Duvessa had been affectionately brushing aside a few strands of Raina’s hair as she’d spoken the last of that. Raina was so disturbed by both the tone of her voice and the perversely turned-on look upon her face and the genuine vibe of lust she sensed from her that she actually flinched away from her touch. Duvessa was a sadist in the purest sense of the term, and she seemed to find no shame in admitting as much to her. She had heard and read of the supposed tendency of High Courts, as well as other vampiric races, to find sexual pleasure in both sadism and masochism, but until that moment, she had always figured it to only be a reactionary, cultural fetish of sorts. Vampires supposedly pretended to be cruel simply because cruelty was expected of them. The Grand Duchess, it seemed, did not care to pretend. For her, it was all genuine. For all that she had said and done to try to dispel the idea that vampires were simply bloodthirsty, evil creatures, Duvessa certainly had no qualms about admitting to having a penchant for torture.
Of course, she sensed more of Raina’s reaction than she saw in that mere act of flinching away. Duvessa smiled down at her.
“Would you all kindly allow us a few moments of privacy?” Duvessa asked of the others without taking her eyes off Raina. Obediently, William arose and followed Robert out of the room, but Svetlana hesitated after arising from her chair. The Grand Duchess looked to her with a sudden frown. “All of you? Now, please?”
Reluctantly, Svetlana obeyed, though she looked to Raina with the barest hint of real concern upon her face. Raina could plainly sense that sudden swelling of dread within her, and she got the distinct impression that Svetlana knew something very unpleasant was about to happen. She dared not to intervene, however, and Svetlana filed out of the room after the men, gently closing the heavy wooden hospital door as she left.
Raina was alone with Duvessa once again. The first time this had happened, something bad had happened, although Raina had been too drunk and too naïve to see it for what it was at the time. However, the look in Duvessa’s eyes and the perverse sense of both lust and anger that simmered within her were more than a clear indication of what was on her mind. Pathetically, Raina felt like screaming for help … but who would come? Nobody would save her. And, worse still, she could do nothing to save herself in her current position of restraint. Any other time, to any casual outside observer, the smile upon Duvessa’s thin pink lips would have been called pretty, warm, and loving. In that moment, however, it was something that made Raina shudder with trepidation. It was the smile of a cat looking down upon a mouse with its tail caught in a trap.
“You’re right, dear,” the Grand Duchess said to her softly. “We really should just … cut the bullshit, as you so crudely put it. Let us air our dirty laundry once and for all, here and now. I will be completely and … brutally honest with you, if you will extend the same courtesy to me.”
“Everything she said was true, wasn’t it,” Raina stated. “You cooperated with the Nazi SS and that ‘Angel of Death’ guy … whatever his name was…”
“Ah, yes … Herr Doctor Josef Mengele,” Duvessa sighed with a momentary German accent, looking away as though to savor the memory. “He was a very ill man with a twisted, evil agenda … but I cannot deny that I did learn a great deal from him. His greatest flaw was to hide his true passions behind all of that Nazi propaganda and senseless anti-Semitic rhetoric. If he could have been brave enough to cast aside all of that, I would have welcomed him as my consort. We had so very much in common when it came to our interests in exploring that fine line that separated life and death. We had a mutual interest in the sciences of pain and death, particularly in its administration.”
Raina glared at her. “You’re sick.”
“Oh, now … don’t be mean. You’re basing your judgment of me upon a lot of exaggerations and misunderstandings spread by the general public. You hardly have a right to judge me for events that took place before your parents were even born.” She paused, waving it off. “All of that aside … yes, it is true that I did cooperate with the SS and Doctor Mengele through the latter part of the second World War. However, the extent of my involvement was limited to his research upon vampires. I was not trusted to be involved in human affairs, nor was I allowed to participate in his research upon human subjects. I was only allowed to observe.”
