Bad Blood (Cora's Choice #3) Read Online Free PDF

holding out a long woolen coat without looking at me.
    Wordlessly, I toed off my tennis shoes so I could strip off my yoga pants and underwear, which were dark red and stiff where the blood of my wounds had run down from my back. I used the leg of the pants to clean myself up quickly, then wrapped the long coat around my body, buttoning it from neck to knee and leaving my blood-matted ponytail tucked inside.
    Dorian took a deep breath. I knew he could still smell the blood—I could still smell it, thick and corrupted in the air. But now that I was covered and my bloody clothes were far away, he relaxed fractionally and straightened his clothes.
    My heart was still beating hard as I put back on my shoes, my limbs weak with the aftereffects of adrenaline. Fear, I realized. That primal part of my body knew exactly what had happened, how close I’d come to an edge I couldn’t return from, and I shook with the reaction. I fumbled with my laces, getting them tied again somehow.
    When I straightened, Dorian stood in the doorway, his face a mask. He made no attempt to touch me again.
    “I am sorry, Cora,” he said quietly.
    “Don’t be,” I said. “You stopped.” Don’t be, because I wanted more.… My mind reeled away from the thought.
    “I will always stop,” he said.
    He didn’t mean that he would not drink my blood. That would happen again. I knew it, and at that moment, I not only accepted it, but I was glad. What he had wanted at that moment went far beyond that. He had wanted me to be opened, to be flayed, to give him everything I had until there was nothing left.
    And I would have. I’d heard stories of kinks and fetishes, of dangerous games and safe words.
    With a vampire, there was never a safe word. Even to the very end.
    “Will you ever stop scaring me?” I asked. But that’s not what I really meant. What I really meant was, would I ever stop scaring myself?
    A brief, humorless smile flicked over his lips. “I hope not. If I do, then we are both damned.”
    He stepped out of the coat closet, back into the foyer. “Come on. You’re safe now.”
    Safe. He’d said that word when he had rescued me on the road. Now he meant that I was safe from him.
    I took a deep breath and joined him. There was nothing else to do.
    “This way,” he said, and he led the way across the foyer to another bronze door, the twin of the one he’d just opened.
    “Another coat closet?” I asked.
    “Not this one,” he said, and he swung it open. “I want to show you something. Before we go down.”
    The lights were off, but the room glowed from the light of the bank of monitors against the wall. I stared, mesmerized, at the rotating display. The salon, from four different angles. The grounds. What must be a garage. Rooms I recognized—and many more that I did not. My attention was drawn by a huge room in which a crowd of people milled about. It must be the ballroom, I realized.
    “They’ re here for the proving,” Dorian said quietly, keeping his distance from me.
    “ Proving for what?”
    “ A thrall. To see if any of them has been compromised by another agnate.”
    Thrall, like enthralled? The police who’d chased me had certainly had something done to their heads.
    “ You mean like the police? And those bikers?” I asked.
    I was pretty sure the motorcyclists had been human, even with their helmets. They’d shown none of the impossible speed or strength of an agnate or a djinn.
    “Exactly like that,” he said. “A human can be persuaded of a great deal in an agnate’s presence. To maintain a deeper level of control, a control that does not dissipate with distance or in another agnate’s presence, requires a longer term hold, called a thrall. I hold provings monthly, as much for my staff’s protection as for mine. They like the assurance that they can’t be made another agnate’s agent for months at a time, and the provings mean that other agnates hardly ever even try.”
    “Hardly ever. That’s not the