🔥 The First Vintage 🔥

An Exclusive Bonus Chapter from The Vampire’s Private Detective by Maeve Hollow

⚠️ Spoiler Warning: This bonus chapter takes place a year after the night in Box Five and after the epilogue of The Vampire’s Private Detective. It contains major spoilers and very explicit sexual content (18+), and it runs hotter than the book. Read the novel first for the full experience.

One violet bottle, laid down on purpose. Box Five, twice. Explicit content — 18+.

The First Vintage

The bottle had been in my office safe for a year, between the petty cash and Jessa’s emergency hairspray.

It was no bigger than my thumb. Violet glass, a cork, gray wax. The tag was tied on with wire, and the hand on it wasn’t a doctor’s. It makes its L’s like the ones on old money.

L.V. — Box Five. You asked for this. Look.

She’d asked a week after that night. She asked it the way she asks everything now, out loud and in order. She said three hundred and forty-six bottles had been taken from her or talked out of her, and she would like to lay one down herself, of her own will and in her right mind, and drink it with me in a year. She said she wanted to have a first time twice. She said it was the only decent use she could think of for the whole filthy trick.

Nell Corrigan drew it at my kitchen table with a steel needle and a length of clean tubing, under the left ribs, where everything that ever went into that woman has gone in. Lucasta picked the place herself. Odessa stood by the stove with her arms folded. I held Lucasta’s hand. It took nine minutes, and Nell billed me a tin of the good cat food.

From the doorway of that box to the velvet rail. An hour and ten minutes, out of her head and into glass. She kept the chaise afterward, and the coin. She just didn’t know what came before them.

I knew. I’d had it for a year, and I’d been insufferable.

“You said something in German,” I’d tell her, over eggs. “I’m not going to tell you what.”

“You don’t speak German.”

“I got the gist.”

Now it was a Monday in March, and Vesper was dark, and the bottle was standing on the rail of Box Five with the whole empty house behind it.

She had tied the curtain back herself. Black suit, hair up, nothing at her ears, the guinea on its chain. She stood with her hands clasped behind her, which is what she does with them when she doesn’t trust them.

“You’re scared,” I said.

“I have been told about this night for a year by a woman who smirks. I know that I was had in that chair with the curtain open. I know that I shouted. I’m told there was a rail.” She looked at it. “I find I’m afraid it won’t be as good as you’ve made out.”

“It’s better.”

“You would say so. You were there.”

“So were you. Come here.”

I took the gilt chair. She sat across my lap with her arm around my neck, and I got her jacket off and her shirt open, and she let me. She was cold through the silk. She always is, at first. I put my mouth on her breast and felt the nipple go tight against my tongue, and she made a small sound and held my head there.

“Ask,” I said, when I came up.

She put her thumb to her tooth and held it out. I took the drop. Cold iron, and then the heat coming out from my stomach in a ring, and the house came up sharp around me. I could hear the ice machine behind the bar. I could hear the chain shift on her throat.

“May I bite you, Sloane?”

“Yes. Here.” I tipped my head back against the gilt. “Drink it first.”

She drew the cork with her teeth. A smell came out of that little neck, and it wasn’t violets. It was leather, and my soap, and her.

She drank it down, and she bit.

The door opened both ways, and this time there was something behind it.

I’d had that night for a year. I had my side of it. I didn’t know I’d been missing half.

I was standing over a woman in a gilt chair with my back to her. That was the first thing, and it nearly stopped my heart, because that back wasn’t mine. Nobody had been allowed behind it in a hundred and fifteen years. There was a whole dark house in front of me, three tiers of it, and I was naked in front of every box. Two hot hands had me by the hips. A voice in my ear said, Look at it. All of it. There’s nobody there.

It was my voice. I sound rougher than I think I do.

Then those hands brought me down. I felt it go into me an inch at a time, into a body that was cold all the way up and had not expected to be filled again, ever, by anybody. I felt how wet she was. I felt her thighs shake. I felt what it’s like when I drag my thumbs across her nipples, and what my teeth feel like in her shoulder. Blunt. Hot. I hadn’t known I was hot. I’m the warmest thing that has ever been inside her, and I got to feel that from her side.

