And now he wanted to sit before me like I should be kissing the ground he walked on?
I took a stuttering breath and averted my eyes like he preferred. Not because I gave a damn about pleasing them anymore, but because if I didn’t…then they might see that I am not the fragile flower they’d like me to be.
They might see how deep my hatred runs. How much I loathe them.
They might see that there is darkness in my heart and they have fostered it. Fed it. Groomed it.
And now it has festered into this living, breathing thing inside of me—that one day very soon—was going to slaughter them all.
But I kept my head down and my mouth closed so that they didn’t see it. After living in my sister’s shadow for so many years, I was acutely aware of how much blind arrogance predators had. They saw the world in shades of black and white. Weak and strong.
They never stopped to think about those they placed beneath them.
Never bothered to analyze how strong us lessers truly were.
I wore downcast eyes and a timid demeanor the same way my sister wore her scars.
And Victor—cavalier, condescending Victor—he wore a cruel smile not realizing that I saw through it.
“I am happy to see you being so useful, flower. Your master is quite pleased.” Victor’s words were crisp, as planned and pressed as the white button-down shirt he wore. He drummed his fingers on the aged wooden table, leaning back in his fancy chair.
Everything here was so lavish. Expensive. You could stuff as many nice pieces of furniture in here as you wanted and it wouldn’t change the stale air. It wouldn’t fix the scent of mold and mildew that clung to me.
“Have I proven myself yet?” I asked him, crossing my ankles very ladylike. They were big on that here—women being submissive. At least with me.
“Proven yourself?” He asked it like a question, but I knew better than to answer. I kept my eyes down, my back straight. “Do you think you have proven yourself my dear?”
I weighed my answer for only a brief moment because any longer would be seen as a hesitation, and he didn’t like that. Hesitating meant you were thinking. That you were questioning your place in this world. Which was below them. The Born.
“I have only proven myself if you think I have. If not, I must try harder,” I replied, careful to keep my voice somewhere between apathetic and pleasant. They didn’t like obvious groveling. It was weak. True apathy was not good either, it meant you couldn’t be easily controlled. Easily mind washed.
And they only wanted the best of puppets.
Those that lay somewhere in between and had a healthy amount of respect and obedience, but were competent enough to do what they wanted without question. It was a fine balance to strike, but where I did not possess sheer power, I possessed intellect and a will to survive.
And I would survive this, even if I had to kill every last one of them to do it.
“You know, Lily…” Victor paused. He leaned forward, resting an elbow on the table. “You somehow always know just what to say to please me. I was so worried that you would be difficult, given the Supernatural family you stem from, but you have been a surprising treasure to behold.”
This was high praise from a Born to a Made. He was testing me to see how I’d react.
“Thank you, Victor,” I regurgitated, adding a touch of false sincerity to make it sound believable.
“You’re very welcome, flower,” he murmured almost affectionately. Darkness crept through my veins, waiting for its next victim. “I am so pleased by the progress you have made and your willingness to embrace your new life, that I am going to offer you a deal.”
Behind me, the door opened, but I did not look. A sound like the pattering of wings filled my ears, and with it came the scent of something sweeter. Something more potent than wine.
I inhaled deeply, red glinting the corners of my vision instantly.
Victor motioned with his hand for whoever stood there to come forward. The footsteps were so slight, so…I had to mentally force myself not to flinch when I saw the red-haired child. She was younger than the others they’d brought to me. No more than six or seven.
Her porcelain skin and warm brown eyes…
She was meant to look like Alexandra.
And she’d achieved it.
“I have one last test to ask of you, flower.”
Victor reached for the girl, cupping his palm around her cheek. She didn’t flinch, but I’d long since learned they trained them not to. They didn’t like their dinner stinking of fear. I stared into her hauntingly familiar eyes.
“Anything,” I replied without emotion.
“Save her.”
Wha—
He slit her throat using the edge of his fingernail. Before I could school my reaction, scarlet spilled down her puffy white dress, the scent of blood everywhere.
It covered her clothes and the floor and the table between us.
Red droplets stained my hands. They flecked my powdered blue shirt. Clung to my skin, bathing me in the very substance that held me prisoner in my own body.
Save her. That’s what he’d commanded me to do.
He didn’t think I could. That either my ability or my hunger would fail me.
Oh, how wrong he was.
Victor didn’t realize that I had developed a taste for not just blood, but Vampire’s blood, and after being starved, I would not break so easily again.
Only a fraction of a second had passed. Inhaling a tight breath, I reached out with a single hand and wrapped it around the girl’s slender throat. She scratched at my fingers. Clawed at my wrist. Her child’s strength was useless when held at the mercy of a monster like me.
The darkness leapt forward. A seductively sinister power slithered across my skin like a living, writhing thing. I pushed the energy outwards, forcing it into her skin. Searching deeper than her flesh or bones, to the source of her life force—her energy—and melded my own with her.
Masking my own power within her so that her body did not recognize it as a foreign force when I pushed the broken and hurting parts back together.
