There were no tidy punctures, but rather skin torn open, the flesh raw and exposed, blood oozing from the wound. I’d given the rats a better death when I snapped their necks in Greymere. A painful crush of feeling hit my chest. Guilt? Shame? It pressed against my ribs, my lungs. I was no better than an animal.
“You’ll get better at it,” he said quietly.
The words were meant to be comforting. I didn’t take them as such. The numbness was gone. The thirst was gone. And now the bliss of drinking was gone.
Which meant I was left with the anger I’d been nurturing.
It was his fault I’d been turned into a monster.
“I don’t want to get better at it!” I jumped to my feet. The movement came easily now. Power coursed through my veins, as potent as lightning.I want to be away from him. I crossed the cell to get away from Raphael in a split second, unused to myvampire speed.No, I want to yell at him.I turned back around, my emotions ricocheting. Raphael stood, fixing the cuffs of his shirt while staring at me.
And, gods curse me, I stared at him too. It was as if I’d never seen the vampire king before. As a mortal, I might as well have been blind. With my enhanced vision, I could see every part of his face as easily as if I was in daylight. His hair was longer. I was acutely aware of every strand that curled around his ears, the very tips stained red where they brushed against his open skin. His eyes weren’t simply red; they were shifting crimsons and carmine, with pupils a shade of red just a feather before black. His lips looked hard, but I knew how soft they would be pressed against me.
There was anger still there, more potent for my new strength. But there was also another emotion. One that had only bubbled under my skin. Now I was surrounded by it.Want. Not for his blood, but for everything else he was, for the way I could let myself see something like care and concern in his eyes.
No. He turned you. You’re a monster now, like him. You can’t trust him. You can’t want him.
I slammed a palm to my forehead as the reprimand cut through my mind. It was too much. Hate and desire warred. Everything had been so numb, and now the two were potent poison, sour and bitter on my tongue.
“Turning heightens all your emotions,” Raphael soothed.
He could still feel my emotions? I slammed my mental barriers back up. I hadn’t paid them any mind since being down here—I hadn’t known if the mental walls could survive his betrayal. Hadn’t cared. But clearly they did.
Or I was just transparent.
Or Raphael was used to all these questions from fledglings.
Iademos had said I was the first he’d agreed to turn—
I slammed the gates down on that mental path. Too many contradicting thoughts hit me, but each one was like a strike against the flint of my anger, making me burn.
I surged forward until we were inches apart. “How could you?” I demanded, tipping my head back to glare. I slammed a fist against his chest. “How could you?”
Raphael said nothing, just tilted his head, eyes crinkled.
I ignored any concern I might have imagined in them and pounded again. With my vampire strength, my strikes surely hurt. He was strong enough to stop me, but he didn’t grab my wrists. I hit him again and again. “How could you do this to me?”
I tasted salt at the corner of my lips, mixing with the copper tang of the vampire king’s blood. Tears coated my cheeks as I beat my fists against his chest over and over, until even my hands ached, my skin cracking over my knuckles.
“Why are you letting me hit you?” I snarled. Somehow, his acceptance of my blows made me even angrier. I was nothing, a weak, barely undeadvampirebecause of him. He had centuries to build strength, but he just took them all. “Why won’t you say anything?”
Raphael caught my fists at last. His hand was so much larger, my fingers nearly looked like a child’s. He caressed my chapped knuckles, and I felt that sensation more acutely than any other touch.
“I will accept any pain you offer me as penance, little viper,” he murmured. “I can only hope one day you’ll forgive me. But know, even if you do not, I regret nothing.”
Nothing?The fight inside me disappeared like smoke, the new strength fading as defeat slammed into me.
“I told you I didn’t want this.” It was hard to see him, my tears clouding my vision. “You knew I would rather—”Die. I choked on the word.
“Attempting to lie will be painful,” he cautioned.
I glared up at him. “Because you turned me into this godsforsaken state,” I snapped. “And it’s not a—” My throat tightened again, the word turning into a wheeze.
“Yes, it is,” he growled. For the first time since he’d come down here, some anger slipped out. “Above all else, you’re asurvivor. You can lie to yourself, little viper. But you will not be able to let an untruth pass your lips.”
The anger returned, matching his own fury. “I don’t care what you’ve convinced yourself of. You told me you’d respect my wishes, and I told you I would never want this. I never wanted to be anything but mortal.” There. That wasatruth.
But Raphael didn’t back down from my anger. “And now you’re somethingmore. You were bleeding out in my arms, and I had seconds to act. If you didn’t want me to turn you, you should never have put me in that position to begin with.”
