Ensnared: A Reverse Harem Paranormal Academy Bully Romance (Royals of Sanguine Vampire Academy Book 2)

by Sofia Daniel

  Ensnared

  Royals of Sanguine Vampire Academy Book 2

  Sofia Daniel

  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

  From Sofia Daniel

  Chapter 1

  Silence stretched through the vast, stainless-steel kitchen, broken by the occasional clang of metal on metal, and the dragging of knockers’ feet on the polished floor. They were in their usual trances, carrying items around the kitchen and through the door where I’d seen the strange-looking pigs.

  I snatched my gaze away from them and focused on the one person who might help me out of my predicament.

  The onion woman’s brow furrowed. Hopefully, it was because she was contemplating my suggestion. I held my breath, waiting for her to make a decision.

  She had to help me. It was partially her fault I’d been tricked into murdering Micalla, caught on camera carrying out said murder, and now blackmailed into becoming the Stryx brothers’ blood whore.

  Several moments passed, and blood rushed through my ears to the speed of my frantic pulse. If the onion woman hadn’t given me sunstone, I might never have attracted Nero’s attention, and he wouldn’t have used me as a cat’s paw to kill Micalla.

  I was about to demand that she say something when her gaze met mine.

  Eyes narrowing, she rubbed her chin. “What do you think I can do to help?”

  My mouth gaped open, and words spilled out. “I-I don’t know… Get me out of this contract they’re going to make me sign. Use the Yule break to help me escape and stay hidden from the vampires?”

  She shook her head and strode over to her usual steel table, which was strewn with dozens of fist-sized cloves of garlic. “You don’t need my help for any of those.”

  “What do you mean?” I followed after her with my fists clenched.

  “If you don’t want to become a concubine, don’t sign the contract,” she said. “It’s as easy as that.”

  “Blood whore.” I said.

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “That’s what I’d be signing up to become,” I spat. “The blood whore of three male vampires.”

  The onion woman’s lips parted, presumably to remind me once again that I didn’t need to sign the contract. Or some other smart remark that made me sound like I was flapping about her kitchen for no reason and wasting her precious time.

  Before she could say something unhelpful, I added, “Don’t forget. They have footage of me killing Micalla Mantis under the influence of a blood oath. She’s the daughter of Lady Mantis, who is—”

  “Everyone knows Lady Mantis,” the onion woman snapped. “And I understand well enough the dangers of a video of you staking a vampire.”

  I stepped back and waited for her to continue speaking.

  “We can search the Stryx brothers’ rooms, but I doubt that they’d be stupid enough to leave such vital leverage in the academy.” She turned to her station and picked up a garlic bulb. Its papery covering crinkled apart under her busy fingers, revealing cloves covered by a transparent membrane.

  I folded my arms across my chest and resisted the urge to tap my foot. Maybe I’d been too harsh in coming here and demanding that she solve my problems, but I was desperate. I’d spent an entire term failing to escape this vampire castle, attracting the attention of the vampire elite, and making enemies of both the vampires and the frumosi.

  It had been quite an achievement. I’d blundered my way through the first term, and now I was probably making an enemy of the onion woman, too. Right now, the sensibilities of a grumpy woman didn’t matter. I was desperate and in need of help.

  After breaking the garlic into thirteen separate cloves, she shook her head. “Escaping isn’t a viable option right now.”

  A breath caught in my throat at the implication that I could escape at some point in the future. “Why not?”

  “It’s obvious if you think about it.” She pushed the garlic’s root cluster through a hole in the table’s metallic surface and turned to me with a frown. “The ward keepers are exhausted from opening and closing the wards, of course.”

  My brows rose. “Are they vampires?”

  “Frumosi, like us.” She gestured at the knockers at the stove, who poured ingredients into a cauldron-sized pan. “You didn’t think they were kept around as cheap labor?”

  Actually, I did. Discreet, obedient workers I’d thought. As well as those punished for showing signs of defiance. Like the man I’d met in the dungeon on my first night at the academy. But there was no point in distracting the onion woman when she was finally giving me useful information that might help me escape.

  I rocked forward on my heels. “When will they regain their power?”

  “A day.” She tossed the garlic cloves into a pot.

  Hope leaped into my heart. “Then I can—”

  “If you’re thinking of commanding them to open the wards for you, think again. They’ve been trained to log every opening and closing in the ward book. A set of vampire guards will find you the moment the sun goes down.”

  My eyes bulged. Maybe this was how Gates had escaped before he’d been turned into a werewolf. If the frumosi ward keepers let vehicles in and out of the grounds, he could have slipped out and run for the hills.

  Leveling me with a steely-eyed gaze, she said, “The only way you’re getting through the barriers around the academy is by making a hole in the wards yourself.”

  “How can I do that?”

