The newborn vampire took up the bed as if she owned it, pale limbs tangled haphazardly with the torn sheet and her hair a fan of color. She slept heavily, her vampirism having finally given out after her last orgasm. Perhaps a different monster would have introduced her more gently to the new wants of her body, taken care to coax instead of demand, but for someone so newly dead she'd been a fierce little thing. Teeth bright with his blood where he'd expected her lips, nails sharp little stings of demand when she should have begged. His cock stirred at the memory.

What a lovely monster this Caroline made.

Lips curling, he glanced at the heavy drapes across the windows. Dawn had crept across horizon an hour ago and he saw no need to mar her pretty skin with sunlight. He could be indulgent when it suited him, after all, for all that last night had started on a whim. He did enjoy the occasional surprise which they came with such delicious ends.

He'd sighted Katerina as she'd strolled across the street towards the hospital, her demeanor unchanged even after all the years she'd lived beneath his shadow. He did so enjoy this game of cat and mouse, making an appearance just as Katerina thought she'd gained a bit of the upper hand. She'd grown overconfident these past decades, and he imagined she believed his arrival was still weeks out. As if he, too, didn't watch the cycle of the doppelganger carefully. Witches could be bought, bribed, coerced or seduced into giving up any number of things and he had dozens working in finding him what he wanted at any given time.

Oh, the things Katerina still had to learn.

The things he planned to teach her still.

Death would be stranger for that one for some time still.

This new doppleganger was soft, so easily plucked from her safe and happy home and deposited where he wanted her: in the middle of his ritual. Her protectors were arrogant and obsessed, likely to believe themselves as obstacles, but he doubted they would become a true issue. Still, a bit of caution was necessary and plans were already in place to suss out exactly what their roles would be in the upcoming weeks.

Elena Gilbert would not be given the same chance that Katerina had to escape him. It'd been a bit if an amusement to move unrecognized through town, which was how he'd ended up in the hospital in the first place. The sheriff's daughter being in the hospital had been town news, that she was inside the inner circle of the doppelganger made her a curiosity.

It was a pity he hadn't arrived in time to watch Katerina kill the girl. He'd have liked to have seen if she fought for her life as recklessly as she grasped for control. Klaus wondered what had lived beneath the girl's skin and in her bones that she'd take so strongly to her monster, if death had been an easy companion or if it had clawed and grasped. But human-Caroline remained inconsequential. It remained to be seen what this baby vampire would choose to become.

In a few hours time, he'd have the details of the baby vampire's life but not the whys. It was rare that he was surprised. But she'd managed it once.

He wanted to know if she'd do it again.

She had been a golden haired monster with red eyes and bloody lips filled with such hungry confusion. A quick compulsion had insured they were left alone, that the cameras were destroyed. He enjoyed a good slaughter, but humans were finicky creatures and particular about their facade of safety in a hospital. Letting a newborn vampire rip through the critical ward would be a liability he wasn't willing to risk. He'd been toying with the idea of ending her short stint as a vampire, before he'd realized she'd left the nurse was alive.

Brand new, baby vampires needed blood the way a junkie needed their next hit, the crawling need a vice around their sanity. But blood soaked and near feral in hunger, and she'd still only accepted the heart he'd offered as a conscious decision. It had intrigued him and such a event was rare enough that he'd… paused.

Caroline was hardly the first vampire he'd sorted post-transition, she wasn't even the first he'd taken to bed with their pretty skin still slick from the first kill. She was the first to have such iron control so few minutes into her change. He'd experienced the full range of emotions after a kill, but rarely had he seen such ruthless want mingled with an iron will, even buried beneath the panic and confusion.

It had enticed him to play.

Few, very few, survived his games.

Reclining against the couch, Klaus wished he'd thought to bring a sketch pad. She was a pretty thing, this Caroline, and he thought he'd like to remember her face. His lack of proper preparation was easily corrected even if slightly inconvenient. It seemed there were a number of small oversights that would need to be corrected and in short order.

