Chapter 4
My mother released Mirantha’s wrist. “Want some?”
I declined with a shake of my head. I’d not long fed, and I’d only done so due to stress. “Why is he visiting again?” I snapped my fingers. “Oh, that’s right. To collect his gold.”
“And to see his petulant betrothed.” Mother dismissed Mirantha. After the sitting room doors had closed, she said, “Your anger is getting tiresome. You knew this night would come eventually.”
“Eventually.” My teeth met. I pried them apart to say, “Decades or even a century from now.”
“You’re twenty-eight years.” Collecting blood from her lower lip, she sucked it from her finger. “You should consider yourself lucky for that reason alone. Not too long ago, many born women were matched from birth and bonded as soon as they reached nineteen years.”
The mere thought made me shiver.
People still gasped about the century before last, when there’d been no unbonded noblewomen. As soon as one had been born, they were auctioned like prized broodmares rather than matched with a handsome dowry attached.
When it came to ensuring the longevity of each noble line, pickings could indeed grow slim now and then. Forty-four born vampire families seemed like plenty—until it inevitably wasn’t.
Regardless, reminding my mother where some of my wishful thinking had come from felt imperative. “Yet you managed thirty-nine years of freedom before Father claimed you.”
“Yes, well…” She snatched the book she’d placed face down in her yellow skirts. “Those were the blessed years.”
Often, I wondered if she liked to pretend my father didn’t exist.
I certainly preferred to.
When I was small and hiding from his temper, a feeder had told me that we were cursed creatures. Made or born, we were doomed to feel too much at any given moment and, in the beat of a dying heart, nothing at all.
She’d warned me that great heights created the quickest and darkest of falls. Ever since, I’d seen the proof. I’d also felt it in verbal and physical exchanges—the twirling knifepoint between care and indifference. I understood it.
That didn’t mean I excused it.
“What if he’s violent?”
Mother scoffed. Yet I caught it—heard the subtle creak of her book as her fingers clenched it. “Who isn’t?”
That wasn’t what I’d meant, and she knew it. “Toward me,” I said, though I shouldn’t have.
She never liked acknowledging it.
“Goddess,” she breathed, and threw her eyes around the room, although the doors were closed and the windows were merely cracked open. “That is quite enough of that, Ethelsia.”
Guilt nibbled at my chest. But I rolled my lips between my teeth and shrugged. “You cannot blame me for wondering.”
Cicadas and crickets screeched in the silence. Beneath the ear-piercing noise, something else snuck through the windows. Crunching. Wheels over stones.
The king was arriving.
Though she probably heard as much too, Euricia Blueburn reclined over the divan. Without removing her emerald gaze from her latest erotic novel, she leaned it against her knee and plucked a grape from the fruit platter on the tea table.
I stiffened as that crunching became louder.
As if sensing it, Mother said, “Just do as he wishes, darling.” She flicked a russet curl from her rouge-tinted cheek. “If you can manage that, you may find that you’re the one who benefits the most.”
My hands curled in my lap.
For years, I’d done as my father wished. I appeared at functions, pleased his smarmy guests with my appalling sense of humor, and I never let him catch the too long glances I gave to those I wished to play with next.
The latter was how I’d lured Maxus.
It had taken several moons of placing myself in his line of sight, then ever closer to him.
When he’d finally followed me from the ballroom into the woods, it had been to warn me that we were entering uncertain times.
Times that would see vampires stalking estates like ours, hoping to reach humans or riches.
I’d pretended to trip on our way back to the gardens. He’d caught me, and as our eyes had met and locked…
Well, a moment later, our lips had done the same.
I hadn’t seen Maxus since the evening my father betrothed me to a king without my consent or knowledge. I’d been far from interested in sex. Unable to trust that I wouldn’t lose my temper or cry, I’d barely left my rooms.
I’d done everything right.
So right that I could count the number of times Father had put me in the cellar on one hand. So right that I’d forgotten he could punish me in other wretched ways.
Except this wasn’t punishment. To Aphylus Blueburn, this was simply business.
And there was no better investment than getting a crown on your daughter’s head and a throne beneath her ass.
Both were hideous, no doubt.
“You should see your face right now.” My mother laughed. “Honestly, darling.” Sobering, she said, “You couldn’t have dreamed of a better match. You’re going to be the queen of vampires, yet you look as if you’re being led to the offering stone.”
