She leans in close, her eyes ablaze.
“Do you have my collar?” Her words are a choked whisper.
I shake my head. “I’m sorry. After your scar-face boyfriend tried to kill me and I thought I lost you to the flames, I couldn’t bear to keep it. I threw it into the Seine.”
“The ancient wasn’t my boyfriend.”
“He said you were his, that he’d come to take you home.” His laughter reaches through the past to squeeze around my heart.
“I’ve never belonged to anybody.”
“What about your sire?” The relationship between vampires and their sires can often be close.
Arabella’s eyes narrow. “It wasn’t my sire.”
“But maybe—”
“It couldn’t be my sire, because I killed him.”
Her words hang in the air between us, charged with electricity. Arabella holds firm, daring me to comment.
She killed her sire.
I turn over every tiny snippet of personal information she’s let slip past her defences, every little piece of herself she’s gifted me, and I weigh them against her words. I remember her and Eleanor Mock talking in low voices about non-consensual siring. And I think I know why she did it.
She was turned without consent, same as me.
This is why she hates her Bloodeve.
We are both sinners.
We are the same.
I know that the words I say next are the most important I’ll ever say.
“He must have deserved it.”
“He did.”
She doesn’t elaborate. Her silence is curated. I know better than to ask.
Stillness envelops us, broken only by Celeste’s frantic scrabbling.
Arabella sighs, her talons trailing along the edge of her eReader. “I was born in Egypt, on the banks of the Nile. My mother had fled her own country because she was pregnant out of wedlock. She found a wealthy benefactor in Cairo and set about establishing herself as the city’s most formidable courtesan. She worked hard to give me an education, dance lessons and art classes, to introduce me to the right people. She wanted me to marry, to have a family, to have what she didn’t. But I saw her freedom and I craved it. It’s no surprise that I went into the same line of business, even after I lost her to cholera in my teens.
“I became a favourite in diplomatic circles. I knew enough about history, literature and art that I could provide the kind of scintillating conversation that attracts powerful men. I had many suitors showering me with exquisite gifts. Some of whom begged me to become theirs exclusively.”
“Him?”
My fingers claw the arm of my chair. I can already tell from her detached speech and the way she stares straight ahead at the dungeon door, refusing to meet my eyes, that I will hate this story.
She nods. “Hewas Lord John Astor, a British diplomat who lived in Cairo. He had a wife and children back in London, but he barely spoke of them. He took me to all the finest parties. He introduced me to the pleasures of opium. And…” She pauses. “He made me his Thrall.”
I push out a breath. That is not what I expected her to say.
She waves a dismissive hand. “You are a white man. You cannot understand. Even the kind of freedom I enjoyed was precarious. I could not own property. I was rich with gifted wealth, but what is given can always be taken away. When Lord Astor showed me the kind of power he wielded over this secret underworld of vampires, I saw a way to ensure my future. I saw a secret that I could use against him when I needed it. I can’t deny that the ecstasy of his bite wasimmeasurable, but I didn’t choose it because of that. I chose it because women like me deal in the currency of secrets, and he’d gifted me a winning hand.
“For a time, we were happy, but as his star rose within Cairo society, and mine alongside it, his proclivities grew darker, more sadistic. He became fiercely possessive – he would rage when he saw me so much as speak to another man. He wanted to keep me as his. He offered me the Kiss. I refused. I didn’t want to tie myself to him. But Lord Astor was not used to being refused…” She swallows. “He Kissed me anyway.”