That was then. I had now as well.

Now, she was in my lap with her teeth in my throat and her blood running in me. I had my right hand down the front of her trousers, and I’d found her, slick and cool and swelling under my fingers. So I was being ridden in a chair a year ago, and I was being fingered in the same chair tonight, and I was the one doing both. I put two fingers into her. I felt them go in. A year ago she sank onto the whole length of me, and I felt that in the same second, and the two together were more than one cunt is built to hold.

“Oh, God,” she said against my neck. It came out around her teeth. “There are two of you.”

“Yeah. I noticed.”

“You never said that I… oh.” She’d got to the part with her ears.

I laughed. I couldn’t help it. Then her heart started, and I quit laughing.

One knock, under my hand, under her breast. Another one a year back, in the same place. Then both of them running a beat apart, and mine going like a hammer on top. Three hearts in one chair. I curled my fingers and ground the heel of my hand on her clit. A year ago I rocked up into her and told her nobody had arranged that. And she came.

She came twice at once. I don’t have a better way to say it. Then and now, clenching on a strap and clenching on my hand, and both of them went through me like I was the wire they were strung on. I went with her. Nobody had touched me. I came in my own trousers with my head back on the gilt and her drinking it out of my neck, soaked and shaking, and the sound she made went out over the rail and came back from the gallery, small and changed.

It came back twice.

She sealed the bite. Two strokes of her tongue. Her face was wet.

“It’s home,” she said. Her voice had lost most of its vowels. “All of it. Sloane. You put your hand in the middle of my back.”

“I did.”

“You never told me that.”

“I was saving it.”

“And I said…” She stopped. She was hearing it. Whatever she’d said over that rail in the language she can’t place, she had it back now, in her own mouth. “I still don’t know what it means.”

“I do.”

“You can’t possibly.”

“I was there. I know what you meant.”

She put her forehead against mine. Her heart was still going. I could feel it through both our shirts.

“Well,” Lucasta said. “That is the standard, then. I should like to beat it.”

She’d had a year to plan and nothing to plan from. So she had planned for everything.

She got off my lap and took off the rest of her clothes, and stood there in the dark in a gold coin and nothing else. Then she went to the chaise and opened my bag. I heard the buckles.

I’ve worn that harness for fifteen years. I had never once seen it from the front.

“May I?” she said.

She had it on. Black leather on those hips, the brass sitting in the dip of her waist, the whole dark curve of it standing out from her. She’d done the straps right. Of course she had. She’s watched an expert.

My mouth had gone dry. “You’ve never.”

“No. I’ve had it done to me by a professional. Twice now, that I can remember. I took notes.” She came and stood between my knees. “You may say Tuesday.”

“It’s Monday.”

“I know what day it is. Up.”

I got up. She undid my belt. She took my trousers down, and my wet shorts with them, and went to her knees to get them over my boots. On the way back up she put her mouth on me. Just the once. One long cool stroke of her tongue, bottom to top, with her blood still in me so that I felt it from both ends. I tasted myself. My knees went.

They didn’t go far. She caught me.

I forget, most days. She lets me forget. She lets me hold her wrists and put my weight on her and carry her three steps to a rail, and I’m strong for a living woman. Then she put one arm under my thighs and picked me up off the floor like a coat, and I remembered what I’ve got in my bed.

“Arms round my neck,” she said. “I shan’t drop you. I once carried a cook through a sewer.”

“That’s romantic.”

“Hush. I’m concentrating.”

She put my back against the pillar of the box. Gilt plaster, as cold as she was. She held me there with her hips and one hand, a foot off the ground, with my legs around her waist. She reached down and set the head of it against me, and she looked me in the face.

“Ask,” I said. My voice had gone somewhere.

“May I fuck you, Sloane?”

“Yes. Christ. Yes.”

She pushed in.

I’ve been on the giving end of that a couple of hundred times. I know what the slow part looks like, when somebody opens for you. I didn’t know anything. I hung there in her arms and took it, thick and slow and all the way up, and she felt me take it, because the door was still open. I watched it hit her. Her mouth came apart.

