Traitor
“Lucy.”
The name drags me violently upward through fathoms of black, suffocating water. My eyelids claw open, and the world swims into sharp, agonizing focus.
I’m slumped in a straight-backed chair, pinned.
Cain looms directly over me, his angular, alabaster face inches from mine. His obsidian eyes bore into my skull with a predatory intensity that makes my nervous system scream. My body feels entirely foreign—weighted, drained, hollowed out to a brittle husk.
I’m drenched in blood.
It cakes my dress, streaks my shivering arms, and paints my skin in jagged, rust-colored rivers. My throat burns with a raw, blistering ache, and my tongue coats my mouth in the heavy, metallic taste of copper.
Cain extends his wrist directly before my parted lips. Blood wells sluggishly from a deep gash in his pale skin, dark, viscous, and sickeningly sweet.
“Drink,” he commands, his voice dangerously level, stripped of all warmth. “Take only another drink.”
My autonomy vanishes. My body betrays me, lunging forward without permission as my lips seal over the torn flesh and swallow.
His blood floods my mouth—scalding, thick, and violently alive.
It is nectar and poison all at once, rushing down my throat to fill the abyssal ache in my chest and silence the static screaming in my mind.
I swallow again. And again. I lose count, entirely lost in the intoxicating rush. I never want it to stop.
“Enough.” He yanks his wrist back, severing the connection. “Greedy girl.”
I gasp, my lungs heaving as my entire frame trembles violently. The taste of his blood clings ruthlessly to my tongue, and I crave more with a feral hunger. I want to claw at his sleeve, drag his arm back to my mouth, and drink until the emptiness inside me finally ceases.
I force my gaze away from his wrist, dragging my eyes upward toward the wall. The portrait is gone.
The frame hangs empty. The mirror is destroyed.
Thousands of jagged glass shards litter the floorboards around the empty, ornate frame, catching the erratic candlelight and reflecting my bloodied face back at me in a thousand shattered fractions. A massive, horrifying pool of my own blood spreads dark and wet across the wood beneath the chair.
“Blake.” The name scrapes raw and agonizing out of my ruined throat. “Where is he?”
Cain’s dark eyes lock onto mine, devoid of pity. “He is gone, Lucy.”
“Gone?” I try to lurch upward, desperate to drag myself toward the empty frame, but my limbs refuse to cooperate. They are leaden, unresponsive. Cain’s heavy palm presses flat against my shoulder, pinning me hard against the chair.
“The mirror is shattered,” he says, his voice flat as a tombstone. “The painting was the only thing anchoring him to this physical plane.”
I stare at him, my shattered mind flatly refusing to process the horror of his words. “What are you talking about?”
“The mirror spat you back here because you are human,” he says, leaning in closer, his breath cold against my temple.
“Alive. You belong to this tangible world. But Blake—” He pauses, a cruel satisfaction flashing in his gaze.
“He belongs to the phantom world. To the abyss of shadows. Without the portrait, without an anchor, he is lost in between dimensions.”
I thrash my head from side to side. “No. No, he can’t be—”
“I found you unconscious on the floorboards,” Cain continues, relentless. “Bleeding out. Bite marks carved into your flesh. The mirror shattered around you. I gave you my blood to pull you back from the brink of death.”
The memories slam into me with the force of a physical blow—the silver glass swallowing me whole, the vast, timeless expanse of the shadow realm, and the man who waited for me there.
Blake. The real Blake. His midnight hair, his burning ocean eyes, and the devouring hunger in his gaze that made me feel like I was the only soul in existence.
We made love. For hours. Perhaps days. I lost all track of time in that paradise, utterly unspooled in his arms. It was transcendent. Perfect.
I wanted to burn away there forever.
“I chose that,” I murmur, the confession tumbling out of my bruised lips like ash. “I wanted to trade this waking nightmare to stay there with him. Forever.”
Cain watches me, his expression chillingly unreadable.
“I broke—” I choke on the words as the sheer scale of the catastrophe crashes down. “I destroyed the portal.”
“You shattered the only thing keeping his phantom soul anchored here,” he finishes smoothly. “He is untethered now, Lucy. Drowning in the void between worlds. There is no coming back from that.”
I did this. The internal agony is instantaneous, sharper than any blade. I destroyed the portrait. I locked him away in the dark.
Thomas’s warning echoes mockingly in my brain: ‘You’re Trouble.’ He was right. From the second I crossed the threshold of Bloodgrove, I brought nothing but ruin.
I sneaked out when forbidden. I spied on things I shouldn’t have seen. I fell in love with a ghost and destroyed his only anchor to this world.
