“He won’t touch you. Not really,” he says, his words kissing across my shoulder blade while a warm salve covers the wound on my back.
I hiss from the intensity that shoots through me, but it dissolves ever so strangely. It isn’t a numbing cream like human medicine. It’s... just gone. He takes the pain away with the slow motion of his hands.
“I don’t really believe you,” I whisper, a far-off laugh lingering on my words.
“He’s not legally allowed to touch you until Thorn arrives to give you away.”
Thorn?
“Who’s Thorn, and why do either of them care about me?”
I’m fucking no one. I’ve never even filed taxes, for Christ’s sake. I don’t exist to my own government. Why the hell do I exist here?
A pause drifts on for a lingering moment before he quietly speaks.
“He’s your father. Or kin. Some distant relative who forgot you existed until he needed you, I suppose..”
A bitterness drifts through me before it lays laden and sour in the pit of my stomach.
“Oh,” is all I can say.
When I was young, I wondered everyday who my parents were. In recent years, I haven’t considered them at all. I have more important things to worry about than them.
And suddenly I hate them all over again. I hatehim. Whoever he is.
There’s too much to think about, but I try my best to sort through it. In this moment, I need all the information I can get.
So, what am I to this creepy Vampire King?
“Am I his bride, then?”
A deep, chuckling laughter tumbles out of him, and the feel of it shivering across my neck would be nice, but I think he’s literally laughing at the idea of me being fit for a king to marry.
“No. No, you’re only a Promise from one king to another.” Just like with everything this man does, his tone carries a warmth of honey that seeps right into me.
“A Promise?”
“Women are... they’re seen as lowers in our world. They’re not... not as powerful. Not as important. But they’re useful.”
My lips part, and for some reason, that gives me even more rage than if I was just a betrothed woman to a disgusting king from a father who never cared about me at all.
“Oh,” I say, the word clipping out with too much unspoken rage that I keep shut away inside myself.
Except.
Nope.
Can’t keep it in.
“They’re mothers and sisters and wives, and your kind doesn’t see them as equals to yourselves?”
His palm lingers on the curve of my waist, and I know he’s done, but I’m not ready to face him.
How could I actually think any of these men have any sort of kindness inside them?
“I didn’t say I thought that. I’m just explaining how life is here.”
“But you don’t oppose it? You just kidnap innocent women from their worlds and bring them here for no fucking reason other than to give them away as playthings for old men! I’m nothing to you.” Those last words slip out with a hollowness I can’t hide. Maybe because the men in my life have always made me feel that way.