Raina struggled not to be distracted by the disgustingly appreciative tone that Duvessa used in regarding those atrocities. She wondered how it was possible that the Grand Duchess had gone this far and lived so long since then without having been brought before a court or sought out by Nazi hunters for a slew of war crimes. She suddenly found herself wishing for a voice recorder or, if nothing else, a camera with audio already installed in the room to eavesdrop upon their conversation.
“I’m sure that the Countess put her own spin upon the tale … making herself appear to be an innocent victim in the matter, claiming that I betrayed her and that I escaped Birkenau while leaving her to die,” Duvessa mused as she began to walk around the hospital bed. “I suppose she conveniently forgot to mention that it was her suggestion, in the first place, that the House of Fallamhain should collaborate with the Nazis when they first marched through Paris. She believed that we could capitalize upon the German government’s rising power by allying ourselves with a prominent German bloodline, and she personally negotiated the treaty between the House of Fallamhain and the House of von Reichenbach.”
“Of course, that was where the truce went afoul,” she continued, “because she had not expected Count von Reichenbach to take such a liking to her. He made it quite clear that if we wished to avoid being executed or otherwise destroyed by the German army, he would have accepted nothing less than my dear Elizabeth for his bride as a condition of our treaty. After more than fifty years, I had grown quite tired of her madness, anyhow. I was not willing to sacrifice the survival of my entire bloodline for the sake of one petulant, mentally unstable offspring, so I agreed to it. I did what I felt was necessary and right to ensure that the High Court would not be destroyed as a race and as a society. Again, I don’t expect you to understand this because that was all so very long ago, but I can assure you that you would have surely done the same if you had been in my position.”
“Somehow, I seriously doubt that.”
Duvessa glided to stand at the other side of her hospital bed, standing with her back to the drawn heavy curtain of the large window that filled the private Intensive Care Unit room with an ambient faint reddish-orange glow as the light of dawn peeked out dangerously from around its edges. She took hold of Raina’s hand and lifted it as though to shake her hand, but instead she simply held it as she caressed her forearm gently with her other hand.
“Now, it is my turn to ask something of you,” she began with a faint smirk. “At what point were you intending to admit to me that you were not truly a Fallamhain?”
Raina blinked at her, and her chest tightened. “Come again?”
“Don’t play coy. I know your secret,” she said. “The amount of silver to which you were exposed would have easily killed most any High Court vampire, yet you somehow managed to survive. I had fully expected you to die as a result of silver poisoning from your wounds.”
“Sorry,” Raina sighed. “I’ll try harder to die next time.”
“You have an unnatural resistance to the effects of silver as a vampire. Not even a Fallamhain could have injuries such as yours from a silver-coated weapon,” Duvessa observed. Her faint smile vanished. “You are no pureblood. You are some sort of half-breed, some mixed-race creature.”
Her mind raced as she fought not to let her surprise and fear show too visibly. She tried to will herself into calmness, though she was all too aware of the futility in that effort. Duvessa could sense her emotions, too … perhaps even her very thoughts, given her age and experience as a High Court vampire. There was no point in hiding it. But she was not about to volunteer any information on her own. As before, she would only answer questions that were asked of her, and she would al
low Duvessa to draw her own conclusions. It was the only thing she could do, in lieu of lying.
“So … what, you’re going to play the race card on me, now? Just because my dad was Hispanic and my mom was white?” Raina asked, trying for humor.
Quite unexpectedly, the Grand Duchess reached for the IV line inserted into a vein at the crook of her elbow and gave it a firm upward push, moving it this way and that. The needle moving about in her arm was not excruciatingly painful, but it was unpleasant enough to make Raina wince and tense up. The IV line monitor beside the bed began to beep.
“Do not trifle with me, young lady. I asked you a simple question, and I expect a simple answer,” Duvessa said sternly through tight lips, flashing her fangs menacingly as she spoke. “Did you ever intend to admit to me that you are some kind of bastard creation of science? Did you truly believe that I would not find out?”
“I don’t know what…”
Before she could say anything more, Duvessa squeezed Raina’s hand so tightly that the bones of her fingers ground together and she had to stifle a yelp of pain. A moment later, as she loosened her grip, Duvessa reached her other hand to the top of the sheet covering Raina and tugged it down.