Pushed—until there was nothing beneath my fingers but smeared blood against unblemished skin and a steady pulse.
I dropped my hand away, sitting back against my ornate chair like the obedient Made that Victor wished me to be. I hoped this would be enough of a show for him. That he wouldn’t demand more of me, more of my soul, in return for a chance at escape.
But fate had never been kind to those of us that had to work for our place in life.
“Well done, my flower,” he murmured leaning back. “Well done indeed.”
He rose swiftly from his chair to stand behind the young child, resting his palms on her shoulders. Her eyes fell closed as she leaned against him for support. Ordinarily, the children knew better, but the exhaustion of almost dying wiped it out of her and Victor allowed it.
“Thank you. I have learned a great deal of control so that I may be more useful.” My voice had a pleasantly bored tone. We could have been talking about the weather. Here, there wasn’t a lot of difference.
“You’ve proven you have both the restraint not to lose yourself around blood and the control to use your ability without pressure…”
His eyes darkened at the mention of my near rape. Victor had been quite pleased at the rather gruesome end his guard had found. He didn’t like others touching me. Handling me. His possessiveness should have frightened me, but it only served my purposes further.
“But I do have one last thing to ask of you,” he continued. If I had a heart it would have dropped, but I was already dead and trying to survive in a land of horrors.
I raised my eyes to his, unflinching from what I knew was coming.
“Kill her.”
And there it was.
The order that would either haunt me or define me for the rest of my days.
I had to choose.
Freedom or chains.
Murder now o
r murder later.
Survive or risk something worse than death…
When you are alone in a strange place with no one but yourself and your own thoughts to judge you, the line between right and wrong blurs quite easily. When killed, enslaved against your own will, starved and tortured…there is no line.
No one came for me. No one is coming.
There is only me and my freedom. Everything that stands between it are consequences that I will have to pay.
The ends will justify the means.
Because I’ve lived through too much not to survive this too.
I reached for the child and the darkness grew. She looked so much like Alexandra. That should have bothered me.
It should have.
But it didn’t.
I woke, drenched in a cold sweat. Shaking. Screaming. My fingers clawed at the soft expensive sheets, shredding through them like an animal.
I tried to jump to my feet, but the weight holding me down trapped me, pushing me into the mattress. I let out another animalistic scream in fury and pain.
Footsteps. I heard footsteps running, racing, as the bed creaked beside me. Every sound was a battering ram to my brain. Chaotic. Angry. Disorienting.
My head swam with the thoughts, feelings, and sensations of someone else. Someone that was supposed to be dead. Logic and reason told me it was nothing.
Just a nightmare.
Just a dream.
I’d long since learned that not everything that was real could be logically explained, and somehow, someway, I just knew.
And it utterly destroyed me.
The bedroom door came flying off its hinges, and before I could register the whos or whats, I acted. My palm thrust outward, fingers curled inward as I slashed at the person holding me down. They held firm and terror seized me. Like a puppet on a string, I couldn’t stop myself from what came next as I launched a full-frontal assault.
The canopy above broke apart into infinitesimal pieces of the lush gold fabric it once was. They swirled round and round like a sandstorm that came out of nowhere. The wooden bed posts broke off and went flying. All four of them circled the bed like a pack of dogs waiting for the kill. Drawers opened and closed so hard the wood began to crack and splinter like the pieces of my soul.
And amidst it all, was me, trembling so hard that I couldn’t make sense of the scene before me.
I screamed with the pain and anguish of that night.
I screamed for a sister that was supposed to be dead.
I screamed because deep down I knew, and I hadn’t come for her.
I screamed…because it was too late.
And when my voice broke, the wind itself responded.
Howling and screaming in my stead.
“SELENA!”
That voice. I knew that voice.
He repeated my name again and again and again. No quieter than the first time. Hands touched my shoulders, my face, my chest. It wasn’t a sexual touch, but a soothing one. He was rubbing at the black and purple tendrils swirling across my skin.
“Breathe with me.” He spoke firm. Controlled. Not a trace of fear within him as he breathed in and out beside me, coaching me down from this ledge that I had placed us all on.
The winds outside quieted as my breathing slowed and my heart followed with it, but from inside—inside the residence—people were screaming.
“Talk to me. Tell me what’s going on inside your head.”
I stilled, breathing slow and steady as I listened to screams and footsteps below.
“She’s alive,” I rasped. Ash looked at me like I’d grown another head.
Of course, that was the moment that people would come barging into our room. Not that the hole in the wall where I’d taken the door off provided much privacy.
“For fuck’s sake—you better have a good excuse for this, Selena.”
Chapter 130
“I’m not sure if I should ask about her lack of clothes first or why every window in the residence was just blown out…” Amber stalled, her eyes flicking over the rumpled sheets and Ash’s missing shirt. A wide inappropriate smile lit her face. “No fucking way. You guys—”
“They’re bonded,” Johanna finished for her.
