by Kitty Thomas
I wasn’t even sure I wanted to be free of him.
That thought had bumped around in my brain off and on for a few sleeps now. I wanted nothing more than to destroy that thought and convince myself it was about Simone and wanting to believe he’d honor his promise. But here he was, honoring that promise, and yet the idea of saying goodbye made a tight pain bloom in the center of my chest.
Simone gasped and leaped back, not expecting anyone else to be with me. She must not have been looking at the surveillance cameras when she’d answered the call box, or else Gabriel had been smart enough to stay well outside the range of vision of the house’s electric eyes.
“T-this is the friend I’ve been staying with,” I said. I looked at him, begging him silently not to make me say more. My lie was halfhearted and unconvincing even to my own ears. Only someone whose survival depended on believing it would have been able to do so.
When I’d told my sister I was staying with friends, I knew she’d assumed women. I hadn’t clarified. I’d been afraid if her stress got too high—even with her medicine—she’d have an episode.
I held the bag out. “It’s not your usual brand, but they gave me two different ones. If you’re fine with what you have you should be fine with one of these, too.”
Simone watched Gabriel warily as she took the bag.
“There’s only one bottle in here.” She pulled it out. “What are you talking about, Helene? This is my normal brand.”
“I took care of it,” Gabriel said, without further explanation. So he’d dug into things. He’d searched through some electronic data and made sure that she didn’t just get her medicine but she got exactly what she was used to taking.
Simone looked from Gabriel to me and back to Gabriel. “Thank you.”
“Have you been taking your pills on time?” I asked. She looked healthy enough, but I was still concerned. Leaving with Gabriel again would be touchy.
“Y-yes.” Her gaze kept drifting to my unexpected companion.
I could practically see the questions scrolling through her mind.
“I made sure my pill alarms were set. I was tempted to start rationing them in case no one came.”
I was grateful she hadn’t.
Her gaze settled on the gold band around my throat. Her fingers strayed to her own throat as if she couldn’t bring herself to verbalize the question. Please don’t ask me this, I begged silently, as if some sort of sibling connection would create a mental tunnel through which we could have a private conversation.
But the conversation was unnecessary. Simone had always been observant. With her condition, she’d reminded me of a deer, always one ear perked up for danger, knowing she must manage her stress response for her own survival. She looked back and forth between the two of us as if trying to determine my safety with him. Nothing had to be said. She knew I’d traded myself for her pills.
A thread of shame wound around me. I didn’t want Simone to know. I didn’t want her to guess at the gory details. I didn’t want her to imagine me in compromised situations in exchange for her life.
Hinkly’s small claws clicked from the other room into the entry area. He took one look at Gabriel and vocalized what we all felt. A low growl emitted from the small dog as he positioned his body, ready to leap and attack. His lips drew back in a snarl, revealing his canines more deliberately. The low growls were punctuated every few moments by a shrill yappy bark that sounded like an alarm. Then he went back to growling.
I turned to Gabriel, hoping he’d do something to placate the dog, but instead, his eyes glowed, and his fangs descended into view from between his lips as he let loose with his own growl, deeper and louder than the dog’s. Hinkly shrieked and fled the room, his claws clicking faster and faster until the sound faded at the other end of the house.
I jumped when something crashed and turned in time to see Simone on the ground, seizing. She’d seen Gabriel. And heard him. And even with her medicine, that kind of equilibrium-destroying shock had sent her into a medical crisis.
Before I could react, Gabriel was beside her, his fangs in his wrist. His blood dripped into her mouth as she convulsed. Though I’d seen the power of his blood to heal, I doubted it could fix something like this. But it took only seconds to prove me wrong as she came to. Her body trembled as she looked up at him, but it was just normal fear now. Her breathing had normalized. Everything had stilled.
