Raze’s night had been going pretty well, until the woman he’d just spent four hours fucking stumbled across a naked, disemboweled body on his doorstep. Her scream had shattered the serenity of the predawn, forcing him to knock her out before she drew a crowd. Now, as the sun stretched sleepy tendrils of light over the horizon, he stood over the corpse and struggled to contain his roiling fury.

“Dumped on my goddamn porch like trash.” He ran both hands over his shaved head. “Poor bastard.”

“Guesstimate of the time your gift arrived?” Vashti asked, her stiletto-heeled boots tapping out an impatient staccato as she paced. Her crimson hair swayed around her shoulder blades, the vividly-hued tresses the only wash of color against her skintight, all-black jumpsuit. She was a comic book aficionado’s wet dream, with her lush tits and ass offset by a fallen angel’s incomparable beauty. Her appearance was as lethal as the twin katanas she often wore in crisscrossing sheaths on her back, her physical beauty another weapon in the arsenal she used as second-in-command of the entire vampire nation.

“Hell if I know,” he bit out. “There was nothing out of place when I got home at midnight. He was found at four.”

“You didn’t hear anything? Nothing at all?”

Raze scowled. He had a squeaky board on his front porch and everyone knew it. Even if they ruled out the benefit of his vampire hearing, his powerful sense of smell should have picked up on the freshly spilled blood. “No. Christ. If I’d heard anything I would have caught the fuckers.”

Damned if he’d tell her that it hadn’t been possible to hear anything over the woman moaning beneath him and the steady banging of his headboard against the wall as he pounded into her. The smell of hot sex, dripping sweat, and semen filled-latex had saturated the air along with the scent of the blood he’d drunk from her-a lover whose name he couldn’t remember now. It shamed him that the broken body on his doorstop had been lost among the sexual excess.