by Ella M. Lee
SOUL BOUND
Ella M. Lee
Soul Bound
Ella M. Lee
Published by Ella M. Lee
Copyright © 2020 Ella M. Lee.
All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.
Any references to historical events, real people, or real places are used fictitiously. Names, characters, and places are products of the author’s imagination.
Developmental editing by Courtney Kelly.
Cover design by Danielle Fine
Book editing and formatting by Danielle Fine
www.ellamlee.com
For William,
who likes raw mushrooms and raw eggs.
Table of Contents
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Chapter 46
Chapter 47
Chapter 48
Chapter 49
About the Author
Also by Ella M. Lee
Chapter 1
Stupid, stupid, stupid.
I touched my cheek, hesitating with my fingers a half inch from the blooming purple bruise.
Stupid girl, the tiny, nagging voice in my head whispered. This isn’t how you improve things.
I’d put myself at a disadvantage. I wasn’t that pretty to begin with, and now they’d think I was a troublemaker. That cut out all the bidders who didn’t want to bother with a troublesome slave.
Leaving behind only those willing or eager to hurt and break a human girl.
I rested both palms on the edge of the filthy gas station sink. In another minute, Franklin would expect me to open the door. He’d expect me to be cleaned up and ready to put on a show. He’d blame me if I was anything less, even though he’d done this to me himself earlier.
I was too tired to cry over it anymore. A year ago, I might have. Even six months ago, maybe. But now? Nah. Not worth it.
My hands shook as I rinsed my face. My jaw clenched as I caught my own reflection above the sink and looked myself in the eye. Pretty eyes, my boyfriend used to say. Blue like the ocean. That was back when I had normal things like a boyfriend, back when I was allowed to look anyone in the eye.
I carefully pulled my mouse-brown hair off my face and into a ponytail, smoothing it with water. At least my long-sleeved sweater hid most of my bruises.
“Trixie!”
I jumped.
“Trixie.” Franklin hissed my name through the door again, his fingers tapping on it softly. He didn’t have to yell. He didn’t have to pound. He knew I wouldn’t disobey. I’d resisted him in the beginning, but weeks of beatings had taught me it wasn’t worth the trouble. I’d tried everything in the captive handbook: crying, begging, pleading, obeying, disobeying, trying to get Franklin to see me as human, trying to seduce him, trying to escape…
Nothing worked. So I just moved on to coping.
Off, the tiny voice in the back of my mind said, and I let my expression go vacant, let emotion and fear slip out of me like water from an open faucet.
It was so easy not to care anymore, so easy to shut off the parts of myself that mattered. That used to matter.
Remember getting bagels with your friends before school? Remember feeling invincible when you got the “Star Runner” award for Track and Field? Remember playing Frisbee with your neighbor’s dog?
My brain liked to cruelly remind me that plenty of people had normal lives, that I used to have a normal life. Now I just had this.
I opened the door. I didn’t need to look worse before we arrived at our destination. Franklin’s huge hand closed on my upper arm, and he dragged me back toward the car.
He was tall and burly, with a perpetual scowl on his chiseled face. His eyes were always half-hidden by his dark hair, not that I found myself looking up at them very often.
Another rough tug of my arm. “Quit dragging your feet, Trixie.”
Trixie is not my name, asshole, I wanted to say, but I’d already gotten myself hit enough tonight. I’d been with him for a year, and I didn’t think he’d start calling me my real name hours before we were parted for good.
As if he could read my mind, he said, “Trixie, because you’re my perfect little trick. And now I’m going to trick some other bitch into buying your troublesome ass.”
That seemed a little unfair. I hadn’t truly resisted him in ages. I hadn’t tried to escape since my second week with him, when it seemed like I’d be able to make a run for a well-lit rest station while Franklin changed a blown tire. That had earned me a beating so bad I hadn’t been able to sit down for a week, and Franklin had tightened up on what few freedoms I had. For months, I looked for another chance but never found one.
I stumbled along toward the car, eyes on the ground, barely paying attention. There was nothing here. No one else at the pumps, not even a car racing by on the road despite not being that far outside the city. Just a disinterested attendant behind bars and Plexiglas, fifty yards away, staring down at his phone and ignoring us.
“My little trick, who’s going to earn me a lot of money tonight,” Franklin went on, thrusting me into the passenger seat and slamming the door.
The only good thing about being inside the car with Franklin was that it was a warm reprieve from the cold winter air.
“I’m not going to say good luck,” he told me. He started the engine. “You think you’re fucked now, girl? You just wait. Tonight will be worse.”
I stared straight ahead down the dark road and took a deep breath. It didn’t matter anymore. None of this mattered. It didn’t matter that tomorrow was my nineteenth birthday. It didn’t matter that one terrible year of my life was ending and another beginning. It didn’t matter that my real name was Arianna Ward.