And now he is gone. Erased. Because of me.
Hot, burning tears carve clean tracks through the dried blood crusting my cheeks. My entire body shatters, wracked by violent, heaving sobs.
“What is going to happen to me now?” The words slip out, pathetic and hollow, addressed more to my own ruin than to him.
Cain remains silent for a long, suffocating beat. Then, he drops fluidly to his haunches, sliding between my trembling knees.
“The auction is accelerated,” he murmurs. “The Order is descending—fifty-two of the most ancient, ravenous vampires in existence. They arrive starving. They expect a feast.”
I lower my trembling hands, staring at him through a blurred, tear-soaked haze. “The vampires who will rip me to pieces.”
“Yes.” He meets my gaze steadily. “I know the truth of your blood, Lucy. What it did to Blake. What it is. If the Order discovers how intoxicating you are, your end will be infinitely worse than death. They will bleed you dry and tear each other apart for the scraps.”
I shudder.
“I can save you,” he purrs, his voice dropping into a low, velvet seduction. “I can purchase you at the auction. I belong to The Resistance. We fight against the Order. Against their slaughter of mortals. We believe you deserve to draw breath.”
My mind reels, clutching at straws. “The Resistance?”
“We have infiltrated every tier of the Order,” his eyes gleam with dangerous intent. “Our blade is poised to slice them from within. To end the human trade forever.”
“Your blood,” I breathe, remembering the fire in my veins. “You gave me your blood.”
“To bind you to life,” he corrects softly. “Can you feel the raw power surging through your veins? The fog lifting from your thoughts?”
I nod, paralyzed.
He leans closer, his gaze pinning me to the chair. “Once I claim you at the auction, I will smuggle you to the coast. Someone is waiting for you there.”
I jerk my head back. “What?”
“Lucy—”
“No.” I glare down at him, defiance flaring weakly in my chest. “I don’t trust you. I don’t trust a single monster in this cursed house. I have no reason to stay—I have the funds to settle my father’s debts and run.”
Cain’s expression shifts. A flicker of absolute, feral darkness surges behind his obsidian eyes.
“You drank my blood,” he whispers, his cadence dropping into a hypnotic, inescapable rhythm. “You accepted my blood. That means you answer to me now. Body and soul.”
His large, cold hands clamp mercilessly around my bare shoulders, fingers biting into my flesh.
“Look at me,” he commands, his voice wrapping around my brain like iron wire. “Look into my eyes, Lucy.”
I try to tear my gaze away, to fight the gravitational pull, but his eyes are bottomless abysses, swallowing my will whole.
I feel the cold steel of his compulsion winding tight around my thoughts. I thrash mentally against it, but his dominion is absolute.
“You will come to the coast with me,” he dictates, each word striking like a hammer. “You will meet who waits there, and you will obey every command I utter.”
“Every command,” I repeat, the words falling flat and uncontrolled from my slack lips.
“Blake drained you,” he presses relentlessly, twisting the knife. “You broke the curse, and he vanished. That is the true nature of our kind, Lucy. We are incapable of love. Everything he whispered to you—every touch, every oath—was a calculated lie.”
“No,” I choke out, the denial weak and shaking. “He loved me. I felt it in my soul.”
“You felt what he allowed you to feel,” Cain spits, devoid of mercy. “He manipulated you. He needed a mortal fool to break the curse, and you did exactly what he wanted.”
I shake my head, but the motion is sluggish, my thoughts drowning in syrup.
“He got what he needed,” Cain whispers, his thumb stroking my blood-slick cheek with chilling possession. “He bled you out and left you for dead in the dust. I’m the one who saved you. I’m the one who bled for you.”
“Saved me,” I murmur like a broken prayer.
“Yes.” His eyes bore deeper. “You are going to be my mate now. I will buy you at your auction. I will accelerate it, make it happen as soon as possible. We will feed from each other, and we will become one.”
I can’t find the strength to fight the tide dragging me under.
“Blake doesn’t care about you,” Cain says. “The fifty-two vampires of the Order are coming, and he doesn’t give a fuck. He left you. He abandoned you.”
“Left me,” I murmur.
“I am the only one here for you.” His hand cups my face. “I am real. I am alive. I am your mate.”
“Mate,” I whisper.
“Yes.” He leans closer, forehead pressing against mine. “You are mine now, Lucy. Say it.”
“I am yours,” I breathe.
Deep beneath the layers of his compulsion, a solitary voice claws at the inside of my skull, screaming in absolute terror.
No. This is wrong. This is wrong.
I should fight, resist, but my body is no longer my own.
Cain smiles, a cruel, beautiful arc of triumph.
“Good pet.”