Fifty
I sag down the wall as soon as he releases me. The fact he named his children weighs me down like a cinderblock around my feet. He’s a monster. And yet even he is a better parent than me.
My heart breaking, I rasp, “I need some V.”
“Why?”
The word is short, clipped, a simple demand, but the heft of it is too much. An anchor to those cinderblocks.
A sob ruptures from me as I lean my head against the wall. “It hurts.”
“What does?”
I slam my fist against my chest – once, twice, my mouth twisted in pain, unable to speak. I drop my hand to my belly, wishing I could feel her again.
Terrified I’ll feel something else, I rip my hand away.
My tears come faster. I can’t do this. I don’t want to talk. I don’t want to think. I don’t want to feel.
“Tell me.”
My throat closes. This is worse than anything Sadist has forced me to do. Worse than what I did to Bear. I flinch, hating the comparison, but that request just asked me to violate me and my morals. These questions? This incessant demand that I confront my own guilt? My loss.
I can’t.
Then she’ll really be gone, and I’ll just be left with the truth of the monster in my belly. I know she’s dead. I know he killed her, but these questions will lead to the first step of healing. To letting her go.
And I can’t.
She’s my baby.
She’s my baby.
I can’t heal and leave her behind.
Cradling my belly in my arms, I scream on broken sobs.
June 26 1907, St. Augustine, Florida – Antonio
I have fallen asleep to the screams of men dying. I have pulled shrieks from the mouths of many, cutting them into pieces, torturing them without a care. I have ignored the cries of pups as I slaughtered their parents. But hearing her whimpers, her moans of pain as she thrashes in bed –
I cannot bear it.
“Siome, please!”
I beg as I hold her, wrapping my arms and legs around her. She fights me as I try to raise a bottle to her lips. “You need to drink something!” She needs to eat too. She’s a bag of bones, wasting away, refusing anything that isn’t V. I don’t know how long it’s been since she’s had a proper meal, don’t know how long she’s suffered in that witch’s den, but it’s been three days since I rescued her, and she hasn’t eaten a damn thing.
“So give me V!”
she shouts. Then she jerks her head and bites me in the wrist, her canines digging deep. I clench my teeth in pain, but I don’t try to shove her off. At least blood is something. It has to be better than nothing.
She releases me quickly enough on her own anyways, screaming for me to let her go. To let her run back to the men who “really love me.”
Who “actually care.”
I want to go back and kill them all over again. I want to raise them from the dead and take my time.
But I’m terrified if I leave her, she’ll find a way to kill herself – or leave to find more V. The Shadow Domain has hundreds, if not thousands, of drug dens over their territory, and the Mattos twins have suppliers all over the world. If she can’t get it in St. Augustine, she’ll just keep moving until she can.
A fist bangs on my door. “Antonio –”
My Boss shouts over the screams of my only treasure. I can smell his alpha scent, the power he’s trying to push out to bring me to heel.
My head whips in his direction, shifting into that of my wolf. A feral snarl rips from my throat, shaking the walls, and his fear permeates the place even through the closed door.
He might be an alpha, but he knows I can kill him. That the only reason I haven’t is because I haven’t had a reason to. But for her, I will. I’ll kill them all and damn every other innocent caught in the bloodbath afterwards.
I’m never leaving her again. Never trusting her safety to someone else. I trusted the gods, and look what they have done to her.
Because of me.
Because I was too greedy and selfish, keeping a piece of her with me, keeping her light shining in the darkness I had wrapped around my shoulders.
“You know what will happen if you stay with her,”
Oscar says, trying for authoritative but sounding too damn scared. “The gods will see this as an act of defiance. They could kill us all. Let someone else –”
I shift back into my human form so I can speak. “Let. Them. Come.”
I hold Siome close as she shrieks herself hoarse. I keep trying to coax her to drink the water; she keeps trying to demand I give her V.
That’s the only thing she wants.
She used to only ever want me.
“Siome, please,”
I murmur in her ear. “Come back to me.”
“Go away! I hate you! I hate you!”
I release her, my chest cracking open to leave my heart bare to the crows, but I’m not giving up. I’ll never give up on her. Stepping quickly from the room, I go to grab a vial of V I have hidden at the back of a kitchen cupboard.
Disgust twists my stomach as my fingers wrap around the small bottle of glass. Every two to four years, I am reduced to my primal urges, caught by the scent of a bitch in heat that I can’t refuse. So I take a Rick to make it more bearable to be inside someone who isn’t Siome, and I force the poor substitute to take a V.