  Her mouth puckered as though she’d chewed on something sour. The onion woman didn’t like sharing information, but I’d told her earlier that if I got caught and interrogated by the vampires for Micalla’s murder, it would take them no time to work out who had given me the sunstone I’d used to disfigure Dante’s face and to burn through Raphael’s internal organs.

  Eventually, she spoke. “I’ll have to train you in the art of Frumosi magic, won’t I?”

  I sucked in a breath through my teeth. So many had implied that such a thing existed, but no one had been able to explain how to unlock this power. “Can we start now?”

  She gave me a crooked smile. “Start by helping me separate all this garlic into cloves.”

  With an eager nod, I rushed to her side and let my gaze linger over the large garlic bulbs. Sure, this had nothing to do with magic, but I’d seen Karate Kid. Mr. Miyagi got Daniel to carry out all kinds of repetitive and seemingly useless tasks, but deep down, he was learning the basic moves of karate.

  “Know the garlic, don’t crush it,” she said.

  “Right.”

  My throat dried. So, the answer was in the garlic. What had she called it before? Allium cepa magicis? Some kind of magical strain that repelled vampires. It was an essential ingredient in knocker porridge. Maybe repeated contact with their power would melt the barrier holding back my frumosi magic.

  I picked up a bulb and caressed its papery surface. It felt denser than regular garlic, and
it hummed under my fingers. When I twisted off its crispy covering, the humming stopped.

  “Does separating the skin from the garlic remove its magic?” I asked.

  She shook her head and unpeeled her bulb with a twist of the hands. “It only pushes the power into the cloves.”

  “How do you know all this?”

  Her lips pursed, and she placed the cloves in the container, moved the root to the hole, but kept the paper on the steel table. I was about to ask what was so special about the paper without its magic when she spoke.

  “My parents were in the middle of teaching me before I was taken. They were hunters.”

  “But that means—”

  “I’m no hunter!” she hissed.

  “What’s wrong with being one of those?” I separated my garlic into thirteen cloves, tossed away the root, and pushed the paper to one side.

  “You think they protect the world from vampires, but they don’t. Hunters—”

  A crash from above made my heart jump into my throat. I spun around to find the usual bustle of knockers carrying items to and from the doors leading out from the vast kitchen. Perhaps one of them had dropped something, and I was fretting over nothing.

  I turned to the onion woman to ask what she thought, but her face had blanked, and she peeled the garlic with the slow, deliberate movements knockers used.

  If one of the vampire guards had tracked me to the kitchen, he would probably want to know what I was doing. I’d have to tell him I was exploring, and then he’d accuse me of trying to escape. To throw off any suspicion, I would make a noisy and unconvincing denial.

  Stepping away from the onion woman, I let my gaze rove around the kitchen, waiting for the vampire to step out of the shadows and confront me. Moments passed, but nobody except a knocker covered in flour stepped through from the pantry.

  “So that’s the cause of the noise,” I muttered loud enough for the onion woman to hear.

  Without reacting to my words, she carried on with her task in that robotic, knocker fashion. I supposed it was her way of telling me it still wasn’t safe to speak.

  A long sigh slid from my lips. Just as we were finally getting somewhere, someone or something had to spook her. Hanging around here while she pretended to be a knocker would be a waste of my time. I grabbed a clove of garlic and made my way back through the kitchen.

  In the darkened pantry, I passed a sack of flour someone had spilled and made sure not to tread in any. At the end of the room stood another doorway, which led to a laundry room where a pair of male knockers unloaded wet clothes from a dozen washing machines.

  At the end of the laundry room stairs, I paused to stare over my shoulder. Three outcomes awaited me if I didn’t unlock this frumosi magic and learn to pull down the wards.

  One - I would become the blood whore of the Stryx brothers. If they were anything like the Coven of Bitches had been with Zarah, I’d spend my days stumbling about, light-headed from blood loss. Now that I wasn’t taking the anti-conceptional, I would get pregnant and birth a daywalker.

  Two - If I refused the scenario above, Nero would hand the recording of me killing Micalla to someone in charge, and I’d be executed for murdering the daughter of a vampire noblewoman. Or worse, the vampires would kill me slowly and painfully.

  Three - If the vampires didn’t kill me for the murder of Micalla, they would turn me into a knocker. Then I would either be as good as dead or locked in my body while it was commanded by the vampires to conduct all manner of hideous tasks.

  None of these were acceptable. Especially not option number one. I pushed opened the door and stepped into the stairwell. Next time, I would ask her about the garlic. Right now, I needed to sleep.

  The moment I stepped through the door of our dormitory, Zarah rushed at me. She’d tied her blonde hair into a bun, revealing the fading bruises on her neck. The sight of them made me shudder.

  Vampires could bite humans or whatever we were without leaving marks, but the girls who had taken her under their wing had inflicted so much damage, it was visible on her skin weeks after I had arranged with Micalla for the girls to leave her alone.

  The two beds on the left of the room were still gone. Kat and Annette had moved out the moment I became ostracized. Now that the Stryx brothers had publicly staked their claim on me, I had no doubt they resented me even more.

