Chapter 24
For a split second, I consider it.
I consider taking my stepfather’s life.
He’s injured. Weak. And the other demons want him dethroned.
How would it feel to be the sword that ends his reign of evil?
Perhaps my mother would never forgive me, but she forsook me long ago. Would she even care if she had to disown me?
But I jolt as my abdomen flutters. It’s too early to feel the child kick, but it’s speaking to me in some way.
And I know, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that this child is paramount. Not only to me and to Rogan, but to my mother.
She needs to know what it feels like to love a baby again. She was a good mother once. A caring and giving mother. She protected me from my father when I was young, but then…Richard…
He and his evil ways made her see and feel only him. She lost all emotion for Larissa and me…and that’s exactly what Richard wanted. We were nothing, and he made sure we knew it. He had a special disdain for me—the rebel, the bad seed. Larissa was good and I was evil.
Until I left home.
Then he turned on her as well.
Funny. All those years he convinced my mother that I was the embodiment of evil, when in truth? He was the fucking demon king. Evil personified.
King fucking Richard.
The names he called me—those vicious names that most people wouldn’t call their worst enemy.
And my mother allowed it. Did nothing to stop it. Accepted all his lies without question.
The baby nudges me again.
He—in this instant, I know he’s a boy—doesn’t like the thoughts I’m having about his grandmother. Odd, to be sure. I could be imagining it. In fact, it’s likely. Because no matter how much she hurt me, made me feel like nothing, I never stopped loving her. Never stopped wanting her approval.
Funny. I don’t feel the same way about my father. I never sought his approval, and now I’m bound to him through our shared vampire bloodline.
“Don’t do it, Hannah,” Rogan says again.
When he calls me Hannah, I know he’s serious.
I regard him in all his naked glory. He’s like a Greek statue, all muscle and sinew and pure, raw man.
“Your mother won’t forgive you,” Richard says again.
“Don’t you say another fucking word to me,” I grit out. “You’re nothing to me. You never were.”
Richard cackles, and I swear to God a shadow of a snake slithers out of his mouth. “Do you think that matters to me, bitch? I never wanted you. Only your mother. But you are her child, and you won’t kill me.”
I draw in a breath, let his words flow through me and out of me.
My child. Must think of my child.
My child will not be the son of a killer.
My child will be the son of an alpha lycan and a vampire princess.
I turn my back on Richard and meet Rogan’s gaze. “Take me out of here. Please.”
He touches my cheek, and the tenderness in his caress nearly melts me. So much of me feels so much of him. How can it all be a lie?
“Princess,” he says, “I would if I could.”
I jerk away from him, and his hand falls back to his side.
“I told you,” he continues, “that I know very little about the ether. And I sure as hell don’t know how to get out of here.”
I rub my hands over my forehead. Outside the walls, the demons are laughing, howling, making noises I have no description for.
“A portal,” I say, remembering. “There’s a portal in your bedroom closet. At the penthouse.”
“Princess—”
“It’s got to be here somewhere, Rogan. We just have to find it.”