Page 39 of Their Blood Queen

His face is perfect. His blond hair has a note of his mother’s curls, but it’s charming on him as it frames his gentle eyes.

He’s wearing the latest fashion of velvet and stripes that flared up two weeks ago. A royal blue embroidered vest is fitted to his muscular but lean form, betraying that it’s tailored to perfection. The vest’s design matches the blue stripes down his dark pants. Even the metal buttons on his polished boots have a blue tint.

My gaze doesn’t know where to settle, so I find myself admiring his face again.

“Don’t let my mother intimidate you,” he says as he grips the back of her chair and leans in to plant a chaste kiss on her cheek. He lowers his voice as he chides her. “No frightening my future bride, please, dear mother.” His marble-blue eyes flick up to meet mine.

The simple gesture has my stomach doing flips as he gives me the faintest of smiles.

Somehow, that smile makes him even more attractive. There’s a kindness there that seems almost fabricated, too sweet to be real.

No one is this perfect.

He doesn’t keep my gaze for long. Like a true gentleman, he breaks eye contact first to give me a sense of security.

To let me think I’m the one in control.

This isn’t the terrifying, ruthless Earl Rinhold of rumor.

And, most interestingly of all, he doesn’t seem to be hiding anything.

There’s no secret agenda written in his features. There are no inner thoughts bleeding out through his eyes.

Which is a first. Every time I meet someone, I see the image they try to present, but I can also sense what they’re really thinking, as if I’m looking through broken glass.

I can glimpse who they really are underneath the surface—but Earl Rinhold doesn’t seem to have another layer to view.

No. This can’t be right. Everyone has a mask.

It’s a strange thing for someone with my affliction to meet another person who is exactly who they present themselves to be.

Maybe it’s confidence? I wonder, trying to make sense of it.

Because I know not to doubt my abilities. My affliction is that I’m originally from a village, meaning I’ve been genetically modified and my bloodline is the result of generations of experimentation.

Something my brother likes to remind me of when I don’t give in to his demands.

But it’s the memory of my father that rises to the surface first, bobbing on an ocean of the past.

“What do you see, Scarlett?” he asked. I remember my father bringing me to a dark place with lots of people. I couldn’t have been older than six or seven.

But he was testing me.

“Never let them know what you can do,” my mother had said in one of my earliest memories.

“Just a bunch of men, Father.” I gave him the answer I’d been told to give.

Give them nothing.

He seemed relieved at the time, but I learned something about myself that day.

Because I had seen something in that room. Some men had been out of place, their eyes the wrong color and their thoughts terrifying enough to make me wary of men in general.

But the Elite City was made up of different kinds of men. One of them had been thinking about slitting my throat just to settle a debt with my father.

Mysteriously, he died not too long after that night. But I imagined my father had various ways of settling his debts—ways that I hadn’t been ready to accept until now.

The things I’d written about him in my notebook had broken my heart, but I wasn’t lying to myself about my father anymore.

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