Page 70 of Ruthlessly Mated
I am not going to be the one to tell Kita he has killed Tailor. I do not want to acknowledge it or admit it myself.
He leads me down the hall to a cell where Kita is at the bars, clinging to them with fury.
“Alexander! Why are you like this? This is stupid. I’m not going to get you the heart back if you do this to us. Let me out. Let us all out. Then, maybe, if I’m in a really fucking good mood, I will think about getting you the maker’s heart.”
“Kita, if you keep acting this way, I will eat you.”
“No, you won’t.”
“Do not mistake the fact that I have not done it yet for the idea I will not do it at all. I am thousands of years old. You are a snack. I have not spared you because you are special. I have spared you because you are the human equivalent of the crumbs on the floor of my larder.”
“Good speech,” she throws his attitude right back. “I’m a crumb with your maker’s heart.”
He opens the door and thrusts me into the cell with her.
“Good luck,” he says. “She is entirely uncontrollable.”
She waits until he disappears, a feat that takes all of a second. He doesn’t burst into bats. He’s just… gone. I am sure he could come back just as quickly.
Kita looks at me, throws her arms around me, and bursts into tears.
“I’m so glad you’re alive,” she sobs. “I’m so sorry. Again. I’m sorry again. I’ll spend my whole life being sorry about the things I do to you. And I just keep making it worse.”
“Don’t worry,” I say, holding her close. “It’s going to be okay. We are going to make it okay.”
“We’re trapped here, and he’s not going to let us out until he gets what he wants, and I can’t give him what he wants.”
“Slow down. I need you to explain what the hell is going on. I thought the vampire hated you, but he clearly doesn’t want you dead. Tell me everything.”
We sit down on the bed, which is a stretcher with a mattress and a thin pillow and no blanket on it. It’s not stained, but it gives the vibe of being stained.
She starts babbling. “He’s like my dad. Sort of. Stepdad. Dad I want to kill. Dad who killed my dad. If that’s what a dad is. I feel like it’s not really. My dad used to mow the lawn, and I’ve never seen Alexander mow anything. He kidnapped me after he ate my parents when I was about seven. And he took me here, and he…”
“Raised you as his own?”
She snorts. “He’s not really the raising anyone as his own sort of vampire. He’s busy. Travels a lot. Kills a lot of people. Terrorizes villages. Dominates other vampires mercilessly.”
“What did he do with you all the years he had you here?”
“Well, he forgot about me for most of them, I think. I lived in the castle. He had a cook and cleaners and I could go out during the day. I ran away a few times, but there wasn’t really any point. There wasn’t anywhere to go. I’d been taken a long way from home, and I didn’t know how to get back, and there was a bed for me at his place, and I got fed, and I could go to school if I wanted to.”
“He didn’t hurt you?”
“He hurt me by ripping my family away from me and then carrying me off like a hamster he forgot. He hurt me by making me understand how to live only by stealing and running, and being an asshole, because there was nothing to do other than learn how to be a criminal. If my family had raised me, I’d probably be an accountant. But no, he didn’t kill me. He didn’t beat me. He didn’t remember me most of the time.”
I think about that for a moment. “Is that why you did that? With the heart? Were you trying to get his attention?”
“No! Of course not!”
She blushes a little and I think I have gotten close. She may want revenge, but she also wants to be acknowledged.
This very personal psychodrama now involves a whole fucking war with humans. I assume the Rock City siege is still continuing. It’s not that uncommon, I suppose, for wars to be based on personal spats. Most of them might be, actually.
Tailor died because our mate started a fight with her surrogate daddy.
“You’re angry at me,” she says. “I’m sorry.”
We keep telling her these things aren’t her fault, but I am starting to consider that it’s very possible that quite a few things have been significantly impacted by her decisions. Like the one to run away while Damon was bleeding out.