Gabriel helped her off the floor and placed his hands on either side of her face. “Simone, nothing out of the ordinary happened. Your dog didn’t come in here. I didn’t growl. I am a friend of your sister. We need to go, but she will be back in the morning. She is safe, and you are safe. Everything is okay. Be a good girl and say goodbye to her.”
He stepped back and Simone turned to me, a glassy-eyed robotic look in her eyes. She moved closer and embraced me. “I’m glad you came. Thanks for my medicine. I’ll see you in the morning.” She kissed me on the cheek and turned and went down the hallway in the direction Hinkly had gone.
I stared after her, unable to process what had happened. He had this power, and yet he’d been willing to beat me into submission when I’d first been taken to him? I felt the betrayal burning out from my eyes.
“Let’s go, Helene.”
My feet were rooted to the spot. I wanted to make a scene that might snap Simone out of whatever waking dream state Gabriel had put her in. I wanted to force his hand, to see if he might try similar mind tricks on me. If he’d wanted to “bring me back to life” so much, all he’d had to do was get inside my mind and twist it. If he’d wanted my obedience he could have done the same.
Now that I knew this, I couldn’t determine if it was worse that he’d chosen to beat me within an inch of my life to gain my compliance or if the mental invasion I’d just witnessed was the real crime.
“Now, Helene. I won’t ask again.”
“Or what? You’ll control me like that?”
His eyes narrowed, the fire flickering on and off inside them. The lights in the house flickered with his barely tamped-down anger. “We have a deal. You are mine until morning. It’s not morning yet. If I hadn’t done that, Simone would have been in danger. She wouldn’t have been safe even with the drugs, and I don’t have time to babysit her. There are larger issues at stake.”
“Then why not let me go?”
His large hand bit into my arm. “No!” He scooped up the key box and practically dragged me out of the house and to the waiting car.
The house beeped onto secure mode as he pushed me into the back seat. He joined me and pressed a button on the console. “Take us to the second city.”
“Yes, sir,” Santo said.
I watched my house fade in the distance through the back window, wondering what Simone was doing and if somewhere underneath Gabriel’s hypnotic suggestion, she still sensed the danger she and I were both in. Because now more than ever, I was aware that this world I’d been introduced to was dangerous in ways far more insidious than I’d suspected. And despite Gabriel keeping his word, I felt as if those pills had been payment in full for me.
Tension rolled off him, filling the space between us with the loudest silence I’d ever experienced. I swear I could hear it when his fangs descended and his eyes glowed, even though there was no growl to accompany the partial shift into his darker form.
He pinned me against the seat, and his fangs were in my throat. He drank as if he was ready to stop playing with his food. The warning bells of my impending doom didn’t sound, though.
His grip and feverish feeding wasn’t boredom. It wasn’t the cat that has tired of terrifying the mouse. It was obsession and possession. Moments before consciousness slipped away from me, he tore into his own arm and fed me as he had Simone.
It only took a few gulps of his blood for me to realize that feeling wasn’t basic tiredness and the slip into sleep. It was the slip into death, and he’d pulled me off the track a moment before the train barreled by to finalize the arrangement
s.
I didn’t have time to be angry or scared or anything else before his mouth pressed against mine, his tongue demanding entrance. He wanted my blood, my body. He wanted to be inside me in ways that probably weren’t possible even with all his power.
He fumbled with my pants and slipped his fingers beneath my panties. He growled in approval as my wetness coated his skin. I knew in a detached sort of way that I shouldn’t want him, but although I’d felt moments of disconnection since we’d left the cell together and re-entered the world everyone else inhabited, I couldn’t erase what had happened between us—how it had changed me, and how that change seemed to permanently attach to Gabriel’s very being.
It didn’t take long for his insistent rubbing to produce an orgasm. The pleasure went on, more endless than the night and was intense enough that it was the only feeling I could hold in my mind for the full eternity it lasted. Finally, I’d had enough and tried to push him away, but he wasn’t having it.
“Beg for more,” he growled.
