Finally, the fleshy, heated sounds stop. Alacine yells, “You’d best enter, child.”
I tentatively open the door and poke my head in, expecting the worst—
Wholly unprepared for the true awfulness of it.
Alacine is drawing her robe up as I enter. Palacia sags in the X-frame, her milky white essence spent across the floor in a great pool between her legs. Worst of all, and most alarming, is the blanket of bright red blood spilling down her neck, down her flat chest, as she twitches in her shackles.
I inhale a sharp breath, hurrying in. “Mother, what have you done?!”
Palacia is dying. Alacine drops a dagger onto the floor and waltzes past me to the door. “I figured you’d be hungry, son. You’d best feed before her blood spoils. Then you’ll take care of her and toss her to the wolves.”
My mother leaves me in the room with the dying interfolk girl.
A million things race through me, but only two options I see. Neither of them are to feed on Palacia’s blood, as enticing as it sounds.
It’s my fault Palacia is here. Alacine did not bring the girl because she knows Sephania Lock cares about her, as a strategy to draw her into the Spymistress’ web. No, she brought Palacia because she knowsIcare about her due to my weak half-human heart.
I rush forward, lifting the girl’s small head on her thin neck. The tear through her tendons and veins is surgical, and she only has seconds left alive.
Rather than finishing her off and “taking care of her” as Alacine demanded, I take care of her in a different way. I bitemy fangs into my gums, resisting the urge to drink her spilling blood. Then I chew into my wrist, bare it to her pale lips, and force my blood on her. “Stay with me, lass . . . and fucking drink!”
I’ll deal with the repercussions of keeping Palacia alive later, if my mother cares enough to discover it.
First, I have to make sure she stays alive.
Chapter 32
Vallan
My thoughts drift in and out, recalling the torrid memories of last night when I was deep inside Sephania and hearing her moans. It’s all I can do to not think about my current situation, with Master Barnabac rutting me from behind.
My palms are flat on the table. I’m leaning forward, my body still as Barnabac grunts and shoves his cock inside my hole, holding my hips as he moves.
My master has become more daring as of late. When he first called me to him weeks ago, and I came bearing his gift of a silver sword for my prolonged absence from his military coven, there was only a hint of perverse notions on his old, sagging face.
Then, last time I was here in his tower, he forced his cock into my mouth, which led to my anger getting the better of me downstairs, where I found myself in a quarrel with other Red Spawn—the legion of male and female thralls he’s turned.
Now, he’s forced himself on me completely, and there’s nothing I can do to stop him because of the hold his blood has over me. He’s thick inside my ass, pulsing as he takes what he thinks I owe him.
My heavy cock swings limply between my legs while his balls smack into mine. I don’t let out so much as a grunt or moan, and do everything to keep my mind elsewhere, free from this stone prison fortress in the Military Ward.
Luckily, I can bear the brunt of this pervasive rape and abuse better than most. I feel nothing. Perhaps if I did feel something,I would hate myself for what has become of me—what Barnabac Craxon, the Red Butcher and Blood Baron of Olhav, has turned me into: a sheath for his pleasure and a hole for him to fill.
The only semblance of feelings I have, the only surge of sensations I get, is when I think of Sephania Lock. There is something special about my silverblood, and it doesn’t even take feeding on her to understand her immense power over me.
In the girl’s presence, I feel humane for the first time in decades. Almost like she brings back the empathetic human side of me—the version of me that existed before I was turned and has since been lost to time—simply by existing next to me.
I smile at the thought of her strong body, her ample curves, rolling and grinding against me. Her flashing smile and bullheadedness. Her whip-smart wit and brattiness, which gets her in trouble more often than not.
I’m lost to the girl, and there’snothingMaster Barnabac can do to steal that away from me, as much as he tries.
The Red Butcher grunts, hilts himself deep inside me, and holds my waist as he twitches. As he comes, he lets out a long groan. When he pulls back, his seed drips from my used body, down to the floor between my legs.
The evening with Sephania and the others lingers in my mind. I almost don’t recognize he’s finished. When I look down, I see I’ve inadvertently shot cum across the table’s surface from thinking about my silverblood while my body involuntarily reacted from Barnabac slamming into me. I frown at my spilled seed.
Barnabac pats my back and draws my pants up around my ass. When I turn, his face is sweaty and blotched pink from exertion.
The disgusting bastard smiles cruelly at me. “Still as tight as the day I made you, boy,” he mutters, then takes a heavy seat at his chair with an exaggerated sigh.