Each mile was bringing me closer to an auction filled with buyers. Vampire buyers who would at best kill me quickly because my blood spoke to them like a fine vintage or at worst keep me as a human slave for who knew how long and in what condition.
As far as I was concerned, my life had ended a long time ago.
Chapter 2
Franklin had taken me to a few of these auctions before. I hadn’t been for sale those times. I’d just been his “guest” while he searched for his next meal.
Franklin didn’t have a lot of money, so they’d often been in the basements of dive bars, musty and dark. At the first one, there were only twenty or so vampires, browsing the three dozen humans for sale. The humans were the lowest quality, all scared vagrants—old people, homeless crazies, migrant workers
. People who wouldn’t be missed.
Meant only for food.
Franklin bought two and gorged himself that night, while I hid in the bathroom with my hands over my ears and cried. That was back when I still cried at all, back when I couldn’t turn off the pain and misery and shock like a switch.
This auction was a different story. After driving into the city, he pulled the car up to the side door of an upscale hotel. It was taken by a valet who ushered us quickly inside. A guard pointed down the hall to a service elevator. A vampire.
I’d come to notice the signs. If it had been possible for a vampire to walk out in broad daylight without the sun burning them to a crisp, they would’ve been recognized for what they were. They were creatures of the night—just like the legends—and the shadows they lived in hid their most alien features. Large pupils and extra white around the irises of their eyes, which got dark, and brownish, and murky when they were hungry. Ashen skin—pastier than most humans, with a purplish-green tinge that made them look like corpses. Their fingernails were dark, almost purple. Their veins bulged, especially when they were hungry. If you touched one, you’d find that their skin was cold and firm, like dead flesh. Their canines were pointed, more than a normal human’s, and their lips were pale.
Any one of those things might be something a person could brush off. Weird genetics. Disease. Heroin addiction. But together? They looked vaguely inhuman. Only dark streets, the smoky light of bars, and the shadowy corners of the earth kept vampires inconspicuous.
Along with blood, of course. Newer vampires needed blood every week. Older ones needed blood maybe every couple of months. But they liked it, and it plumped and brightened their skin, making them look prettier and somewhat approachable.
So they drank.
And drank, and drank, and drank.
“Is she a guest or a sale?” the guard asked, clicking his fingernails together disinterestedly.
“Sale,” Franklin said.
The guard’s bored sigh trailed into his words. “Twenty-fifth floor. They’ll process her before the party.”
Franklin dragged me toward the elevator. Once inside, he straightened his suit jacket. He looked a little absurd, like a pit bull dressed up in a tuxedo. It didn’t work on him at all, and his discomfort was laughably apparent.
With rough touches, he adjusted my sweater over my faded jeans. My clothes weren’t nearly nice enough for whatever we were about to walk into, but my attire wasn’t going to be the focus of the night, and Franklin knew that.
I twisted my hands in front of myself as the elevator rose through the building.
When it dinged and opened onto the twenty-fifth floor, I swallowed. We entered a nondescript lobby, with a female vampire at a reception desk. Gray sheath dress. Deep purple manicured nails painted to hide their unnatural color. Her sallow, veiny skin and dark eyes told me she hadn’t fed lately.
“Your name?” she asked crisply.
“Franklin Oberian,” he said, his hand tightening on my wrist painfully.
“Sale?” she asked.
“Yeah.”
She looked me up and down. “Last door on the right for processing.”
The last door on the right opened into a large hotel room filled with a flurry of activity. At least ten other vampires crowded the room, each with a human. Two vampires sat at a table by the window. Their red and black uniforms told me they were part of Origin, the organization hosting this auction. Owned by vampire royalty, they were responsible for keeping vampire secrets hidden and well-guarded.
Franklin fidgeted as we waited our turn. When we got up to the table, the indifferent vampire didn’t say a word before taking my measurements and blood pressure. After that, he pushed up the arm of my sleeve and took my blood, filling several vials with it.
Finally, he dipped his thumb into a dish of blackish-red blood and placed a thumbprint on the back of each of my hands. With a whispered word in Estrerian, the vampire language, the blood lit with blue magic. These marks told everyone at the auction that I was a sale piece, not meant to be touched or harmed. They also gave Origin the ability to track me, not that I would be stupid enough to try to escape from a building full of vampires.
“Her name?” the vampire asked Franklin.
“Trixie.”
“I see here the minimum bid price is set to 22,500 dollars. Is that correct?”
“Yes,” Franklin said, and I could almost hear his eagerness.
I swallowed a laugh. That was all I was worth. That was higher than the cattle at the last auctions I’d attended, but it felt like a lame amount of money for an entire human life. If Franklin tried hard enough, he could stretch that sort of money into a year’s worth of blood. Or more, if I went for a higher price. He’d probably learned from the past year that dragging around a human was more trouble than it was worth.