“You have no idea what forms of pain I can inflict upon you, Raina,” she informed her as she slid a hand gently over the hospital gown covering her breast, almost lovingly caressing her now. She found her nipple through the fabric and suddenly pinched it for a moment, very hard, between her thumb and forefinger, causing Raina to cry out through clenched teeth and strain against the metal restraints that bound her wrists and ankles to the bed. “Not all pain is physical … and not all pain is temporary. You should keep that in mind when answering my questions.”
The beeping of the IV monitor’s warning alarm continued loudly, demanding attention in the relative silence between them in the following few seconds as they glared at one another. Not content to be answered by Raina’s silence, Duvessa gave her another pinch, this time not relenting until she actually cried out.
“Okay, okay, enough! Stop!” Raina yelped, gasping so sharply that she almost choked as the Grand Duchess added a slight twist to that pinch before releasing her. “What the fuck do you want from me, lady?”
“I require an answer to my question … and in a more civil tongue befitting your title as Duchess,” she replied. “Quid pro quo, my dear … or do I need to ask less politely?”
With that, her hand began to slide downward, trailing her fingertips over the surface of Raina’s stomach.
“What question?”
Duvessa smirked as though she was pleased by Raina’s response. She grabbed the rumpled-up sheet and yanked it downward completely to her feet, revealing much of Raina’s bare legs where the rather short hospital gown stopped. Almost teasingly, she dragged her nails down the flesh of Raina’s right thigh with a feather-light touch before wrapping her fingers around the clear catheter tubing between her knees. She slid her hand slowly upward along that length of thin tubing toward its source with a nefarious smile.
“Why did you deliberately fail to mention to me the true nature of your blood? What consequence did you fear to suffer by admitting to me that you were not a pureblooded Fallamhain?” Duvessa demanded. She waited only a second for a response before tugging at the catheter line with a cruel hint of her intentions. “Did I not make myself clear to you upon our first meeting that trust is absolutely essential in our relationship?”
“I’m sorry, okay? Really, I … I’m sorry that I didn’t tell you,” Raina said, honestly feeling as though she were begging for mercy already. The catheter was already uncomfortable enough without Duvessa tugging lightly upon it over and over again. Were there barbs on the end of that thing? “I thought that if you found out that Brenna was my Maker, too, then…”
Duvessa’s eyes went wide and her lips parted for a moment in genuine shock. “What?”
“Brenna was my Maker, too. Remember, she injected me with her own blood only a few hours after Sebastian started my Change,” she explained quickly, hoping to avoid what now seemed inevitable by distracting her with words. “When I started my Change, it went so fast and I didn’t take in enough nutrients and stuff ahead of time to compensate for it, so I blacked out. Brenna said I was so bad that I skipped right past bloodlust and I was having a seizure because I was about to go into a coma. She told me that she was just doing what you had ordered her to do.”
“Then she was a bloody liar,” Duvessa snapped, “because I instructed her to let you drink her blood! I never suggested that she should inject you with it!”
“You told her to help keep me alive, okay? That’s the only thing you told her, word-for-word,” Raina countered. “It’s your own fucking fault that you didn’t give her any specific…”
The catheter was removed with an abrupt and forceful jerk at the same time that Duvessa clapped a hand over Raina’s mouth, effectively stifling what would have otherwise been an ear-splitting scream of agony. The catheter felt as though it had been covered with miniature razorblades and battery acid as Raina shrieked and half-sobbed her suffering into Duvessa’s palm, straining against the handcuffs and ankle shackles that kept her mercilessly secured to the bed in such a way that she could barely even get her knees together in reaction to the pain. She had a momentary and instinctive urge to bite into the Grand Duchess’s hand, perhaps already being pushed to the edge of bloodlust, but she still had enough conscious restraint to know better. Inflicting injury atop insult to Duvessa would only result in more severe punishment. She realized with despair that she could not even hope to goad the Grand Duchess into such a rage that she would grant her the blissful mercy of a quick death, as it was far more amusing to a sadist to torment the living than it would be to desecrate a corpse.
