghost of a smile played for an instant across his lips. “No. He tried to kill her.”
    “You stopped him.”
    “Yes, but the fight was long and bloody. Octavius had insanity on his side. A sane man has moral limits, pain thresholds. Insanity freed him of such things. In the end though, we left Octavius near death on our apartment floor. Elizabeth…” He looked away, his eyes suddenly glistening with unshed tears, his chin quivering.
    A deep breath and he collected himself. “Elizabeth was so damaged by Octavius’s relentless pursuit, she took a knife and cut…and cut off his testicles. She told him if he ever dared follow her again, she’d leave him with nothing to prove himself male.”
    “Ouch. Holy smokes, Alex, I’m so sorry. I can’t imagine what the two of you must’ve endured.”
    He didn’t look at me. He just kept talking. “Elizabeth was never the same after that. We never saw Octavius again, but I think when she cut him, she cut out a piece of her soul as well.”
    No doubt. The creep had made her as crazy as him. “Wait. Octavius said he found you after Elizabeth passed away. He said you wouldn’t see him.”
    Alex shook his head, perplexed. “No. I never heard from him again after that night.”
    Another lie or a half-truth? Hard to know with Octavius. “How long did you and she have with each other before she died?”
    “Twenty years. And she didn’t just die, she was killed—murdered. We spent the next twenty years in each other’s company but we were never the same, never truly together the way we’d been before.” The tall female bartender from earlier appeared at our table suddenly, replacing our drinks. Apparently someone always had their eye on the boss.
    Alex cupped his hands around the fresh glass on the table, aimlessly caressing the sides with his thumbs. He took a quick drink. “It was my fault. I didn’t know how to help her, how to bring her back from the darkness in her mind. I let the distance between us grow, let myself become careless. I knew they were hunting our kind. We’d already lost a few friends who’d joined us in the years after we’d escaped Octavius. I only left her for an hour. Long enough to book passage on a ship bound for the Americas. I had to get us out of Europe, away from the vampire hunters sweeping the continent. I thought she was safe. I was wrong. Good Lord, I was so wrong.”
    “Vampire hunters. They staked her through the heart.” I knew now that part of Octavius’s story was true.
    Alex nodded, his gaze downcast, his chin quivering again. “I left Europe that night. Never returned. And until you mentioned his name, I believed I’d left Octavius there as well.”
    “Maybe you did, but he’s here now, and he’s brought friends. Or made them.”
    Alex’s gaze snapped to mine, all evidence of tears gone. “What do you mean?”
    “His restaurant, Sinners, it’s full of vamps and they’ve all got the same tattoo. Matches his ring.”
    “Tattoo? Where?”
    “On the inside of their wrists.” I pointed to the same spot on my own unmarked wrist to show him.
    “His fledglings. It’s his mark, unique to his venom.” He leaned forward to rest his arms on the table. “The ring is from another time. Used long ago when our kind kept human servants.”
    “Used it how?”
    A wince flashed across his face. “We used the rings to mark those who we claimed as ours. There’s a button on the side that releases a sharp edge along the design of the ring. We’d dip the ring in venom and press it to the human’s wrist, hard enough