Читать книгу Dark Obsession - Amanda Stevens - Страница 7

PROLOGUE

Drake D’Angelo woke up suddenly, the realization that it was almost dark and he was starving coming upon him. Soon, he comforted himself. Soon he would taste again the sweet red nectar that he had been deprived of for too many years.

He licked his lips in anticipation as he got up and strolled out to his balcony. The soft twilight fell around him, blanketing him with the cool comfort of the approaching night. This was his favorite time, this tenuous moment right after sunset when the world came alive with the darkness, when the night stretched before him like an endless dream. How he had missed it during those eight years when he had lain deep underground, sleeping the sleep of the dead while the wounds that had nearly destroyed him healed.

He hated the dawn. Hated being trapped by the prison of daylight, but he wouldn’t think about that now. Not when the darkness was calling to him so strongly. Not when he had been waiting so impatiently for the night.

Not when revenge finally lay within his grasp.

Visions raced before his eyes, and he let himself remember that night eight years ago—a mere moment in time for one such as he. The heat had been suffocating, stinging his eyes and searing his skin as the inferno raged around him. The flames had licked at the tattered drapery and rotting floors of his mansion as the fire consumed everything in its path.

He closed his eyes at the remembered terror. The agony! The excruciating pain as the fire caught at his clothing and ate at his flesh. He could still hear Simone’s screams as her long, silken hair blazed like a halo around her glorious face. Within seconds she had been gone, destroyed, her loveliness nothing but a memory.

And all because of one man.

His enemy.

An unworthy rival who had thought to destroy him, but like the legendary phoenix, Drake had risen from the ashes of death. He had survived the torment. He had lived to seek his vengeance against the man who had taken away the one woman who would have been Drake’s mate through eternity. His one great love. He had waited centuries for her, and now she was gone.

“Simone.” He whispered her name agonizingly in the gathering darkness. There was only one way to ease the pain of her memory. Only one way to avenge her loss.

Death.

Each one would make him feel stronger. Would take the edge off his loneliness. Would give him a sense of justice in an unjust world.

They would give him a little something to look forward to night after night, he thought, smiling. Each death, each “kill,” would torment his nemesis as once the pain had tormented Drake. The kills would take everything away from his rival as Simone had been taken away from Drake. And he had found the perfect way to once and for all destroy his enemy. Nicholas Slade’s pathetic little crusade was about to come to an end.

And so he would go out again tonight, in his new identity, to a club where others like him met. A place where he could see but not be seen. A place where the unsuspecting were so easily seduced by the darkness. He would go there because that was where Slade would be.

Tonight his revenge would begin in earnest.

Drake smiled as his hunger sharpened. He could hardly wait. “I’ll see you in hell, Slade,” he whispered.