Chapter 13
Chapter Thirteen
The contrasting sensations of hunger and nausea kept Thomas in his bed from early evening all the way through to afternoon the next day.
He was hungry, but the thought of drinking bagged blood from yet another crystal goblet made his stomach turn. His incisors were pulsing and aching. He had a headache, and he was beginning to feel ravaged in the same way he had just after he’d left the dungeons.
Why was his mind tormenting him? It was starting to feel as if he had never escaped—would never escape his prison. That his remaining life would always be some variation of that torture, whether he was sleeping on the cold, filthy ground or not. His body and brain would never let it go.
Thomas lay in bed with his eyes closed, feeling the warmth of the rare winter sunlight spilling over his duvet. The world was silent and completely peaceful aside from the throbbing pain within his body and mind.
Quietly… he thought that this might be a nice place to die. To give up fighting, moving around and carrying on. What good was it doing him, anyway? Or anyone else.
A soft knock at the door made Thomas’s eyes flutter open.
The room was awash in golden light from the afternoon sun.
Had he died? He didn’t believe in heaven, but the dust motes floating within the soft rays of light reminded him of its imagery.
If it was heaven, it really sucked that he was still in pain, even in death.
He didn’t answer, but the door clicked open anyway. Mira poked her head inside. “Sir Thomas?” She saw him lying there, then stepped into the room. She was carrying a modest vase of white tulips. Not as large and glamorous as the first arrangement. Simpler and without the baby’s breath.
Despite everything, it warmed something small in Thomas’s heart as she set it on the bedside table.
“These are from Lord Ashford. He’s very worried about you… We all are.” She looked over at the bistro table and the untouched food and blood there from earlier that morning when she’d come to bring him breakfast. Which had only replaced another untouched tray from dinner the previous evening.
Mira bent to her knees at the side of the mattress so that she was at eye level with him.
For a long moment, she simply watched him, unspeaking.
Finally, she whispered, “What is happening to you? Why are you still suffering?” Her eyes welled up with tears before she dropped her head as if she were praying at an altar.
Thomas had held steadfast to his anger toward her. He was still angry, but his heart quivered at her blatant distress and tears.
“I’m sorry,” she sobbed quietly into the sheets.
“I am so sorry, Thomas. We—I didn’t know where you were for the longest time.
You’d disappeared and I couldn’t sense your aura.
I don’t know why. Maybe because you were too weakened?
Or too far beneath the castle? It wasn’t until two months into it that Hudson finally confided in me and told me where you were—what had been done to you. ”
She lifted her head, watching him with her messy, tear-stained face.
“He was so distraught, he needed to talk to someone. But neither of us knew what to do! He was afraid and so was I. If Lord Blakeley was willing to do such a vile thing to his eldest child—his own flesh and blood—what more would he do to a servant? It took Hudson another month to convince Lord Blakeley to stop the torture, but we were—I was a coward. I should have helped you and I’m sorry.
I will regret it for the rest of my life. ”
Thomas closed his eyes and a single tear spilled from the corner and across the bridge of his nose.
In the storybooks he’d read as a child, someone had always come to the rescue when another person was in trouble.
A cherished friend or family member. A lover.
The protagonist never experienced devastating hardship because someone always came for them at just the right moment.
Just before terror struck and scarred them irreparably.
No one had come for Thomas. He’d been terrorized and scarred for three whole months, and he didn’t think there was any coming back from that. What happened when no savior arrived? How did the story carry on?
“Please keep trying,” Mira said hoarsely, breaking the stream of his forlorn inner thoughts. “Will you try to drink the blood, Thomas? Just try. You haven’t touched anything since lunchtime yesterday.”
Maybe this was how the story continued? Just trying. He wanted to give up, because he was tired of feeling wretched. Tired of remembering what he used to be and the life he used to expect for himself. A vampire he would never be again and a life he might not ever realistically have.
