Page 35 of Taken By Touch and Torment

I got whacked in the side of the head with a holy book.

“Mm, yes, harder please,” I groaned dryly.

The room of vampires laughed.

I hated every single one of them. Durian’s lingering touch between my thighs made me want to crawl out of my skin.

But my process of reinventing myself was off to a stellar start. It was like playing a part in a grand production. I could dissociate and slip out of Scarlett, the traumatized woman who wanted to sink into the dirt and become one with the mycelium, and embody Scarlett, the demoness who did more than survive.

She waged war. She sowed chaos. She raised Lillian’s dark underworld.

“Naughty human,” I heard someone purr from behind me as an aunt shoved my head further into the black carpet.

My fellow slaves had stared at me with nothing but hatred when I’d first joined them. Now, the energy was shifting. They were starting to relax. They looked at me with new eyes—curiosity, confusion.

Because I was the one taking the brunt of the aunts’ disdain and punishment. I was the one drawing the vampires’ attention away from them and onto me.

I was protecting them the only way I knew how. No one could feed from me nor rape me. I would take all the rest if it meant I could distract these psychopaths from the humans far more vulnerable than I was.

I took a nasty blast of ice magick from one of the aunts, my bones rattling as I recited sickening prayers to Lillian justifying slavery.

“I always knew she was far less innocent than she let on,” Liza’s recognizable voice commented.

Then, the sickly sweet voice of her friend Evangeline filled the room. “Mm. Curious little vixen, lapping up the attention. I wonder how her Master will feel about her behavior.”

“Jealous, ladies?” Brennan asked, earning laughter from some of the other men.

I nearly smiled as I finished the prayer. Psycho born vampire or not, it would seem I’d crafted my first protector.

The slaves and I raised back to our knees to gaze up at Lillian, and the aunts watched me with the eyes of hawks. Suddenly, a human woman was pushed down on the ground next to me. She was shaking violently.

“All I’m saying is,” Evangeline said, closer now. She must’ve been the one that had shoved the woman to her knees. “She’d better watch her mouth.”

I stole a glance at the girl next to me. She turned her head toward me.

I screamed.

Her mouth had been sewn shut. Black thread and dried blood zigzagged over her lips. Her eyes were hauntingly dim.

I scrambled to my feet. An aunt rushed toward me, and I threw up all over her ugly black shoes.

My careful web of power spun out of my control. The aunt peered down at her bile-covered shoes, then back up at me, cold fury in her eyes.

That was when I noticed Rosalind in the corner of the room. She wasn’t attracting any attention to herself. She was only watching me. She glanced briefly at the slave’s brutalized face before looking away.

The other slaves were reacting similarly. One girl shrieked. Another joined me in puking on the carpet.

“You. Insolent. Bitch.”

I wasn’t paying attention to the aunt yelling at me. My focus was behind her, on Evangeline. She was grinning in triumph, her arm in Liza’s.

I committed their faces to memory, and I saw those tall, spitting flames crawling up palace walls.

The aunt grabbed my throat, her hands shooting more ice into my veins as I shivered violently. I clawed at her arm as she lifted me up off the ground. Who knew witches could be this strong?

My vision began to vignette, darkness spreading out from the corners. I thought of Rune’s cloud of shadows as I faded.

In the void, there was no suffering. No pain. No confusion. Life’s ever-shifting kaleidoscope of love and grief, pain and euphoria, striving and sinking, melted into an opaque formlessness. Here in the nothingness, I was no longer responsible for myself or others. I was released, caught in an endless exhale.

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