“Please, Raina, don’t make me do this to you,” she said softly with shocking sincerity. “I enjoy the act of causing others a great deal of pain. It excites me to feel their emotions in me, to feel their fear and anguish. But I only enjoy doing this to people that truly deserve it. I do not wish to take pleasure in hurting you, dear. As difficult as it may be for you to believe this, Raina … I do care for you with all my heart. But provoking my anger only brings out the worst in me, and pain is one of my favorite guilty pleasures. So please … stop giving me opportunities to indulge.”
Tears burned hotly in Raina’s eyes as she felt the deep, burning sting that lingered in the sudden and forceful absence of the catheter. Still, it was nothing compared to the emotional shock of what she was doing, that this was Duvessa doing this to her, and the very real fear that filled her of what unspeakable atrocities of which the Grand Duchess could be capable. Duvessa was a genuinely warped, ill, sadistic individual. While she could not doubt that, at least in Duvessa’s own mind, she genuinely loved and cared for Raina, she was also so deviantly fascinated with sadism – whether consciously or by genetic design as a High Court – that Duvessa had no qualms about inflicting terrible acts of physical and psychological cruelty upon anyone, even those for whom she cared. In spite of her words, Duvessa did not simply torture her enemies; rather, in the Grand Duchess’s warped mind, everyone deserved the torment that she inflicted upon them.
Perhaps it was the very fact that Duvessa did like or perhaps even love Raina that made torturing her so much more appealing. It was no wonder, then, that Duvessa’s own daughter had essentially opted to commit suicide, rather than to surrender and face whatever unspeakable cruelties awaited her at Duvessa’s sinisterly capable hands.
“I wasn’t … I wasn’t going to tell you,” Raina finally admitted as Duvessa uncovered her mouth, “because I knew you’d be like this. I knew you’d be mad if you found out about what I really am.”
Duvessa shook her head. “I’m only doing this because your attitude is making things difficult for us both. The nature of your race has nothing to do with how I am treating you. I understand that you are upset over losing Brenna. I understand that you wish to blame me for her de
ath. I am willing to accept that. But I will not allow you to speak to me in the tone you exhibited, especially when we are in the presence of others. And I absolutely will not tolerate any violation of our trust. If I cannot trust you, then this simply will not work between us.”
“And what if I can’t trust you?” Raina countered with a sniff as her pain gradually subsided.
She shrugged with what almost seemed to be genuine innocence. “I have done nothing to violate your trust, dear. Why should you ever have any reason not to believe anything which I say?”
“Because,” Raina replied, “omitting certain important things from your history is just as bad as lying. If I’d known that you were a Nazi sympathizer and you were trying to get me to kill your daughter for you…”
Again, the Grand Duchess clapped a hand over Raina’s mouth and reached for a breast, this time pinching and twisting her other nipple fiercely. It seemed like a juvenile means of tormenting someone, but it was effective enough to elicit another muffled scream from her victim. Even if she was bruised as a result of the assault, it was nothing that would be readily noticed by anyone else, whereas something like a bite mark or anything else that could break the surface and cause bleeding would be hard to conceal. The aftermath of a hard slap or punch to the face would have been much more difficult to disguise. Duvessa obviously was a seasoned abuser.
Releasing her pinched hold upon her, the Grand Duchess told her, “If I had known that you were a half-breed bastard bloodspawn, I would not have been so foolish as to name you as my heir. I would have taken you in, regardless, but I would not have entrusted the survival of my bloodline to someone whose blood was corrupted by the likes of both a Commoner and a human. The only reason you still live now is because it would be too much of a bother to explain to everyone else why I found it necessary to kill you.”
“You’d be too embarrassed to let the world know you made a mistake,” Raina replied as soon as Duvessa uncovered her mouth, “just like you made a mistake with your daughter.”
The Darkest Colors Page 56
