Page 26 of Taken By Touch and Torment

The table was silent. And I could feel their frustration heating up the surrounding air, thickening it like blood.

None more so than the space around Durian’s second, Brennan.

“No, my lord,” Brennan said. “Of course you wouldn’t. As enticing as her beauty is, we know she belongs to you.”

There was something there, in the threads that connected me to Durian—Durian to Brennan—Brennan to me. I had entered this table’s constellation of desires, their web of power. And they had no idea. I was a wolf in innocent lamb’s clothing.

Even when I was wearing nothing at all.

Tonight, when Rosalind came to rescue me for our midnight chat, I would ask everything I could about how to control and wield my powers. She’d been right. Running from what I was had never worked. If I wanted to live, to make my last remaining days mean something, I’d have to lean all the way in.

12

RUNE

Past

The day my twin sisters were slaughtered by a group of born, they’d been playing in the woods on the outskirts of our neighborhood. They were eleven.

I was eighteen. It had been two years since I’d killed my father and my mother had shunned me.

You’re dead to me.

Those were the last words she’d spoken to me. Even at my sisters’ funeral, she’d pretended I wasn’t even there.

I thought of the day my sisters were murdered nine years later, as I was strung up from the ceiling in Sadie’s dungeon. Blood flowed freely from the gashes in my chest, pooling on the dark floor below.

The torture inflicted by my wicked mentor was nothing compared to the devastation I’d experienced when I saw my sisters’ brutalized bodies on the forest floor. They’d been cast aside, drained of blood, amid dead leaves and huge, aboveground tree roots.

Crescent Haven had always been the most beautiful in early autumn.

The born had stolen that simple pleasure from me. They’d stolen my whole world.

I’d dedicated my life to protecting my sisters since they were first born. Helia knew my mother wasn’t going to defend them. It was up to me. I was their hero—deflecting all of my drunk father’s anger, drawing it away from the girls and toward me. I’d taught them how to read, how to escape our grim existence and dream of a better tomorrow.

Jesalynn and Lizbeth had been late to our secret meeting, the one we had every week without our mother’s knowledge. I’d been making them a warm meal, preparing tea and setting out new clothes and books I could finally afford to buy them. I wanted them to have everything our parents could never provide. I sought to preserve as much of their childhood as I could. I didn’t want them to grow up as quickly as I had.

The food and tea had been getting cold, and I’d grown worried. I’d gone in search of them.

I was the first to find their bodies.

Dead. Because the born could do anything they wanted, anywhere in Valentin, and mortals were powerless to stop them.

I had been powerless to stop them. Until I’d met Sadie, and I became the first human to be reborn a vampire by her cunning hands.

She’d saved me. She’d transformed my aimless vengeance into focused precision. She’d seen my potential, hidden underneath useless, weak human flesh, and she’d made my exterior match the darkness that already resided in my soul.

You will be the strongest of them all, Rune, she’d promised me. And it will have nothing to do with me and my magick. The spell to turn a human into a vampire pulls from the power a person already possesses.

The more powerful the man, the more powerful the monster.

The room was dimly lit and bare, designed to deprive me of all comfort, all beauty. Only pain. Only denial.

I spit blood on the floor, and Sadie had a dagger at my throat. Her sharp nails gripped my face before I could blink.

“Naughty Rune,” she said with a sigh. “Has my schooling in manners truly fallen on deaf ears? Or was that your way of begging for more?” She released me, dragging the poisoned dagger down my chest before taking a step back.

I grinned at her, blood dribbling down my chin and staining my teeth. “My apologies, Mistress,” I drawled. “My mouth was full.”

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