That voice, twisting inside me, wrapping around me like choking vines. I’d tricked myself into believing it was an embrace instead of restraint, passion instead of obsession, caring instead of control. But his aggressive insistence unmade that fantasy even as he demanded I accept these lies as truth.
My hips twisted away, a panic rising inside of me as if some magic had transferred my sister’s health problems onto me. But the convulsing was just the spasms below my waist as he wrung ever more pleasure out of me—as if this nourished him more than my blood. Each whimper that left my mouth made him seem stronger, larger, filling up and encompassing the full screen my life was projected upon.
“Beg. Me.” His words were clipped. Still growls. He’d stopped to wait for me to turn into some clinging, clawing, writhing bitch in heat. The queen’s image popped into my mind, and I wondered if he’d ever brought her to this moment, if she could have allowed that surrender, if he could have conquered and forced it out of her.
How had he brought me to this place of caring so much for something so otherwise inconsequential? When night had first fallen I couldn’t find anything big enough to live for, and now something as small as the pulsing bud between my legs was enough to make me want to go on.
For him.
His eyes hadn’t lost their glow, nor had his fangs receded into a parody of civilized. He was still the unapologetic monster, his stare so hard and hot that I felt scalded by it. He bit me again, the intensity of his feeding even higher than before as if he could never be satiated. In some dim corner of my soul, I knew the intense blood sharing increased his feelings of possession—as if he needed to imprint himself upon me so strongly that nothing could ever take away his claim.
“Please…please, Master.” I wasn’t sure if I was begging to live or begging to die or begging to come just a little harder, to push the bounds of the sensations I’d thought possible—like we’d done in the dungeon with pain.
He sealed his bite, then fed me his own blood again. As I drank, his fingers slipped inside me furiously fast—faster than any human could have moved. The release was so shockingly hard I fought to cling to the edges of consciousness. In fact, I might have lost it because the next thing I knew, I was on my hands and knees on the floor of the moving car, my pants and panties somehow gone, hips thrust upward in a desperate bid for more. He thrust into me, taking me with such animalistic glee, I thought he might accidentally kill me.
He’d begun the full shift, like Felix in the dungeon cell. I wondered now if the woman with him had displayed trust or just some instinctive surrender because I wasn’t sure I trusted Gabriel. He’d never broken his word, but I wasn’t sure I could trust this wildness.
“You belong to me,” he insisted as he drove into me. Every part of him seemed larger, stronger.
He wasn’t talking about our deal now. It was as if he were trying to cement something more permanent, something unbreakable.
He let out a roar. Moments later, he pulled out of me, and without him holding me up, I crumpled into a small heap. My cheek rested against the carpet, and I felt the engine humming, vibrating like I still vibrated.
“Helene?”
I looked up. He’d managed to right himself and shift back into something that almost resembled human, but his breathing still came hard and fast. To see him so out-of-control was unsettling, but to be captured inside that wildness was a scary form of freedom.
“Y-yes, Master?”
He pointed at his cock. “You know my rules. Clean your mess.”
I crawled the few feet to him and obediently lapped up my own juices. He petted my hair as my tongue glided over his skin. When he was satisfied, I sat beside him as he reached under the seat for a new set of clothing to replace what he’d just ruined during the shift.
I caught his gaze and was startled by what I found there. Fear. Whatever this was, it was as new and unsettling to him as it was to me. His hand inched across the leather toward me, his fingers brushing mine as if he couldn’t stand to not be touching me. As if it could soothe him.
But I still saw the fear. It was so unnatural on his face—as if he’d eaten a small prey animal that now somehow looked out at me through his eyes. He turned away, his fingers still touching mine.
“Say it, Helene.”
“Say what, Master?”
“You belong to me.”
It wasn’t just words. He no longer wanted me just until morning. In his mind, that deal was done and over. He had nothing else he planned to trade for me. He wanted me outright. No, “If you do this, I’ll do this”. It was a naked bid for power. He was a colonizing force, and I was the resource he wanted to plunder until there was nothing left.