The most pressing being the matter of his accommodations. He'd need a secure location to keep the doppelgänger and a proper bed for the kind of games he intended to play with Caroline. She didn't realize it yet, but the life she'd known as her own was over. By now she'd have been noted as missing from the hospital, her family who had left her to Katerina's tender mercies would have been notified.

The sheriff, he imagined, would be worried.

Steps would need to be taken to ensure she didn't attempt to destroy Caroline just yet. He had no doubt that the ex-wife of Bill Forbes would find her daughter's transformation a terrible thing. He had a number of plans that would require the baby vampire, the most important being that Caroline had called the doppelganger Elena. She'd called her friend. Idly, he wondered what friendship meant to this precocious monsters born at the cusp of adulthood.

What did she think of as loyalty?

How did he make her biddable?

Head tilting to the side, Klaus studied the girl in his bed and traced the lean lines of her with his gaze. Would she fight for or against him when she learned of his plans? He'd ruined friends that were older than her, who had watched for the betrayal he'd sown with clear eyes. That shadow of bewildered hurt behind her eyes when she'd said Elena's name had spoken of a weakness between them he could exploit.

A perfectly lovely Trojan horse.

Five hundred years ago, he'd been considerate. He'd offered Katerina a clean death. He had been repaid with betrayal. He'd no intention of letting Katerina have even a moment of triumph this time around. He wondered what web Katerina had spun here, if she believed herself truly capable of out maneuvering him.

She'd likely chosen this girl-child as replacement sacrifice. Fresh faced and monstrous, an enticing sacrifice for his freedom. Klaus once would have taken the offering and broken it on the altar of his mother's curse with a smile.

I'm not prey.

Standing, Klaus prowled back to his bed tug away the sheet that had tangled around Caroline's lower body. She made a noise of complaint, blue eyes hazy from sleep peering up at him with clear irritation. Leaning down, he skimmed his lips beneath her navel, hands settling low on her smooth thighs. Her body rose against his mouth on a sharp inhale as he moved lower still, tongue a wet rasp on her skin.

Brute strength wasn't always the most elegant of tools, and perhaps he could be a little generous when Caroline offered him such entertainment as he played his games. The vampires here were few in number, had no real allies to aid them. Killing them would be easy. Hardly worth the effort. But a little seduction could reap so many benefits and he found his hunger not yet sated.

A little pleasure mixed in with the mayhem yet to come. It appealed.

The tangle of Caroline's fingers in his hair and the sound of his name, ragged and hoarse, left his mouth skimming her clit with slow touches. She tasted of their combined release, and he lingered with his tongue until she was wet and flushed, cheeks as lovely a pink as the hard points of her nipples.

But he wanted more from her.

Klaus laughed softly at her snarled complaint as he moved to explore the softness of her thighs thighs, marking her skin red with his beard and then his mouth. Her toes curled into the bedding, muscles straining beneath his grip but he held her legs apart to watch as the slickness between her thighs glistened in the low light.

He would need a bigger bed, he decided, with a headboard sturdy enough to hold a baby vampire writhing for her release. Perhaps he'd even indulge in getting her a daylight ring so he could throw the curtains wide and study her skin and body in proper light, paint her as she truly was: hungry and greedy and magnificent when she begged.

Later perhaps, he'd even take her outside in the cool autumn shadows and teach her to hunt. Idly, Klaus ran his teeth along the muscle beneath his mouth just to feel her shudder and he wondered if she'd prefer her prey compliant and sweet or drowning in fear.

If she'd find the hunt as arousing as he hoped.

But those were thoughts for later.

They had hours until sunset. He'd count each of them by her cries, the sharpness of her need until she broke and gave him those hoarse entreaties he so enjoyed. He wanted her need to be a drug and his body the high she craved when he finally let her walk away.

She'd think of him. He'd ensure it.