Free Hunted (The Tinder Chronicles) by Alexa Land

shoulders and arms.
That earned me a smirk. “You forgot to tell your body that you never want to
sleep with me again,” he said. “I can smell it the moment you become aroused,
you know. Don’t think I failed to notice your arousal when I pinned you down
earlier, either.”
    “You’re such an ass.”
    “I’m merely pointing
out the obvious, love.”
    “So am I.”
    Bane grinned at me,
then said, “Bear with me for a moment, please.” He closed his eyes and began
speaking quietly, in what had to be that same rough language. It almost seemed
like he was praying, though most likely he was reciting some sort of
incantation. When he opened his eyes, he took both my hands in his and said
something else. It felt as though a mild electrical current passed between us.
    I pulled my hands back
and asked, “What are you doing?”
    “Giving you an
all-access pass.”
    “Huh?”
    “Taking down a few of
my wards,” he said, then spun around in his chair, turning his back to me. “Run
your hands over my skin and you’ll see what I mean.”
    That request sounded
odd as hell, but I gave it a shot anyway. I swiped my palm quickly down his
back, and for just a moment, his skin lit up like a Christmas tree. Something
big and dark appeared and then disappeared in the wake of that light show. I
gasped in surprise as he said, “Slower, Tinder.”
    I lined up both hands,
fingertip-to-fingertip, and ran them very slowly down the expanse of his skin
from shoulder to waist, light spilling out between my fingers. A huge tattoo
became visible in their path, the exact symbol I’d been studying on the
computer. “Oh wow,” I murmured, running my fingertips along the lines of text. “Where
does it start?”
    “Try to find dead
center, and trace it to the left.”
    I looked closely, then
touched my index finger to a spot on his spine. I traced the pattern a few
inches, then returned to the center and said, “Can you please tell me what it
says, so I can get a feel for the language?”
    He began to speak,
slowly and distinctly, and I followed along for a few minutes, learning which
sounds to assign to the letters. After a while, I asked him to start over in
English, and began to get a sense of how the language translated. I sounded out
a few words under my breath, and he chuckled a little and said, “I feel like
the Rosetta Stone. And you really do have an amazing gift for language, I can’t
believe how quickly you’re assimilating it.”
    “How can there be a
language I’ve never heard of?” I asked. “Well, unless it’s a dorky made-up one,
like Esperanto or something.”
    He glanced over his
shoulder at me. “Oh, it isn’t made up. It’s part of a rich culture dating back
many, many centuries.”
    “A rich, never-heard-of
culture. Why can you speak it?”
    “Because it’s the
language of my people.”
    “Your people? I wasn’t
aware that East-Enders had started speaking Klingon.”
    He chuckled at that. “Not
the culture I was born into, the culture into which I was reborn.”
    “The culture…wait a
minute, is this some kind of vampire language?”
    “It is exactly that.”
    “There’s no way,” I
said, leaning back in my chair. “If there was such a thing, I would have heard
of it before now.”
    “No offense, dearest,
but all you really know about vampires is where to shove the stake. We were a
grand society, once upon a time. We not only had our own language, but also many
beautiful customs, traditions, and celebrations. They’re almost all forgotten
now.”
    “A vampire society is
pretty hard to believe, given how solitary they are.”
    “When my kind became hunted
and our numbers dwindled, we disappeared, scattered to the far corners of the
earth to avoid total extinction. That became the norm after a while, never
gathering in groups to avoid attracting attention, blending in with the human
population so we wouldn’t be slaughtered. We wiped out every written record of
our history, tried to be