I’d spent so long not wanting to be here that my identity had been an accidental amalgamation. I wasn’t sure how attached to it I was, but to give in to him was to allow that fragile slip of identity to pass from my hands into his. And yet I craved him now.
“I belong to you.” The air sizzled and sparked with my words as if an electric current moved between and through us.
It seemed absurd that I’d worried about the queen. Although she was locked in Gabriel’s dungeon, she was trivial. Simone was safe. And I was his.
He pulled me against him and urged me to lie on his lap. His fingertips skimmed gently over my exposed skin. “Sleep. We’re still hours from the city.”
Chapter Eight: 43 hours until day
In my dreams, no longer was I chased by the ghosts of my parents. Nor did I run toward some smiling reaper to make it all disappear forever. My sleep this time had been punctuated by hypnagogic images that drifted along in such a gentle way that I questioned whether I’d fallen asleep at all. But the countdown clock in the glass glowed back at me. Forty-three hours and thirty-eight minutes. I must have slept more deeply than I thought.
My pants and panties still lay in a heap at our feet. I struggled back into them.
Memories from before my nap flooded my mind. Oh God, what had I promised him? Was this my life now? Not until day, but until he was finished with me? His powerless slave, just hoping his tenuous kindness stretched as long as my enslavement did?
Surely he’d lose interest in me as my youth slipped away—if for no other reason than the mismatch of our apparent ages. For now I appeared younger than him. That wouldn’t last. When he grew tired of me, would he let me go or kill me?
Gabriel nudged me off his lap, opened a cold box, and passed a sandwich and water to me. “I packed it before we left. I thought you might be hungry later.”
“Thank you.” I was hungry. To his credit, he was always aware of my needs.
The gold band around my throat felt heavier than before. I couldn’t just live like this. Gabriel had handed down a sentence I could cope with in exchange for helping Simone. But I didn’t know if I could live with this new and improved sentence, the one where he’d gotten greedy. I told myself I’d be comfortable and safe with him. I wouldn’t have to worry about any
thing again. All struggle was over. Erased.
It was all so simple now as Gabriel controlled all the parameters of my existence. Tears began to slide down my cheeks.
“Why are you crying?” There was no anger in the question. He sounded genuinely baffled over what I might mourn—as if he couldn’t imagine any sense of loss because nothing had ever been taken from him. He’d never felt the weight of surrender on his own back. How lucky for him. He’d always been the one with power. He would always be the one with the power. Why are you crying? I wanted to hurl the sandwich at him, but I was too hungry to waste it.
“Will I ever see Simone again?”
“Of course you’ll see her. Now finish your food. We’re here.”
Through the glass pane dividing us from Santo, and beyond the front window itself, headlights revealed a massive metal gate. It was sturdy and seemed to climb forever up into the sky. Statues of angry beasts that looked like what Gabriel changed into sat atop the gate.
I wasn’t entirely sure they were statues and not silhouettes of the monsters themselves. Santo said something into a speaker, and the gate creaked open in a loud, grinding way as if it might buckle under the pressure of the slightest movement.
Beyond the gate, a glistening mirrored palace seemed to rise out of the ground and stretch even higher into the sky. It was enormous and imposing. If I’d thought my city created an understanding of total state control, it was nothing compared to the audacity of Amari’s frivolity.
Gabriel didn’t live with this much pretense. His compound of closely built cottages had been nice but not flashy—hidden at the edges of the city behind trees, away from the main pulse of human life. It was a safe hideaway from the oppression of night.
Here, the queen’s palace had been plopped down in the middle of everything as if some magic wand had waved and caused the place to appear from thin air, intruding upon the people who’d lived there.
I imagined in the daytime that the shadows of the palace still left the residents in darkness. It must feel like dark hands around throats, choking the will from them. Why else would there be a resistance?