His gaze shifted to the bouquet of tulips sitting near his head, lovely, ethereal and soft in the golden light like a beacon of… he didn’t know what. He breathed in, and the faintest scent teased his senses. Sweet and peppery.
Thomas made an effort to push the duvet down, and Mira quickly stood. She pulled it until the material was far enough down that Thomas’s pajama-clad legs were free. He allowed her to help him upright because his body felt weak and his head was swimming.
Am I hallucinating? Tulips shouldn’t smell like Lord Ashford. They exuded the typical earthiness of freshly cut flowers, but it was as if a subtle, gingery aura were invisibly wrapped around them. It was wonderful.
“Can we go to the table?” Mira asked, standing in front of him when he was upright and with his legs over the side of the bed.
Thomas nodded. “Yes. Okay.”
She held him steady as he stood, then wrapped her arm around his waist to support him to the table.
If Thomas had been in Mira’s position—a first-gen servant working in a cruel purebred lord’s house, without any power and bound by the strict rules governing society at large—would he have saved her from such an ordeal?
Would he have had the conviction and bold selflessness that he so expected from her?
As he sat in the tufted chair, the question made him uncomfortable.
Was it fair for him to hold her accountable for what had happened?
Probably not. But it had fed his rage in a morbidly satisfying way.
That by hating and ignoring her, he might give her just an infinitesimal speck of the suffering he’d experienced.
“Can we try the blood first?” she asked, bringing it to the forefront of the tray and making it easier for him to reach. The mere sight made Thomas’s gag reflex lurch in a dry heave. He swallowed it down and took a breath.
“Give me a minute,” he said shakily. He glanced over his shoulder and back at the beautiful flowers. “Where did these come from?”
Mira took the seat beside him. “Lord Ashford. He had an appointment in town this morning and brought them back for you.”
If he carried them, maybe that’s why? Thomas took another breath and closed his eyes, letting the heat from the indirect sunlight warm his face. Mira had sat him in the chair that was obscured from the sun.
“Lord Ashford is very… cautious, about the circumstances in which we’ve come here,” she went on, speculating.
“But it is clear to everyone that he sincerely cares for you. Sulee thinks he has a crush on you, but he doesn’t know how to wrestle with the truth of it.
That the experience is completely foreign to him. ”
Thomas opened his eyes. “Sulee? The head chef?”
Mira nodded. “She’s been so nice and helpful since we’ve arrived—everyone has. But Sulee is… wonderful.”
He huffed a soft laugh. He didn’t need to ask any further questions to understand the sentiment behind that statement. It sounded as if Mira was adjusting to their new environment exceptionally well.
“How… do you feel about Lord Ashford?” she asked.
Thomas didn’t hesitate. “I might have a crush on him, too.”
I want to bite him, he thought ruefully.
Cameron always smelled magnificent. When Thomas thought of Cameron sitting across from him with his sturdy and broad frame hunched in sincere concentration over the chess board, his flawless brown skin practically aglow and golden from the firelight, it made Thomas hungry in a way that didn’t simultaneously trigger the nausea.
It was a pure and instinctive hunger from deep within the core of his nature.
A feeling he recognized well but was actively ignoring because of Lord Ashford’s personal convictions.
He wouldn’t dare to selfishly challenge the line of Cameron’s boundaries.
One Devon in Cameron’s life was more than enough.
“I thought you might like him,” Mira said, tilting her head. “You’re often attracted to other bookish types.”
Thomas scoffed, amused. “Am I?”
“You are. Dawn was an intellectual and quiet, bookish type. Lord Ashford is the same, except much larger and male. I think…” She paused, contemplating.
“If you want something from Lord Ashford, you should ask him directly. Sulee said she thinks Lord Ashford is embarrassed by his lack of experience—that he thinks he’s too old to bother with such things because he’s spent all of his youth focused on running the estate and raising Lady Rachelle.
But if someone was patient enough to… to guide and reassure him… ”
“You speak to Sulee a lot, I see?” Thomas said, wanting to cut off that particular thread of conversation.
