When Valentine’s sire is forced to take a mate by his Clan leader, Valentine is reduced to stoking the castle’s furnaces as nothing more than a cindered servant to the new matriarch. With his sire Libertine incarcerated and Valentine forced to wear a cursed collar, there seems no way to escape Belladonna’s hold on them. When a stranger appears, Valentine is surprised by how quickly he trusts the other vampire. He accepts the request to go to the castle of his Clan Lord, the ancient and powerful Hades, to uncover who is working to overthrow him. His reward is freedom for both him and his sire. No one is meant to know who he really is, and Valentine pretends he’s one of Hades’ favorites while in the castle, adopting the name Cinder and playing his Seductive nature to its full. But his world is shaken to its core when Valentine finds himself falling for the enigmatic Cole. As a Seductive, Valentine never imagined he’d want an Alpha Predator as a mate. Worse yet, it may be that Cole could be the very one he’s been sent to uncover. When the battle for dominance begins, where will Valentine’s loyalty lie?

Cinis

The lycans moved to stand shoulder to shoulder, barring Valentine’s way to the stairs. When he reached the guards, Valentine looked at each, very deliberately in turn, and favored them with his best, sultry smile.


“Aren’t you going to let me…pass?” He exuded every bit of the seductiveness for which his kind were renowned.


The lycans inhaled deeply, and Valentine was assailed by the pungent scent of their arousal. He made his smile more coquettish and fluttered his eyelashes.


“Name?” One of the guards asked, his voice deep and gravelly and Valentine gave a deliberate shiver.


“You can call me…Cinder. Because I’m hot and smoldering.” Valentine leaned in, his lips just a hair’s breadth from the guard’s. As he leaned back, Valentine ran his tongue slowly across his upper lip, unsurprised to see all four guards riveted to the movement.


“Another of Hades’ favorites.” A different guard growled, an expression of disappointment crumpling his face.


Chapter 13