Page 1 of Hitched to the Vampire King
ChapterOne
I would kill them all.
Adrian. The guards. The Academy council members.
All of them.
I would rip out their throats and tear them limb from limb. And when I was done, I would bury all their little pieces in my backyard and stand over their graves with a smile on my face. They would know thatIwas the one who’d won in the end. That I was the one who’d brought themalldown.
I couldn’t wait for the moment when they realized they’d underestimated me, that they’d fucked with the wrong werewolf.
This fantasy of mine, as dark as it was, was the only thing keeping me sane right now, the only lifeline I had left. It kept the fire burning inside, along with the hope that we would escape this.
Because wewould. We had to.
Hehad to.
My mate.
I stared across the dim room to where Gabriel, caged just like me, lay not ten feet away. Such a small distance, and yet he was completely unreachable, thanks to the reinforced metal bars separating us.
It’d been three days since Adrian Roche, or the King of Pricks as I’d so fondly dubbed him, had locked us up in here. Three days of watching that bastard’s people inject Gabriel with holy water over and over again. At first, he’d writhed in agony after every injection, and I’d stood by helplessly and watched as his skin grew paler and his veins darker. On the second day, he’d gone completely catatonic. Since then, he hadn’t so twitched, no matter how hard I begged him to come back to me.
Adrian didn’t just want to kill us—he wanted us to suffer first.
The bastard had a lot to answer for. First, he put a hit on his son’s head, and when that failed, he hired witches to summon a demon to kill us, and whenthatfailed…well, here we were. I was sick of Adrian’s twisted little games. He owed me, and I had no trouble taking his life as payment.
But first, I needed to figure out how to escape, a feat that was proving far more challenging than I’d anticipated. This cage was damn near unbreakable. No matter how hard I hit the bars—and I hit themhard—they held. I’d even tried while in wolf form, thinking I’d only needed a little more weight. Alas, Adrian had prepared for that exact scenario. Clearly, he’d built the cages to withstand both werewolf and vampire strength. Just another reason for me to hate him, not that I neededmorereasons.
Of course, escaping my cage wasn’t the only problem. I also had to figure out where we were and find Chris—I hadn’t seen him since waking up here. None of these tasks would be easy. The room they were keeping us in had some serious horror movie vibes. Concrete floors and walls, zero windows, and a single door in and out, which Adrian kept guarded at all times. As far as I could tell, there were eight guards total, split evenly between humans and vampires. All this preparation made me think Adrian had been planning our capture for a while.
During the day, the human guards kept as much distance from us as possible. They only entered the room right before sunset, when it was time to administer Gabriel’s next dose of holy water. Our first night here, I’d overheard them discussing Adrian’s orders. According to that asshole, the guards had to time it just right. They had to inject Gabriel minutes before sunset. If they waited too long, they risked Gabriel waking fully healed, thanks to every vampire’s inherent magic. But they couldn’t dose him too early either, for fear of giving his body too much time to heal during the day. Either way, they must have nailed the timing, considering his current condition.
Why they hadn’t yet killed us, I had no idea. The bits and pieces I’d overheard always focused on Adrian’s orders—to keep Gabriel weak and unconscious until someotherasshole arrived. The guards had mentioned this mystery man a few times, but never dropped his name. They simply called him “him,” and always in a tone that suggested he was someone important, which piqued my interest—and suspicion. Luckily, I didn’t need to know his name to kill him.
With an angry scoff, I paced the length of my cage, my gaze locked on Gabriel’s still form. A single lightbulb hung from the ceiling, but the guards always kept it off. Not that it mattered. I could see perfectly fine in the dark. Just like I could hear the human guards outside the room arguing about who would give “the vamp” the shot this time. The joy of supernatural senses.
If the guards were fighting over who would give Gabriel his next dose, then that meant we were only moments from sunset. Despair sank its claws into me and with a resigned sigh, I stopped pacing.
I’d made it a habit to shift every time a guard entered the room for my own protection. It seemed my hulking form, monstrous fangs, and lethal claws dissuaded them from entering my cage, which kept them from injecting me with more liquid silver. It was a small victory, but a victory, nonetheless.
I crouched in the middle of my cage and let my wolf take over. Once upon a time, shifting had been painful. But with time and practice, the pain faded, and instead, it now felt like a wonderful stretch. For a moment, I reveled in that blissful feeling, but it didn’t last. Not when the reality of our situation once again reared its ugly head.
The argument between the two human guards paused, and the door cracked open, light flooding the concrete floor. I stood on four legs and resumed pacing, my tail twitching in agitation. I wasn’t sure how much more of this Gabriel—or I—could take. I’d never heard of a vampire dying from holy water poisoning, but neither had I heard of one enduring so many injections in such a short time span. Who knew the long-lasting effects this would have on him?
I couldn’t help the snarl that came to my lips. To see my mate like this fueled a deep, seething anger within me. It was one thing to face your enemies head-on, but this…this helplessness was a whole new kind of torment. One I intended to pay back onto Adrian with interest.
I took a deep breath and closed my eyes. But the second I closed them, memories of Gabriel’s and my last moments alone together resurfaced, cruelly taunting me. We’d just destroyed the Hallowed Moon Coven and returned home. Gabriel had led me into our bedroom and taken me into his arms. Then he’d told me I was the only thing he wanted, and that he had every intention of giving up his crown to be with me.
Because he loved me.
Me.
No one hadeversaid those words to me before. Not like that.
Before I’d joined the Vampire Academy, before I’d met Lucy, Jaden, Chris, and Josh, I’d been an orphan who’d never been anything but a burden on others. I’d lived in so many different foster homes, I couldn’t remember half of them. And the ones I did remember, it wasn’t because they inspired happy memories.
Then a few years ago, everything changed. I found family and friends. I found a place in this world. For the first time, I was happy. But none of that compared toGabriel. My mate. He made me feel whole. Complete. Needed.