Mira smiled. “She has all the gossip. For instance, I knew Lennon didn’t care for Devon—Lord Gates—even before he arrived.”
“Did you?” Thomas asked, intrigued.
“Apparently, Lennon calls Lord Gates ‘that lurking bag of maggots.’ He knew Lord Gates had a thing for Lord Ashford, and that Lord Ashford was oblivious to it. But Lord Gates doesn’t even read the books he sells—he hates the whole business of it.”
Thomas drew back at this, aghast and offended. “How could he? He’s a rare bookseller living in Calais! Some vampires would kill for that kind of life.”
Namely, me.
“I know, it’s a tragedy and such a waste,” Mira agreed.
“He inherited the business from his mother, who ran away from Eden as a young adult with her mate. He grew up traveling between Calais, Paris and London, but what he really wants is to have a manor home in Eden and be a proper lord, I guess? Essentially, he wants the very life his parents walked away from for his betterment. It feels quite backward.”
Thomas huffed. “What an ungrateful toad. A bag of maggots indeed.” Nobody wanted to be a lord in Eden. It was simply dumped on you by a cruel fate, and then you had to deal with whatever bullshit accompanied your unique and terrible circumstance.
To be a contemporary vampire—free from the antiquated responsibilities and rules of a rigid aristocracy—traveling across Europe and comfortably situated with a stable, thriving business was something any rational Eden purebred would long for.
“He doesn’t read the books,” Thomas went on, scoffing. “What madness.” He hoped he never saw Devon’s face again, lest he slap him across it with the hopes of knocking some sense into him.
“Sulee has all of the dirt,” Mira said, grinning hopefully. “I’ll share it with you, of course. They… The staff members like you. They’re worried about your being ill, but they’re rooting for you.”
Thomas raised an eyebrow. “Rooting for me in what way? To survive?”
“Yes, that. And to be happy here. To be a good companion for Lord Ashford. They love him and want that for him.”
Does he want that for himself? Thomas mused. He sighed. The harmony of the estate and everyone’s contentment was obvious. Even Mira’s overall conduct had changed drastically compared with the way she’d skulked around, jittery and silent, in front of Lord Blakeley at their home estate.
Still, it wasn’t right to push something onto Cameron that he didn’t want. That was how Thomas had arrived here in the first place… not that he was ungrateful for it.
Thomas looked at the crystal goblet gleaming in the sunlight. The blood velvety and red like the most forbidden nectar. He thought to reach for it and try again, but before he could even lift his hand, his stomach lurched. A wave of nausea loomed at the edges of his consciousness.
He took a breath and closed his eyes. “I’ll keep trying, Mira… Could you please give me some privacy? I’d like to take my time.”
“Yes, but… I’ll come back to check on you in a little while,” Mira said, worry etched all over her face. “Lord Ashford said he wants to see you when you’re awake and willing to receive him. What should I tell him?”
Thomas stilled, deliberating. He wanted to see Cameron, but he was simultaneously embarrassed by his pathetic state.
The thought of refusing Cameron’s company felt both ludicrous and uncouth.
And further… there was something fragile there.
Thomas didn’t know what it was just yet, but he had a strong sense that if he pushed Cameron away—even for the smallest of reasons—the tenuous thread forming between them might snap.
With each passing day, Cameron was growing more at ease with Thomas’s presence. Opening up to him and allowing himself to be honest and vulnerable. Thomas knew that he needed to do the same. He wanted to.
“Yes,” Thomas told her. “Please tell him we can meet this evening in the lower library—perhaps we can play chess…” Chess was a contemplative, low-energy activity. It might also help to distract him from his selfish thoughts about biting Cameron… maybe. Probably not. “Will you help me dress later?”
Mira nodded, her expression relaxing, just a bit. “Of course I will. But you’ll try the blood first?”
Thomas glanced back at the dreaded glass. His gag reflex lurched as if he were about to vomit, but he quickly swallowed it down. “Right…” he said, taking a breath. “Blood first.”