Chapter Eight
No matter how hard Alexandria tried to sleep, all she could manage were bouts of tossing and turning between short blitzes of slumber. Her mind remained fixed on them; certain they would live in her head forever. Until the day she died.
Her intrigue with them persisted in her mind without a reprieve. She so desperately wanted to put a name to their faces. But why did they haunt her every thought, awake or asleep, since the first moment she had set her eyes on them?
Her obsession—the word frightened her—with them seemed to scale her boundaries. In other circumstances, she realized she would have been as intrigued as she was now with them. But once she helped them escape unscathed, she would never set eyes on them again as it was meant to be.
But their nearness—what they made her body do without actually touching her, just with their cocks—consumed her mind. What were the chances that her silent pleas and disloyalty to her family got through to them? Who was she kidding? It was a moot point, considering she would be the first person they killed if they were ever released.
She’d asked that question countless times, though. What was going to happen to them afterward? What did Swan House council plan to do with them afterward? Her parents told her it was not her concern, and Melle had remained tight-lipped, telling her it was best she didn't know such things.
Would they be killed if she couldn’t find a way to release them without compromising Rhea’s, Cara’s, and her own safety? The surety with which she made that deduction turned her blood ice- cold. But she had to remain focused, except their escape plans became muddled in her head, and now she wasn’t sure they would get away in time.
Hidden doors and secret passages littered the house where Alexandria had grown up, leading either directly out of the house or to the dungeon below.
One such passageway was in Cara’s walk-in closet, where the tunnel took them past the dungeon and out onto the east side of the garden, a few feet away from their neighbors.
By this time tomorrow night, they would pretend to be trying on Cara’s eclectic style of clothes, but two duffel bags would be hidden in the closet.
One with cash, clothes, and their new identities. The other bag contained pepper spray, a taser, and chloroform. The contents of both bags were courtesy of Dr. Amanda Foyer, their ally and confidante, without whom they would never be able to escape.
Amanda was the same doctor who had secretly put Alexandria on the pill so she didn’t fall pregnant during the ritual, which helped an already treacherous situation on Swan House’s side.
Since news of the centenary ritual broke, her parents had planted guards on every exit that led out of the house, both on ground level and underground, hence the second duffel bag.
The thing was, if they got as far as knocking out a guard, then they had mere minutes before someone caught them on camera, which meant they needed a getaway car waiting and an aircraft on standby. Alexandria refused to be lax about Swan House’s reach and power.
The chances of them being caught were very high. Having new identities reduced those odds, giving them a reasonable chance of getting further away, provided everything happened in mere minutes. But what kind of life was she subjecting her sisters to? Would they be constantly looking over their shoulders?
No, that was not the kind of thinking she needed right now. They just had to make it to a monastery in a small village in France to seek asylum. What felt like a million years ago, Melle had told Alexandria about the organization called The Console, and now it was the only thing giving her hope.
The Console were the overseers of the four most powerful families in the world: the Leoni Family, the Basilisk Empire, the Phoenix Monarch, and Swan House. Their word was the law. But, they also granted immunity to anyone who no longer wished to be a part of the four secret societies. Melle had said that once The Console bestowed on a recipient their freedom, they were untouchable by any of the four families after being granted such a pass.
At the time when Melle had told her all this, Alexandria never imagined she would one day need The Console to provide blanket immunity for her sisters and herself from her parents and the strange men on the Swan House council.
She flipped onto her side, determined that everything would be okay, but also she knew she needed to sleep so she wouldn’t make any stupid mistakes.
But the instant her eyes closed, her body heated, and the feel of their thick, heavy cocks, deep inside her, stretching her to mind-shattering levels until she was so full, her body was no longer her own, engulfed her mind.
She squeezed her thighs together, her clit, swollen again, while fresh wetness seeped onto her folds. What was wrong with her?
But again, in her mind’s eye, her gaze slid over their features, their raw, powerful beauty so virile and primal that she shuddered as if they were touching her again. Her gaze slid over their jaws, to their chests, to their tattoos…
Every time the image of their tattoos came to mind, her stomach sank, and she felt as if she were being buried in concrete.
Why?
They were just tattoos of three dragon heads on each left side of their chests, over their muscular pecs. What was it about their tattoos that made her panic?
Forcing herself to face this unusual response to them, she closed her eyes and remembered the details. Perfect. The craftsmanship was extraordinary, and the detail was magnificent on each of their bodies. But lower, just beneath the heads of the dragons, roaring fire from their mouths, was...
Oh god.
She kicked the covers off her feet, and her blood turned frosty. It couldn't be.
No. No. No.
She was seeing things that weren’t there. Her family wouldn’t do such a thing.
She flung open her bedroom door and barefoot raced down the hallway.
Standing in front of another door, she hesitated.
Please, let me be wrong.
She steadied her nerves and softly knocked on the door, knowing her sister, an insomniac most nights of the week, would be awake.
“Cara?”
Alexandria opened the door wider, and Cara was sitting at her desk, surrounded by her romance novels, classic literature, and her handmade bookmarks and pictures of her, Alexandria, and Rhea that she had taken on her Polaroid right here in this room. She’d been writing her own novel, and sometimes she let her sisters read bits and pieces, promising them the whole book once it was done.
The book she was writing...
A tear gathered in Alexandria’s eyes, but she brushed it aside when Cara turned to her with a lovely smile on her face.
She wasn’t surprised to see Alexandria in her room at one o’clock in the morning. Since Cara didn’t leave her room, it was common for both Alexandria and Rhea to show up at odd times. Cara had somehow always been the center where they came together.
But would everything change now?
“Cara,” Alexandria said, going to her and gently lifting her left arm. “Oh god,” Alexandria whispered.
There it was.
Cara had an extraordinary birthmark on the inside of her arm. It was shaped like a dandelion, with three perfect puffs floating above it as if someone had blown on the pappus.
“Alex? What’s wrong?” Cara asked, fear lining her features. Alexandria could see the light dim in her eyes, and her face paled with trepidation. Cara could slip into herself in a heartbeat. She was an empath, and her moods were dependent on the people around her. That explained why Alexandria and Rhea had kept the finer details of the ritual from her. She didn’t need to know that Alexandria would be giving her virginity to three men who would rather kill her than accept the offer.
Alexandria swallowed and tried to force a smile on her face.
“Cara, please tell me about your book again. Just a little, please. I can’t wait to read it.”
The book Cara was writing was about a little girl and her three brothers, who were big and strong and treated her like a princess. They lived in a trailer in a park near the river.
The three men in the Swan House dungeon had a single dandelion and three little puffs tattooed on their chests, just beneath the three dragon heads. The dandelion looked exactly like the birthmark on Cara's inner forearm—the shape, the way it leaned toward the left side, the position of the puffs.
What had her parents done?