“Oh,” she said. “Oh. That’s what I feel like.”

“Uh-huh.”

“I’m very good.”

“You’re okay. Move.”

She moved. She didn’t have to brace. She didn’t have to breathe. She stood there with a hundred and seventy pounds of detective in her hands and fucked me against that pillar in long deep strokes that never sped up and never got tired. Every one of them dragged right where I’m swollen, and I couldn’t do a thing about any of it. My feet weren’t on the floor. There was nothing to push against. All I had was her neck, and her eyes, and that strap going into me, and the base of it grinding on her clit every time she drove home, so that I felt that too. I was getting fucked, and I was doing it. I was so wet I could hear it over both of us.

I got loud. I’m not, as a rule. That house was built for sopranos. It took my voice out over the rail and handed it back to me from three tiers, cracked.

“There,” she said. She was shaking, and it wasn’t the weight. “I’ve wanted to hear that in here for a year. I didn’t know I wanted it. Again.”

“Lucasta. Fuck. I’m going to…”

“Not yet. I haven’t finished beating it.”

She carried me to the rail, still inside me. Three steps. She slid out, and turned me around in her hands as if I weighed nothing, and I got my palms on a hundred years of red velvet with the whole black house below. She put her hand flat in the middle of my back.

Nobody has ever put a hand there on me, either. I hadn’t known that until it landed.

“Okay?” she said. That’s my word.

“Okay.”

She went back into me from behind, to the hilt. Her other hand came around and found my clit, two fingers either side, a little left of center, the way she learned it from the inside. And she gave me what I’d given her. Slow and heavy, no letting up, her mouth on the back of my neck and that coin swinging warm against my spine. Each stroke shoved me an inch onto the velvet, and her hand pulled me back onto her. I could see us in the black glass across the house. I was the one bent over. I looked good like that. I’d never have guessed.

“Look at you,” she said into my hair. “All that watchfulness, and look what you let me do. You’re dripping on my carpet, Detective. I shall send you the bill.”

“Harder.”

“Ask me.”

“Please. Harder. Lucasta, please.”

She gave me harder. The rail creaked. My arms were shaking on it.

She said it then, low, against my neck. The thing from the rail, in the language she can’t place, the same six or seven words. She meant them the same way.

That was what did it. I came with my forehead on the velvet and my own voice coming back at me off the gallery, clenching on her so hard she swore in German, and she went over with me. She can now, like that. She came from the inside of me and from the base of the strap both, with her arm locked around my waist, holding me up, and for a long time neither one of us could have told you whose it was.

We stayed there. My legs weren’t going to be any use for a while.

Against my back, her heart was still going.

She put me on the chaise under my own coat. She gets to do that part tonight.

The bottle was still on the rail, empty. She picked it up and turned it over, and the work light from the stage went through it and came out violet on her bare stomach, where there were velvet marks. I’ve got a matching set.

“Did you beat it?” I said.

“I shall need to hear from the witness.”

“I’m asking you.”

She thought about it. She takes her time over a true answer.

“No,” Lucasta said. “It can’t be beaten. It was the first time anyone had my back and I didn’t mind. One only gets that once.” She lay down along me, with her ear on my chest. “I had it twice. I believe I’m the only woman alive who has. I shall call that a draw.”

“You want another one laid down? I’ve still got Nell’s number. She works for cat food.”

“No.” She said it right away. “No more glass. That is the first vintage I ever put down myself, and I should like it to be the last. I want this one where I can get at it.”

“Okay.”

She laughed into my collarbone. She knows what that word is for.

Her heart went on a while longer. She was counting it. I could feel her lips move. When it quit she didn’t flinch, and she didn’t go still. She only turned her face a little further into me, where mine was.

“How long?” I said.

“Eleven minutes.” She sounded very pleased with herself. “It’s getting used to you.”

She reached over me and dropped the empty bottle into my coat pocket.

“Evidence,” she said. “File it, Detective.”

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