Page 1 of A Heart Of Bitter Poison
CHAPTER1
When you’re a vampire, emotions aren’t just feelings that live trapped in your chest. They have scents. Colors. They have flavors.
Betrayal tastes like copper. Like blood in your mouth.
Like a coin for the ferryman.
I know what you’re thinking.But, vampire, blood technically tastes likeiron,not copper. Maybe to your limited human senses it does. And you’re right, there is a difference. A subtle nuance. But I don’t just taste the blood. I taste the meaning behind it too.
Iron is the symbol of strength, like the bars that hold me in this cage.
Copper is the symbol of love.
And nothing in any realm is more dangerous or corruptible than love. Nothing is more lethal. Nothing cuts deeper.
No betrayal is worse than when it’s delivered by the hand of someone you love.
Like the Reaper and me.
I close my eyes and that moment is so clear. Struggling to stay up on my feet, hoping that I’d live long enough to just tell him. I wanted him to know I was in love. I expected him to fight for me.
Except he didn’t. Quite the opposite, in fact.
Turns out, my love belonged to me alone. And it was used against me. It lured me right into this fucking cell. And even worse, it clings to me, unwilling to let me go. I remember every whispered word in the dark. Every long and heated look. I can still feel every touch. And I just can’t seem to convince myself that it was all an illusion, even though every day in this place shows me otherwise.
“You’re thinking about him,” Ediye warns. Her dark eyes shred me with a suspicious, all-knowing glare. When you’ve been friends for over three centuries, it’s hard to get away with hiding your thoughts.
The Reaper’s voice floats back to me from the time we sat in the restaurant on the way to Ediye’s house.You have a very expressive face,he’d said. Which had almost sounded like a compliment, at least until he opened his mouth again.It is a disadvantage for a vampire. You should work on that.
What a dick. Or, as Ediye and I have dubbed him,ThatAsshat Reaper Motherfucker.
I roll my eyes at myself. I’ve spent the last hour vacillating between thoughts of how shitty life is and thoughts of the Reaper, and neither are the kinds of thoughts I want to be wallowing in. Not that I have much choice, really. It’s not like the Shadow Realm has furnished us with comfort or entertainment in our threadbare stone cell.
So, I refocus my attention on the only positive thing left to cling onto. Ediye.
There’s one thing that will take my mind off everything,I say in sign language. Ediye gives me a dead-eyed glare; she already knows what I’m going to say.Sing it again.
Ediye shakes her head, her expression resolute. “God no.”
Please.
“Why? You’ve already heard it sixty thousand times.”
Only seventy-eight.
“That’s seventy-seven too many.”
I’m sad. Cheer me up.
There’s a long silence. I give Ediye my most innocent doe eyes from where I rest my head in her lap. It’s not a challenge for me to look pathetic either. I haven’t eaten in days. My face is puffy and swollen from torture and tears. A fever rages through my body. Sweat mists my brow no matter how many times Ediye sweeps it away with the rag she’s torn from the edge of her shirt.
And worst of all, I’m fucking broken-hearted.
“Look on the bright side, babe. At least you didn’t mate with him,” Ediye says, her eyes darting down to my torn shirt where a scar would now live above my heart if I had.
I heave a heavy sigh and look away. Because the truth is, the idea of mating withThat Asshat Reaper Motherfuckerhad crept up on me. And, like a dumbass, I was considering it. I was even starting tolongfor it.
The thing is, I was just so lonely. It had been centuries since the last of my sisters was stolen from me. Centuries of hiding, centuries of living a transitory existence among humans, their lives so fleeting. So, when I had no choice but to be attached to the first immortal aside from Ediye in three hundred years, it didn’t take much convincing for me to let my guard down.