But I’m always sickened with myself as soon as it’s over, so I kill them. Slowly. So they know they’re being punished for their sins and mine.
I slip the vial into my pocket, then head back into my bedroom. She’s on the bed, her fingers inside her. She did it as soon as I released her, trying to chase a poor man’s high. Tears fall down her cheeks. Frustration pants from her lips.
Feeling the hole in my heart spread, I dig into my pocket and pull out the V. As soon as I pop the cork, she freezes. Then her head snaps to me, and she scrambles off the bed to crawl across the floor, where she kneels at my feet.
“I’ll do anything you want, big daddy,”
she says, and I flinch.
“Just close your eyes, little helfire,”
I murmur, my tongue feeling thick in my mouth.
She obeys in an instant. Then I walk over to the bed and pick up the bottle I was trying to get her to drink. Coming back to her, I kneel in front of her.
I hold the vial beneath her nose. She starts to open her eyes, but I tell her to close them. She does so immediately.
A slave to a master. Her to the poison of the V.
Keeping the vial under her nose, letting her ‘taste’ it as she breathes in deep, I pour the bottle of water into her mouth. She tenses, uncertain that what she’s drinking is the potion she wants, but she can smell the V so strongly, and the fog in her brain keeps her dumb.
“I need more,”
she says, and I give her more water to drink.
It kills me that I’m deceiving her though, using a placebo against her. I’ve never lied to her before – even when I sent her away with another man, I was so fucking clear that it would break me. That I would trade the world to keep her if I could.
“So why aren’t you?”
she demands.
“You know I’m sun-touched.”
That I’m cursed by the gods to only live a life of misery. Every wolf is supposed to suffer as punishment for a past sin – that is why our change is one of pure agony. The fact that I can bear it means I must pay the price by suffering in all else. If I don’t, the gods will kill her and anyone else that brings me joy.
“I don’t care! I want you, you idiot!”
she shoves me in the chest, her red eyes spitting with rage. With pain. “Don’t you want me?”
“Of course I do.”
I ball my hands at my sides, knowing that if I reach for her, I’ll grab her and never let her go. “I’ll always want you.”
“So take me.”
Tears burn her eyes.
Burn mine. “No.”
She rears back as if I hit her. Her lower lips wobbles. Fuck. If she cries, that’s it. I’m not going to be able to let her go. But instead, she lifts her chin. My little helfire, my little stubborn ball of flame. “Fine. Then I’m going to marry Jack. And I’ll – I’ll carry his eight pups, and I’ll – I’ll love him –”
“You’ll never love him,”
I cut in on a low growl, shoving my hands into my pockets as the rest of me vibrates with a need to hold her.
“I will!”
“You might lie with him, Siome, and you might carry his eight pups –”
Her face cracks, breaking my fucking heart.
“– but your love is mine. It will always be mine.”
“So then take it,”
she whispers, so much agony in that plea. “Please.”
“I can’t.”
Lifting my head, I look towards the group of men on the horses. They are ready to carry her away from me. To a territory out west, where she will be free from all this violence.
From the touch of my curse that has already taken three of my four siblings.
I cannot bear it if it takes her too.
Looking at Jack, a man I owe my life, I wave him over. He hesitates, then he nudges his roan horse in our direction. Vance, Siome’s brother, comes with him.
In the last few seconds I have with her, I memorize her face so I can paint it – once I learn how.
“Smile for me, little helfire,”
I murmur. “Just one last time.”
“Go to hel.”
Turning on her heels, she runs from me.
And it takes everything I have to let her go.
A vial of V is placed at my lips, and I lurch to the side, my hands reaching for it. But the air moves, and then it’s gone, and a frustrated cry escapes me. “Please…”
I scramble around so my back’s to the wall, trying to figure out where he is.
“Tell me why it hurts,”
he says, his voice beating down on my pathetic body as he stands over me. Not far.
I reach for his legs, willing to beg.
He steps away. My hands clench on air.
Collapsing to the ground, I rest my head on the hard floor. “Please…”
“You want it? Tell me.”
Her memories rise, and I start to tremble.
A little girl I’ll never get to hold.
Who I never got to hold because they took her from me.
They took her and put a parasite in her place.
“Please… I can’t…”
Not without the V.
With a sob, I reach a hand between my thighs, trying to mimic the high, the relief of pain that the drug can give me. I don’t want to remember what I have done or lost or left behind. I just want to escape the agony of my soul. I want it all to stop.