Awkward silence ensued where I mentally forced the bed posts to drop in their circling and pulled the sheet close, folding and fashioning it to cover my naked body. The end product was a gold toga styled dress, and while it wasn’t the most practical of garments, it certainly beat wearing the sheet like some kind of blushing virgin.
Bonded or not, I was not letting them give me shit.
“Are we supposed to congratulate them or somethin’?” Tori asked, wrapping an arm around Alexandra’s waist. My sister said nothing, her face an unreadable mask as she flicked her eyes between Ash and me.
“That depends,” Johana replied tersely. “Was your shift in power caused by this”—she waved her hand between us, wrinkling her nose—“or something else?”
Amber started cackling like a fucking hyena.
“Dude, if you guys literally broke the mansion fuc—”
Tori leaned away from Alexandra to stomp on Amber’s foot. She yelped and snapped her mouth shut, her eyes slitting to cat irises as she glared at Tori who proceeded to ignore her.
“Something else,” I said quickly, not just wanting to steer the conversation away from Ash and I, but needing to focus on the problem at hand: telling them my sister wasn’t dead and coming up with a way to get her back.
“What happened?” Blair asked, cutting straight to the point. She stood separate from the group, her arms crossed over her chest. Not terribly surprising given that Alec had stationed himself just beyond the gaping hole in the wall.
“She…” I started and stopped three times. Unsure how to say it. Unsure where to start.
Telling lies are easy, but the truth…the truth is hard.
Telling your friends and family that you’d been having nightmares of your dead sister for months? Few things were harder.
Telling them that you believed she was alive—after months of being called mad—well, that was worse.
I pushed away from Ash, climbing off what was left of our bed. Fabric bits and wood chips clung to the simple dress as I slid over the edge. My legs were remarkably steady for the pounding in my chest. Heat flushed my skin, making my head throb and my neck burn.
I faced the fireplace at the foot of bed, looking at none of them as I tried to say the words that were going to change everything.
“She’s alive.”
Silence, from all but one.
The one I should have told from the very beginning.
After all, she was her sister too.
“Who’s alive?” Alexandra asked. Emotion thickened her voice with a barely contained—fury? Pain? I couldn’t tell, but I knew by the way she asked that Alexandra knew exactly who I was talking about. Still, she was going to make me say it.
“Lily.”
A harsh intake of breath. A gasp. Gritted teeth. Exasperated sighs. None of their responses were unexpected. I myself hadn’t wanted to admit it. For months, I’d tiptoed around my dreams. Acknowledging them as nightmares, but not wanting to admit to myself what I was seeing. Lily, my dead sister, was somehow alive. Not breathing. But not dead.
“Selena…” Alexandra started. Her voice shook. From my periphery, I could see her hands trembling as she took a step towards me. “That’s not…possible. I was there. I saw her die. I, like, saw the building collapse—”
“She was bitten. She was bitten so many times.” My voice almost broke, but it didn’t. “How likely is it that it was only the Made? That she wasn’t bitten by the Born and transitioned?”
I twisted my fingers together, trying to sort through this mess of emotions and find reason. An explanation for how I was seeing what I was. Ash placed his hand over mine. I looked up right as he spoke.
“Even if she did—how could you know? She hasn’t contacted you. There’s been
no trace of her since that night.” He wasn’t wrong, but that didn’t make him right either.
“I have nightmares—about her. About when she woke and what they did to her. How they trained her. She’s been so smart, so brave…” My voice cracked like panes of glass, but I could not break again. I couldn’t afford to break. Not when my sister was out there somewhere. Waiting for me.
I took a stuttering breath, squatting down. I rocked forward onto my knees to sit in front of the fire. It comforted me—melting the shard of ice in my chest that hurt so bad it was difficult to speak.
I couldn’t choke up now.
“Breathe,” Violet whispered. “I’m with you.”
As odd as it was, her being a soul and all, I found comfort in that.
Enough so that my chest loosened and I began to speak, recalling those days after Daizlei’s collapse. The nightmares that plagued me. I talked about Lily and Victor. How he pulled her from a dungeon just to chain her in other ways. How the Vampires used children to train her—to break her. How they starved her, and beat her, and would have done worse—had she not defended herself. I talked about the ticks and tells that she’d unwittingly told me of Vampire society. I spilled her private thoughts and fears and dreams with them.
And by the end of it, a single tear had escaped my watering eyes, silently sliding down my cheek. But I had told them the truth—almost all of it.
All except the darkness that had long been settling in.
“Those are nightmares, girl. They’re not rea—” Oliver started to say. I clenched my hands into fists, digging my nails into my palms. I wouldn’t plead or beg him or anyone to understand, but I wasn’t yielding either.
“She’s telling the truth.”
It wasn’t Ash that spoke, or even Alexandra.
It was Johanna.
“You can’t possibly believe her, Jo—”
“I can, and I do,” she replied sternly. “You should know by now not to discredit something just because you don’t understand it. As Jayma would say, we live in an impossibly possible world.” Oliver flinched like he’d been slapped. Whoever Jayma was, I got the impression she wasn’t around anymore.
Daizlei Academy Omnibus Collection Page 76
