Chapter 33 The Dark Priest
The Dark Priest
Sage
The look on Ronan’s face, the moment as my scent, unbidden, touched his nose, nearly killed me.
He knew then what he’d just done. Why it had been so hard for him to bring me back. What his body had already figured out, begging his mind to catch up on.
I was his mate, and he’d just delivered me to the one man who would never let me go again.
Tears fell down my cheeks as the werewolf dragged him out and the door snicked closed, and then again once Victor’s assistant, ignored in the background as he finished whatever paperwork was left to pay Ronan, left himself.
We were alone.
I felt lightheaded as Victor finally drew back, swallowing the blood he craved straight from the source off his lips.
“Fuck,” he sighed, licking them clean. His eyes met mine, and narrowed in disgust and anger.
He gripped the hair at the nape of my neck tightly, hissing in my face. “I nearly died, Sage!”
“And you’ve been killing me slowly for the past five years, mate,” I hissed back.
I was done being his good omega. If he locked me up in isolation forever, so be it. I’d go mad and welcome the reprieve from reality.
He dragged me into the bedroom, doing his best to be rough but I wouldn’t give him the satisfaction of vocalizing the sting on my scalp, even as I tripped over my own feet.
I still wasn’t used to wearing shoes.
With a hard shove, I fell on the bed, quickly turning around to face him as he began unbuckling his pants.
“Don’t you fucking touch me, Victor,” I said.
He paused for just a moment, radiating with rage. “I’m sorry, but I need you to repeat yourself.”
His voice was quiet, belying the storm brewing under his skin and waiting to be unleashed.
Victor wasn’t a man to be denied anything.
“I said don’t touch me. You killed Kaleb and Nellie, you forced my parents into hiding, you stole my eggs, for Hecara’s sake! You are absolutely, completely unhinged. If you want to lock me up and take my blood, so be it, but the rest of my body is mine and I will never give it to you again.”
He didn’t move a muscle as the words hit him, and he considered each one carefully, examining them in his mind. “That’s not going to work for me, Sage. You’re my mate—”
“I’m not!” I yelled. “I’ve never been your mate, don’t you see? How could I run away, hate you, cringe at the thought of you inside me if you were mine?”
Again he paused, looking away to gather and organize his response, but I continued, rising to my knees and clasping my hands together. “Please, Victor. You know whatever is between us isn’t right. And I figured out why.”
His gaze swung back towards me, and he quirked an eyebrow.
“My heart. It’s not mine. It belonged to your true mate, a witch omega named Liora. It’s her you’re sensing, who you’re smelling.”
He blinked, his face blank. A sinister grin tugged at the corners of his lips. “Oh, Sage,” he said, chuckling from the humor he apparently found in my discovery. “You think I didn’t figure that out years ago?”
I froze in disbelief.
He knew.
He’d known for… for years.
Then how could he have still fought so hard for this to work between us? To hold onto something so corrupt? “But… then why…”
He shook his head with a smile, like I was some ignorant child, finally realizing the Tooth Elf wasn’t real.
“I always knew there was something wrong with you. That something was keeping you from accepting the mate bond between us. Even I can admit there was a small voice in the back of my mind telling me that the feeling of your hair in my fingers was too rough, the sounds of you whimpering in pleasure beneath me were never quite right, the taste of your blood a bit more fruity than I wanted.”
The old me, insecure to be with a man who’d always dated women that looked nothing like me, would have been hurt.
But now, I hardly cared. He could find me vile and it would mean nothing.
Because he wasn’t my mate.
“It didn’t take me long at all to make the connection. And yes, one look at Liora, one stop by her parents’ house and a whiff of her old, stale scent, and I knew she was my true mate, the one blessed by Sanguiel to be mine.”
I gritted my teeth. “Then why keep me? Why pretend?”
He shrugged apathetically. “It was too late. I’d claimed you, the bond was there, my powers had grown…”
His eyes flashed crimson.
“And you were good enough.”
Well, that one did sting a bit, and I spit out my response. “And ‘good enough’ was good enough for Victor Corvane, Premier of Noctis?”
“Half a mate is better than no mate,” he responded with a cruel tint in his eye. “And besides, I’ve been working on how to remedy your… deficiencies.”
I gripped the blankets beside me, fear icing its way through my veins. Things were about to get so much worse than they had been.