Antonio grabs my wrist and pulls my fingers out of my pussy. Crying, I try to tear myself away from him, but he holds me easily in an iron grip.
“Tell me,”
he demands again.
“I can’t,”
I sob. I hate myself. I hate him. “Please.” I curl in on myself. “Just give me a taste. One drop, and I’ll talk.”
I’ll do anything to forget this pain.
He crouches down in front of me, the smell of chocolate and pomegranates so close I can almost taste it. I reach for it, but he swats my arm away, then places the vial under my nose. I lift my chin and open my mouth, trembling as I wait.
The liquid hits my tongue, and I sigh, feeling its effects wash over me.
It’s not enough though.
I can still feel that hole in my stomach.
“I need more.”
“Why?”
My face scrunches up in pain. I don’t want to remember this. I don’t want to remember her.
No, I do.
I don’t want to ever forget her.
Oh my gods. What kind of mother am I, that I’d want to forget my own child? Maybe it’s better that she’s gone.
The tears only come harder.
“Please. I need more…”
“Then talk.”
Sobbing pathetically, I try to find the words I don’t want to speak. I tell myself all I have to do is tell him, and the pain will stop. But my lips tighten. My teeth clench.
Some silent, forgotten part of me is telling me to resist; it sees this path as a threat. If I open up about this, what other secrets will he pull from me? What other people I love will he hurt?
He is the enemy.
He is the enemy.
He is the enemy.
I shake my head, trembling so hard, I’m finding it hard to breathe.
“I never got to hold my children,”
he murmurs, his face now lowered to mine. He’s crouched in front of me, well within my reach. My hands clench with the need to search him for the V, but his words slam into me, crushing me still with their weight. With their solidarity. An understanding. An experience shared that means I’m not alone.
And gods, I don’t want to be alone anymore.
“Sau’s monsters ate them,”
he says slowly, “as well as the lower half of my mate. I held her in my arms as I begged the gods to intervene.” He’s quiet for a moment, but his words keep repeating inside of me. Screaming that he knows. He understands my grief. “I even begged Sau. I pleaded with her to save the love of my life.”
My chin wobbles; I know the ending of this story.
But it isn’t fair.
I want it to be different. I want mine to be different.
“Stop,”
I beg, not wanting to hear the truth.
“Not speaking of it doesn’t change what happened,”
he says. “They are still gone. I will never hear Siome’s laughter again. I will never see her eyes light up as she smiles at me, and I will never hold our children. Never see how they take after their mother, how they carry on the best parts of her.”
I sag forward, my hands hitting the floor again as I cry.
I press my hand to my stomach, feeling Rafiki’s absence, the death of her love and laughter and all the things she could have been.
Would she have taken Varius’ eyes or mine? Would she have had his hair? His dry sense of humor? Would she have held herself back, so fucking terrified to love, to be used for her position, to be killed for her genes? Or would we have figured out a way to make the world safe for her? Would she have driven us mad, feeling safe enough to dash out in the middle of the night to rendezvous with some boy? Or girl? Or just a bunch of friends?
How many of her lovers would Varius have killed? Or at least scared the living daylights out of? How many bodies would I have helped him bury? Would she have caught us? Told us off for being ‘so traditional and controlling and ugh, parents?’
My lips wobble as I think about all those milestones we will never have.
“I lost my entire family that day,”
he continues, pulling me from my grief and tugging me into his. Where it’s a bit more bearable... “My mate, my three pups, and my brother-in-law, the last of her line.”
“How did you…”
I start, only to flounder into silence.
“Continue on?”
he says. Not ‘survived.’ Not ‘healed.’ The fact that he didn’t use either of those words makes me feel like he really does understand. There is no surviving this. It has broken me. There is no way this can scab over and be forgotten. It will scar across my heart, my soul forever. But I can carry on… I can drag myself forward on broken legs.
His voice hardens, but I’m not scared of him anymore. He’s showing me that there is something to feel other than grief. “Because I am making her killer suffer like I am.”
I latch onto his words like an addict, trading one poison for another. A soul-numbing hatred. A righteous fury.
“And I will get her back.”
My throat closes, his hope burning into me, branding me, changing the essence of who I am.
“So if you help me, Micha”
–there is so much honesty in his words, so much understanding of what I am feeling– “then when I venture into the Underworld to get Siome, I will bring your girl back too.”
My lips tremble as my hands ease from the tight fists they were in, no longer desperate to reach for the V. I still want it, but I want his words more.
He nails it home with a murmured, “Don’t you want her to know her name?”