Page 98 of Cryptic Dreams
We didn’t go shopping for fun.
It was a very isolated life in some ways, but I didn’t mind. I’d rather been home, sitting on the floor of the living room listening to my parents reminisce about their homelands or the vampire court of old.
My gifts might have forced it in the beginning but I was always going to be a homebody no matter what because I’ve always been quiet and awkward, with a definite appreciation for the more peaceful things in life.
Which is in stark contrast to the life I was very recently thrown into.
Essentially dying at the hand of a human male contracted to keep me safe then incinerating him somehow when he did because I still can’t remember what happened that night.
High speed shoot outs and Counsel meetings.
A mate who not only outranks literally everyone in the country except his parents, but also happens to be the professed leader of the Purists, orchestrating the Uprising, and potentially starting a war that could change literally everything about our current way of life.
Not to mention, Wraith has absolutely blown my mind in damn near every way imaginable, right down to the way he makes me count orgasms because our mating has turned him into somewhat of apleasure dom,as he put it.
Hardly anything about my life right now is the same as it was, and the risks involved, the ones my wicked prince struggles to acknowledge, should have me longing for things to go back to the way they were before Wraith of Carmarthen blew my world wide open.
I don’t, though.
I wouldn’t change one single thing about my life or the direction it’s going because I’ve found my soulmate, my mate in every single way, and he’s made me more confident and brave than I ever thought I could be. Which in turn has helped me stop hiding from everything and everyone. Even with all of the unknowns looming around us, I wouldn’t ask to go back a few months to change one single thing.
Well… except maybe all of the shopping I suddenly have to do as the mate of the next High Elder.
Thatis something I could do without, and I don’t think even Wraith will change my feelings on the subject.
Especially when I know this little outing was just a tactic to get me out of the house so he could attend to whateverbusinessDeclan brought to our home.
Declan.
I smile a little as I think of that beast of a male.
He’s only a few inches taller than me, maybe five or six at most, but the fact that Declan has to be pushing three hundred pounds is part of what makes him so intimidating. That and the gnarly scar that runs from the base of his skull all the way around and up to his left ear. Abattle scaras Wraith put it, but it looks more like someone tried and failed to decapitate Declan with a dull ax, so it feels like it’s a little more than that to me. But even with his size andbattle scars, that male has a kindness to him that I find surprising.
My mate tries to reassure me that Declan isn’t kind, that he’s bloodthirsty and lethal, and while I do believe that to a degree, I know what I see when I meet those dark green eyes.
Declan is kind, and he cares a great deal about my wicked prince, so much so that he’s put up with Wraith’s crap since they were little andstillputs up with it nearly fifteen hundred years later.
For a broody, devious sadist who likes to think he’s a loner who doesn’t need anyone at all, Wraith has more friends than he knows what to do with. Not that he knows what to do with anyone he might consider caring about, and bymore friendsI mean three because his relationships with my cousin and his mate, and Declan are very different from everyone else around him. But Wraith isn’tfriendlessby any means.
Honestly, my mate’s relationships with Orion and Aries formed because of Plasma and the Uprising, but I think it was also subconscious recognition of the family he’d end up mating into, so I truly believe fate had a hand in that. And why I wouldn’t argue with Wraith about his take on my cousins the way I would about Declan. Because heisdifferent.
From what little he’s told me, the two have actually been friends since they werelads, little boys thrown together by circumstance and held together by the threads of a mutual goal and shared appreciation in how to achieve it.
Declan of Rindoon was born to one of the other concubines—Brigit—in Atticus’s harem, not fathered by the then king but instead the right hand and advisor of Vigo, Pascal of Bordeaux.
Pascal was the one to seemingly get a handle on the first of our kind, who met Vigo of Carmarthen years after he’d been wreaking havoc and striking fear across Europe, and when he did, Pascal helped our true king harness that into a monarchy.
The two were able to form a government amongst vampires to sanction territories and develop a structure that put us back into hiding but kept us safe. And while doing so, Pascal met his fated mate, Brigit.
Under Vigo’s rule, the couple was able to live quite comfortably for a long time, living in the castle and running our kind, but all good things come to an end.
When our true king lost his mate, he went ballistic.
The madness that’s rumored to take hold, the rotting from the inside out that’s supposed to happen when a vampire loses their fated one was amplified in Vigo, and it left us without a ruler king before he would have stepped down. And that is when Atticus stepped in.
He kept Pascal on as an advisor to the crown because no one knew the inner workings of our government better than one of the oldest of our kind who helped start it, but it didn’t mean he was safe from Atticus and his ways.
Our current High Elder put Brigit in his harem to punish them both, and the mated couple was forced to meet in secret whenever they had the chance.
