Page 121 of Their Blood Queen

His chest rises and falls on his deep, panicked breaths. He knows he’s going to die, but I’m waiting for him to give me what I want.

A confession.

I need to know how this happened so that Scarlett is never threatened again.

“It’s because of the work at Vulcan Village,” he sputters. “The Vulcan family stole magic tonics and genetic material from the Rinhold labs. It’s the only reason their crop was so advanced.”

I raise a brow as I lean in, casting a shadow over the human. “You allowed them to steal from you?”

His throat bobs on a swallow. “We needed the studies to be tested. We couldn’t risk…” When his words drift off, I snarl until he continues. “My father found a way to harness dreams inside a human soul.”

I go silent as I digest what this pitiful human’s line had discovered.

Glancing up, I find Duke Rinhold reduced to a maimed carcass seeping fresh blood onto the floor. His blank gaze stares at us, and I know I won’t be pulling any truths from him.

So I turn back to his son. “Go on,” I say.

He sits up as the carrot of hope is dangled in front of him. How quaint. He thinks I’m interested because I want to use what he’s learned.

No. I want to hear how to destroy this research before it’s used against me.

“The process required death on a large scale to successfully test. So… we set them up.”

Anger stirs in my chest, but I settle my beast with a promise of bloodshed very soon.

I am angry, too. The destruction of Vulcan Village was my doing.

This went so much deeper than I could ever have realized. I had been manipulated from the very beginning.

“That’s blasphemy,” I snarl. “You sent thousands of people to their death, and an entire family, all for an experiment.”

“One that worked,” he says, growing bolder as he dares to lean in. My face is twice the size of his while I’m in this form. I quell the urge to bite his head clean off. “Scarlett is what she is today because of that loss of life. She sucked it all in, and it changed her. My family has been watching her for years, looking for the right opportunity to bring her into our fold. With her genetics, we were going to start the perfect breeding program. One with humans who can harness the power of dreams. Imagine the possibilities, Cain. Imagine if you find others like you out there because you have something that interests them. They could just be hiding. Don’t you want more alliances? Isn’t that why you do all this?”

I glance to find Sabre and Cage taking their time killing their prey. They’re little more than a blur of shadows painting the room with blood.

Scarlett watches them with a sense of fascination. The blood that coats her looks like a red dress, one that makes me want to lick it off. She doesn’t try to hide herself now. In fact, her spine is straight with pride as she finally slinks off the bed and picks up one of the shards of the broken mirror.

And heads to her brother, who limps across the floor on a broken foot.

Good girl, I think.

“Now, everything I do for her,” I say, speaking to the pitiful excuse for a human being at my feet.

“There can be more like her,” he promises. “That was always the plan, Lord Cain. It can still be the plan. If you give her to me, you will have our firstborn. You can even?—”

I don’t allow him to finish that sentence. I shove my hand into his mouth and wrap my claws around his tongue.

And yank.

A garbled scream rips from his throat as I tear it from his mouth. Blood gushes down his chin and chest as I toss his rendered tongue onto the floor.

“You won’t be needing that any longer,” I say dismissively as I watch him bleed.

He doubles over and screams again, but I really have no need of him anymore. He only has one more use to me now.

I clamp my claws around his head, and I allow my beast to feed.

His dark dreams pour into me and settle inside my soul. I feast on them, devouring them as I tear them apart until they’re nothing more than splintered fragments in bite-size pieces.

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