Page 166 of Taken By Touch and Torment

I made a point to smile and meet the eyes of each vampire who watched me with cold hatred. They could despise me until they bled bitterness, but they couldn’t touch me.

Brennan’s men, on the other hand, viewed me hungrily—recognizing me as the prize, the masculine marker of success. To them, I was a symbol of power, of status.

To this entire crowd, I was a convincing reason to stand behind Brennan. Because whether they hated me or trusted me, I clearly always found myself on the arm of the most powerful man in the room.

And as I watched several lords mark me with their eyes, felt their desire to plant their own flags in my flesh to prove their worthiness—I imagined this tasteless palace rotting away by shadow and crumbling by tall, spitting flames.

I wasted no time whispering to Brennan’s mind, which was now entirely beholden to my every influence. I had never had someone wrapped so tightly around my finger. Beyond his conscious awareness, Brennan’s psyche recognized me as the granter of his every last wish.

Scarlett needs a healer. Tonight, she will be mine, and I need her strong enough to take me.

“Take Durian and Rune to the dungeons, and set them up facing each other,” Brennan commanded the nearby soldier. He whispered to me, “Poetic, no?”

I laughed, but we weren’t laughing for the same reason.

“Who wants to deliberate how we will torture and maim Lillian’s bastard son beyond recognition?” Brennan asked. “Women permitted,” he added.

How progressive of him.

The crowd cheered.

A soldier yanked Rune to his feet, and with Brennan’s eyes back on me, I couldn’t meet Rune’s intense gaze. Even with spikes of magickal poison in his veins, he radiated power, the kind that couldn’t be killed. The kind that would live on forever.

Rune and Durian were dragged away, both half-paralyzed. And I wasn’t the only one staring at their backs in stunned silence, hardly able to believe my eyes. These were the two most influential vampires in Valentin, sworn enemies who’d been on the brink of leading armies against each other, now immobile and forced to inhabit the same prison.

“Elaine,” Brennan snapped at a witch gathered with the born women. “Fetch a healer witch. Tell them to meet us in the throne room.”

The witch nodded, although I could sense a level of trepidation in her desires. That was something that Brennan would’ve needed to grapple with. The fact that these witches had been fully indoctrinated into Durian’s religion, and they wouldn’t be so quick to accept Brennan’s decree that the Book of Lillian was a sham.

He would’ve needed to deal with that problem—if the end goal of his puppet master had been to place him in a position of power.

Unfortunately for him, her plans would leave him dead by the end of the night.

Brennan suddenly stiffened, peering around the opulent hall. “Someone go find Kole,” he barked.

65

RUNE

“It’s a trap,” I said, facing a group of my most trusted clan members with Sadie, Uriah, and Mason at my side. We stood in front of the windows in the deliberation room, a few feet from where I’d bent Scarlett over the hard table and fucked her while she’d envisioned the borns’ destruction.

“Brennan’s men will surround me as soon as I make it to the end of the tunnels,” I said with certainty. “I will take a vial of mortal blood, and I will be going alone.”

I’d already told the friends who stood at my side, but they still stared at me as if this was the first they’d heard of my plan. Sadie was furious, though she’d long accepted I would willingly sacrifice myself for my Little Flame no matter the consequences, forever.

Scarlett was dying. I could feel it through the blood bond. She was wasting away at a rapid pace. The sound of her poor heart revving up before beating fatally slow was a twisted melody that followed me everywhere I went, impossible to tune out.

I knew this would happen, but Scarlett hadn’t wanted to hear a word of it. Durian had lost the plot, irreversibly. I didn’t need to see the future to know that his obsession with her was too unrestrained and volatile for him to resist squeezing the life out of her.

“When I cross the border, we will spread the information that the palace is in upheaval and Brennan has removed Durian from power,” I said. “I am Brennan’s final play, his evidence that he deserves to rule.”

My men and women were loyal and well-trained, but I could still see the nervousness in their micro-expressions, the fear in their eyes hearing that I would be taken prisoner.

“I trust Scarlett like I trust any of you,” I continued. My heart shattered, yearning to be closer to hers—now beating laboriously and strained. “I trust her to be effective in what she was sent to do, which is to crumble the born from within. I will be safe in her hands.”

My clan was flabbergasted, not understanding that Scarlett was more than a seductress and a spy, a human double agent. They didn’t know she was a succubus, and I doubted that would even help their faith if they did know.

“The kingdom is no longer a concern of ours. An hour after I’m taken, we will break the ceasefire and begin the process of reassimilation.”

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