I’d never seen the giant stone that resided in the hillsides between the palace and the city, and I never wanted to. Just imagining it made me cringe.
King Exayn had let the city guard deal with criminals and dressing the stone with their organs. Supposedly, King Breyron had recently taken to disemboweling them before that stone himself, their organs placed atop it as offerings to Vexaya.
Really, it was probably the gulls and crows who most appreciated them.
I loved blood. I needed blood.
But I drew the line at innards.
“We both know that I don’t need to be queen,” I whispered, though it sounded like the king’s carriage had only just reached the turning bay. “I have all that I could ever desire.”
Call me spoiled, as that was certainly my point, but it was true. Fine gowns, lavish rooms, jewels, pretty shoes, many a man to see to my needs until I grew bored, and my preferred blood type… What more could a lady want?
My cage was large enough that I felt free.
Mother just huffed and returned to her book.
This king might be too pretty for words or paint to ever do him justice, but I had no need of him. I had no desire to marry him, and that had nothing to do with Maxus. Although I enjoyed my father’s prized vampire, Maxus knew what I was like—that I would eventually tire of him.
An immortal life spent with one man was a disgraceful waste.
Still, as boots met the pebbled drive, I forced myself to rise. Through the window, I spied a pearlescent carriage and a brief glimpse of raven-dark hair.
Trapping a sigh behind my clenched teeth, I stomped out of the room to greet my doom.
My mother stayed put.
I supposed that, in her eyes, no one was more intimidating than my father, and after dealing with him for eons, she’d earned the right to take respite whenever she could. He was mercifully absent, visiting a nearby village to frighten those who hadn’t paid last moon’s tithe.
Of course, Maxus had gone with him to do most of the frightening.
“Many evenings in the making,” my father had said after the king’s departure. Which meant ruining this betrothal, or merely attempting to, would guarantee a five-night stay in the cellar. Each time I did something to displease him, he added a night.
The cellar was a deep underground cage in the woods surrounding our estate.
It was used when Lord Aphylus recruited another member for his little army of made vampires.
After they were given his blood and then drained of their own, their lifeless bodies were dropped into the cellar.
Blood was lowered to them in a pail every other evening until they had control of their new thirst.
The cost of being turned was so high that most humans would die before they saved enough coin. So high that it aided in keeping born families wealthy.
My father, however, didn’t make people pay. Not with coin.
Should they wish to be turned by him, they underwent a series of tests to prove their loyalty. As once they were made immortal, they would spend the rest of their evenings living in the stables with the other vampires indebted to the Blueburn family.
Father had now had some of those loyal men dump me in that cellar four times. By the third night, I’d been so claustrophobic, so desperate, I’d pleaded to the stars through the steel grate high above my head.
No matter the age, no matter the crime, no matter who—Aphylus Blueburn made sure that anyone who disrespected him thought long and hard before they ever did so again.
But although the memory of that cellar caused my breathing to quicken, it failed to quell my rage.
With each intentionally slow step through the halls, I only became more certain that I would rather spend five nights in the ground than let this king believe he hadn’t made a gargantuan mistake by choosing me.
Said king stood beneath the large pane of glass that allowed the moon and stars to shine across the foyer tiles.
But he wasn’t staring at the sky.
King Breyron stared at the latest family portrait upon the wall, hung above the stone table containing nothing more than a vase of fresh roses. “Your high cheeks are from your mother,” he murmured without looking at me. “But her hair is a few shades lighter.”
He wore a long mint-green coat, held open by the hand in the pocket of his tight brown trousers. A white shirt draped loosely beneath, unbuttoned and almost sheer. His black hair fell freely down his back in a luminous sheet.
“Mercifully, I inherited nothing from my father.” Aphylus Blueburn wasn’t a bad-looking man, I supposed.
Though it was hard to ascertain all of what lurked beneath the brown beard, bushy mustache, and unruly shoulder-length hair.
“I wouldn’t say that.” The king stood so still, his slow smirk drew my eyes to his magnificent profile. “You have his boldness. That cunning glint in your eye.”
Through a smile that was all teeth, I said, “I am too content to be cunning, Majesty.”
Well, I was content, I didn’t say. Until you ruined everything.