* * *
I woke up untouched the next morning. Victor skirted the line of consent often enough, but when he’d tried to kiss me and I’d screamed at him to stop, he’d thankfully, albeit angrily, backed off, handcuffing me to the bed before taking more blood and leaving me.
“You’ll see reason soon enough,” he’d growled, slamming the door shut.
As happy as I’d been to see the back of him, the need to pee grew uncontrollably through the night. I thought about calling out to Victor for help, but he would probably make me give him something in return, and I’d rather have made a mess than do whatever he wanted.
So I waited, thinking of dry deserts, until finally someone else arrived.
Someone new.
His presence brought goosebumps and an inexplicable wave of dread, and when he opened the door to the bedroom, I nearly wet myself from fear.
He was dressed like a priest from a temple, only his robes were black, a color unclaimed by the gods. His hooded cloak hid the top half of his face, his dark blue lips and the pallid gray skin of his cheeks and chin almost corpse-like.
“Hello, witch,” he spoke, his voice causing a shiver to run down my spine.
“W-who are you?” I stammered in reply.
He took a step closer. At least, he came closer. I heard no sound aside from the swishing of his robes.
“Just a humble servant.”
I shivered again, breaking out in a cold sweat as he reached towards the cuffs. “Of who?”
He laughed. If you could call that high-pitched tittering a laugh. “An excellent question. But one I don’t think you’re prepared to hear the answer to yet.”
When he unlocked the cuffs, I backed up on the bed, rubbing my wrists before he could try to touch me. His hands were the same shade as his face. He just looked… wrong.
“And what do you want? Why did Victor allow you in here?”
His head tilted, and he grinned. Fear sluiced through me anew as the sight of his teeth, each one pointed and as sharp as Victor’s canines.
Even werewolves had normal teeth when they weren’t in their animal forms.
What in Hecara’s name was he?
“Freshen up, and then we’ll begin.”
He pointed to the bathroom, and I got up and ran, closing the door quickly and locking it behind me, my heart racing.
The mirror was still gone, but I could only assume what a mess I must have looked like. I was still wearing the odd combination of clothes Ronan had gotten me from the hospital, and touching my hair revealed what a knotted mess it had become.
I wasn’t necessarily eager to wash up to look nice, especially for Victor and… whatever that man was, but if I was getting all the time I needed before having to see them again, I was going to take it.
After finally peeing, I took a long, hot shower, washing and deep conditioning my curls. Then I shaved everywhere—not that I wanted to be hairless, but the longer I was gone, the better—and used a pumice stone to scrub off every bit of dry skin I could find.
When I stepped out, I put on lotion, tweezed my eyebrows, and carefully dried my hair with the diffuser, a process that added nearly thirty minutes to the forty I’d already spent “refreshing” myself.
Once there was officially nothing else to do, I wrapped myself in a towel, taking a peek back into the bedroom.
Finding it empty, I tiptoed out, steeling myself to wear another one of Victor’s stupid negligees, when surprisingly, I found a cotton robe waiting for me on the bed.
It didn’t come with any undergarments, but at least it wasn’t see-through and came to my knees instead of halfway down my ass.
I put it on and then made my way to the living room, where the man was waiting alone with two steaming mugs of tea.
He was simply sitting on the couch, hands folded on his lap, staring at the wall.
When I was just a few feet away, he turned towards me, the sight of his sharp, predatory smile chilling me once more.
“Feel better?” he asked, without any hint of annoyance for all the time I’d taken.
“Um, yes.”
He patted the space beside him. “Join me. We have much to discuss.”
I swallowed nervously, snaking my way around and sitting a little farther away than he might have intended, and he tittered again.
“After everything you’ve been through, I can imagine it’s hard to trust others.”
My eyes darted towards the mugs. The scent was unfamiliar and sharp, but I realized then that it was the only thing I could smell, and I frowned as I looked back up.
The man appeared to be a beta, but I really couldn’t get an accurate read on him without olfactory hints.
Even his magical aura was off, unlike any Magik I’d ever met.
What exactly was he?
“And how would you know what I’ve been through?”
He took his mug and gestured for me to take mine, but I didn’t move.
Unfazed, he took a sip, sighing contentedly. “What do you know about the gods and mates?” he asked instead of answering me.
I drew back for a second, a little startled. “Excuse me?”
“Mates. Do you know why the gods assigned you mates?”