Vlad smiled as he remembered the bloody tines of the pitchfork in his father’s freak farming accident. He’d spent hours relating the horror of finding his father on the barn floor, how the old man had fallen from the hayloft and onto a broken bale where the pitchfork had been left. Vlad had admitted to leaving the tool where it wasn’t supposed to be. And had the pitchfork not hit the femoral artery, how his father might have survived. Instead, the old man had lain on the pitchfork like a turtle on its back, his pelvis shattered, his screams unheard until Vlad had returned from the neighbor’s house and found the man who had sired him in a pool of coagulating blood. How unfortunate it had been on the weekend when his mother had been away, visiting her sister.

But the old man’s death couldn’t help the situation now.

Vlad prided himself upon his perfection, and the fact that he had made one mistake bothered him.

He walked to the far end of the pool and into a small alcove where a bank of metal lockers still resided. They were empty save for the one he’d reserved for his treasures, those he’d locked away. Deftly, in the semidark, the smell of the chlorine he’d added drifting to him, he flipped the combination of the lock and opened the rusting door.

Inside were several rows of small black hooks. Three, on the upper row, saved for the elite, the ones he thought of as royals, had been marked with the name of the owner and held a gold necklace from which a tiny vial dangled. Carefully, he extracted one of the gold loops and held it to the light so that he could see the deep red color within the bit of glass…like expensive wine, he thought. Gently twisting open the vial, he held it under his nose. He inhaled the sweet, coppery scent of Monique’s blood. Closing his eyes, he remembered how she’d struggled. A natural athlete, she’d fought the effects of the drugs, and as he’d restrained her, she’d gone so far as to spit in his face.

He’d laughed and licked it into his mouth and that’s when he saw her fear. It wasn’t that he could hold her wrists or pin her weight with his legs, it was that he enjoyed the fight in her and that scared her to death.

He’d seen it in the dilation of her pupils, felt it in the rising and falling of her chest as he’d held her down waiting for the cocktail she’d been given to completely take effect. He’d witnessed her struggles on the stage before she’d ultimately succumbed to him. He’d suspected she would be difficult, a fighter. And she hadn’t disappointed.

Hers was a life not quickly given.