Page 28 of Taken By Touch and Torment

“If you want to be someone who matters in this life, you have to lean into the hunger. You have to sit with it. You have to feel it so viscerally that you no longer feel it at all. It’s the fighting that makes it painful. The yearning, the wishing for something more than you currently have. Victory is for those who play the long game. For those who choose lasting fulfillment over fleeting pleasures. Victory is for us. Not them.”

I tongued my fangs, but somehow, I was still in control. For the first time since we’d been playing these games, I saw the vision I’d had before I was turned. I saw myself uniting the mortals against the born. I saw myself leading an army of people like me—vampires who were once human, who’d had enough of the borns’ incompetent, soulless rule and wanted to build a new world from scratch. A legion of protectors, fighters, and dreamers reborn from blood and magick.

“What do you desire, Rune?” Sadie asked.

Blood! my depleted, desperate body screamed.

“Valentin,” I said.

When I was released, I immediately entered bloodlust. Sadie quickly subdued me with blood onyx poison and restrained me again before I could hurt the girl.

That was the farthest I’d ever made it, and I was rewarded with a small cup of blood. And though on the surface it had felt like I’d failed again, something inside my subconscious depths had shifted irreversibly. I was not the same as I was before. Slowly but surely, my shadow side was being integrated into my whole being.

Sadie was freeing me from the tyranny of the corporeal so that one day my fingers might brush the sublime.

“How long did it take for the human to rehearse that little speech about hunger before she had it memorized, oh, wise one?” I asked Sadie about it a year later. I hadn’t experienced bloodlust in months, and that session had marked the beginning of my true progress.

Sadie laughed. “Far too long. She was rewarded handsomely for the feat, don’t you worry.” She winked, a filthy smirk on her lips.

“I knew as soon as the words left her lips that they had you written all over them.”

We watched the sunset on the balcony. The spring air was fresh and full of promise as we listened to the sound of newly turned vampires sparring below.

“It’s hardly my fault no one is as hauntingly profound as I.” She waved a hand, taking a draw of her cigarillo.

I chuckled and dragged a hand over my mouth. The woman had scripted entire conversations—rewritten actual people as if they were mere performers in her grand production. How could I do anything but adore her?

“You were an awful sub,” Sadie said dryly, and I laughed harder.

“Imagine that.”

She sighed dramatically. “Yeah, yeah, you’re not a sub.”

“And you don’t sound bitter about it at all.”

Her green eyes went snake-like, but her lips still curved. “The best dominants have served as a submissive at least once in their lives. So I’d like to think that in addition to saving your life and guiding you into becoming the best person and leader you could be, I have also made you a stellar dom. You’re welcome, all of Rune’s future lovers.”

I whistled, shaking my head and leaning back in my chair as I gazed on the horizon. “There is no one else like you in this hopeless, unchanging world, Sadie.”

“And that is precisely the reason it’s so hopeless.”

13

SCARLETT

Every day that passed was a day that Rosalind kept my secret. I was thankful, but I certainly wasn’t fully at ease. I wasn’t stupid, no matter how many times Durian told me I was.

Tonight, I needed to learn how to lean in. The time for running had passed.

“And what do I get in exchange for helping you?” Rosalind asked.

We sat in her living area, where I gorged myself with chocolate and other sweet treats. My slave meals were clearly for fuel rather than enjoyment. On the other hand, it appeared as though Rosalind was given anything that she could desire.

“What do you want?” I asked her. I studied her flawless face, infuriated as always that I couldn’t read her true motives.

She smiled. “Let’s start with your secrets.”

My stomach twisted. At first, I thought of Rune, before I remembered that was no longer a secret of value. Everyone here already knew of our involvement. It was the entire reason I was a slave.

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