  I couldn’t blame them. From their point of view, I’d been playing hard to get, and it had worked. It would take an eternity to explain to them that I had no interest whatsoever in coupling with a vampire, no matter how good Raphael had been in bed.

  They wouldn’t believe me, and my time was better spent trying to escape. My gaze drifted to my bed on the far right of the room, which was still missing its legs.

  “Where have you been?” Zarah rested her balled fists on her hips. “Were you trying to escape?”

  I reared back. For the past term, this girl had either been too frightened to speak, too busy crying, or too anemic to do more than shuffle from place to place in silence. No matter how much I’d tried to help her, she had resisted, preferring to obey the vampires.

  “Well?” she asked.

  Irritation spread across my skin like an army of fire ants. When did she suddenly grow a backbone, and why was she using it against me? Even if this new attitude was some kind of twisted Stockholm syndrome, I was no longer interested. There was an ax hanging over my neck, and I had two weeks to learn how to dodge it.

  Straightening myself to my full five feet five inches, I asked, “More importantly, what was that thing you arranged with Micalla? I didn’t get the chance to speak to her before term ended.”

  Zarah’s face whitened. Her pale, blue eyes widened, and her mouth opened and closed.

  My lip curled, and I suppressed a growl. No words came out from Zarah’s traitorous lips because she had deliberately kept me talking to give Micalla enough time to arrange an ambush.

  The crazy vampire had tried to crush my windpipe because I hadn’t offered myself as a blood whore to Lord Lilin. Never mind that the wretched bloodsucking bitch had blackmailed me with the lives of my already dead family.

  I waited for a pang of pain to strike me through the heart at the thought of them dying in a gas leak, but none came. Maybe I had cried my last tear on Raphael’s shoulder the night of the ball.

  “Anything wrong, Zarah?” I asked in a voice dripping with faux concern. “Do you need another iron tablet?”

  Zarah’s gaze darted to the left, which I’d read somewhere meant that a person was making something up. “Micalla just wanted a chat, and she asked me to keep you talking.”

  “About what?”

  “She didn’t say.”

  I shrugged. “Never mind. Maybe we can talk when term starts. I’d like to know what I missed at the ball.”

  “You weren’t there.” Her voice was flat.

  I breezed past her and walked to my closet, feigning interest in its contents. Zarah followed after me like a duckling, and I resisted the urge to shove her away. If I gave her the slightest inkling that I knew she’d deliberately set me up to get trapped and throttled by Micalla, there was no telling what she would do with that information.

  Something was wrong with her. Nathaniel, who had erased her memories, must have altered something in her mind. Perhaps he had made her love vampires.

  The worst part was that I didn’t know anything about Zarah except that the vampire guards had picked her up before they’d snatched me from the Velvet Lounge and that they had murdered her aunt. How much of that was actually true? For all I know, she could have been a plant left in the back of the truck to dissuade me from trying to escape.

  I shook off those thoughts. Not only were they wild and paranoid speculations, but they distracted me from my goal, which was to get the hell out of this creepy vampire castle before the Stryx brothers returned from their vacation.

  I pulled out a long, virginal white nightgown and pretended to study the lace at its high
neck. There were two major barriers to my escape: a lack of frumosi magic, and I still didn’t know a way out of this accursed castle.

  Damn it! Why hadn’t I asked Gates before he’d transformed into a werewolf? Or posed the question while we were trying to unlock the shackles around his ankles?

  “What are you doing?” asked Zarah.

  “Studying,” I snapped.

  “What can you learn from looking at a bunch of clothes?”

  I rubbed at my temple with my free hand, placed the nightgown back into the closet, and slammed the door. “Do you know we still haven’t found a library? I’ll bet there are lots of interesting books to keep us occupied during the break.”

  Zarah’s mouth fell open. “Why would you—”

  “It’s time I accepted that the vampires always win,” I lied, repeating something I’d heard from Kat. “And I’m going to follow your example.”

  “What?”

  “You’ve always warned me about the dangers of defying the vampires, right?” If Zarah was monitoring me to report back to someone, I’d give her plenty of useless and misleading information.

  Her pale eyes narrowed, but she managed a slow nod. “That’s right.”

  “The Stryx brothers want me, and I’m no longer going to resist. This break is the perfect opportunity to learn how to please a vampire.” Saying those words made my stomach churn.

  Those three bloodsucking assholes had played me from the beginning. Micalla had had a hold over Dante, and he had been desperate to get rid of her. The hold had been so powerful that he and his bastard brothers had made a blood oath never to kill Micalla.

  Then I came along.

  I hadn’t cowered or tried to fit in. Practically broadcasted my distrust and hatred for vampires. When Dante hadn’t intimidated me into following his lead, Raphael tried to charm me. When that didn’t work, and I’d screwed things up to the point where the vampires were baying for my blood, Nero had swooped in and offered me a deal.