Page 52 of Taken By the Vampires
More.
They’d give anything for me.
And if they wanted to do that…
They could also help Mom.
My brain stuttered, thoughts crashing and coalescing into one big, shocking, unbelievable, answer-to-my-prayers realization. “You can…” I swallowed.
Hard.
I knew what I needed to ask of them. I knew what it would cost them. I knew the leverage would be a lie. I wasn’t their savior – theirmate. Xander’s words were too unbelievable to be true
But theythoughtI was.They thought those words were true.
My stomach twisted in on itself. Cramping and wringing like a damp dishcloth.
I was about to use it against them.
If it was being asked of me, I don’t know how I would answer a request of this magnitude. If I’d have that capacity in my heart to agree.
They weren’t only cursed, they’d been imprisoned. Their lives reduced to feeding off unfortunate stray animals that wandered into their perimeter. The times when no animals came, they would have starved.
Their lives had stopped while generations had been born and died. The world had changed so, so much.
How had they remained sane?
Despite knowing everything they had gone through. Everything they’d endured. The wrong that ultimately been done to them. Despite all that, I still had to ask.
The question was born of desperation because Iwasdesperate.
Because I could take Mom to another city in another corner of the world, and she still may never be cured. Because they offered certainty. Because one sacrifice was worth another.
The irony of the situation wasn’t lost on me. What I was about to ask. It was…too much. I couldn’t possibly but…
I glanced at Xander. He looked…resigned. He knew what I was going to say. What I was going to ask. I knew I shouldn’t. Asking to do the same thing that had cursed them for centuries, but the way I saw it…
The way I saw it they asked just as much of me.
The silence around me was weighted when I spoke, “I will stay with you. Be your mate. Freely offer my blood…if you cure my mother.”
And it was a lie, lie, LIE.
I would use them and then I would leave them.
I wanted to be straight up and tell them I wasn’t their mate, that another woman would eventually come to free them but it wasn’t me.
Instead, I was going to lie to them. I needed them to do something that had ultimately damned them to a horrible carbon copy of a life. A ragged semblance of living.
I would use them as Ginevra had used them. And I would curse them all over again, because I had to do it. Had to ask. Had to…blackmail.
I was no better than my distant relative. In three hundred years, some things hadn’t changed at all.
Long moments stretched and I saw the reality of my words as they fell down around all of us. I wished I didn’t need to ask this way, didn’t need to leverage something they wanted so much against something I wanted so much, but that was the way of the world.
I was desperate.
I’d live with the consequences later. Because the one thing I did know, was that life was filled with consequences and most of them were bad. I just had to deal with that later and hope the fall-out wasn’t too cruel. I would beg and pray that God would bring them their true mate one day. That they would soon be released from me when Fate understood it had made a mistake. I couldn’t help but feel that I was reinforcing something horrible my distant relative had started.