His frustration with me was evident from the bruises on my body, but at least he was smart enough to think of selling me, rather than just killing me out of annoyance.
The vampire made notes on his laptop, tagged the vials with my name, and then waved us to the left. “Take the stairs up one level. The party has already started. The auction is in four hours,” he said, his eyes not even on us anymore as Franklin led me away.
I tugged my sleeves down over my hands because there was nothing else I could do to control anything about myself or my fate.
Chapter 3
Vampires were strange.
From what I could tell, they only seemed to share two things. They needed to drink blood to survive, and their society was governed by extensive rules. Rules for everything. Keeping their world a secret, making new vampires, interacting with each other…and probably a million things I had no idea about because Franklin didn’t spend a lot of time explaining things to me.
Beyond that, there was no telling what any given vampire I met would be like.
They possessed personalities of all kinds. Social statuses of all kinds. Races, genders, and sexual orientations of all kinds. Hobbies. Proclivities. Lifestyles of all kinds.
Some lived and hunted alone, while some were part of covens or “families.” Some never interacted with other vampires, while others hung out in bars or clubs owned and frequented by vampires—called “burrows”—and caused havoc in random humans’ lives.
Franklin had threatened to sell me to a horde once. A horde was a nasty thing, a group of vampires practically insane from the high of blood and power and magic. The older vampires kept them out of the big cities, but they would tear through small, unprotected towns and decimate them. Torture. Rape. Brutal deaths. I’d seen the aftermath of one in my first few weeks with Franklin, and he used the threat to scare me.
It did scare me.
But most vampires didn’t want chaos. They just wanted an easy life of blood and luxury. An auction like this would be filled with rich vampires looking to sate whatever need they had for humans in their lives.
Vampires didn’t care about humans. They seemed to lose their humanity pretty quickly after they turned. Maybe you couldn’t be kind or decent and drink blood. I didn’t know; I had never tried.
The staircase led up into a ballroom. Gold chandeliers, flower arrangements, a string quartet, candles and soft lighting, red-and-black-clothed staff gliding among well-dressed patrons. Like a fancy wedding or a party you’d see in a movie about rich people.
Of course there was an open bar, because the only thing vampires drank other than blood was alcohol.
This auction was bad news. How had Franklin even gotten into it? The vampires here were old and high class, and that was foreboding on its own.
Franklin was an average sort. He drank from me, but not too often. Not often enough to hurt me for real. He raped me, but he didn’t see it that way—he saw it as mercifully drugging me up once in a while and using me because he owned me and I was his to abuse. He hit me when I talked back, beat me when I did things he didn’t like. I had fantasized a million times about setting
him on fire or opening the blinds to the sunlight or crushing his heart—the only things that would kill a vampire—but those feelings quickly sublimated into numb hopelessness.
A twinge of fear twisted my heart.
Tonight wasn’t likely to be a gore fest, where most of the humans ended up dead right after the party was over. The prices were all going to be too high for that. No. Tonight was for picking and choosing, and I didn’t want to be part of any of these creatures’ collections. The part of me that was a little fiery and a little rebellious peeked out, but I smothered it. As much as I might have wanted to fight, there wasn’t much I could do but pray I’d end up in the least bad situation.
A hundred people filled the ballroom, a mix of humans and vampires. Once out of the stairwell, we were escorted by a thin female vampire to the check-in desk.
The Origin staff member located Franklin’s file. She made a horizontal cut across Franklin’s index finger and pressed it onto a flat metal disk that then glowed green. An identity checker. Franklin’s finger healed as we waited for the check to go through. I watched the skin repair itself as we were told to seat ourselves at Table 15.
I studied the crowd, casting discreet glances upward when I could. I recognized no one. Every vampire here was older and more powerful than most I’d ever seen. Older vampires just had a thing about them—an air, an aura, an otherworldliness that I picked up on easily now. They screamed “deadly” to my human senses; they made me want to run. It must come from their ability to use a tiny bit more magic. Vampires didn’t have magic, not really, not anything special, but they could do a few tricks with blood. Enact glamours, hide or find things, change human memories… I didn’t really know much about it. Franklin wasn’t powerful enough for any of that. Not like the others here.
And before the end of the night, one of them might be my new owner. I shuddered.
Don’t think about it, the tiny voice trying to keep me sane said, but I couldn’t help it.
Would it be the vampire female in the pink chiffon dress, following me with her eyes as she took a long drink of red wine? Her manicured nails were like talons, her sneer cruel. Nah—she was looking for a man, probably, given the way she was basking in the stares of a gaggle of male vampires on the opposite wall.
