Page 77 of Sold to the Dark Vampire Prince

“Here, I’m commenting now,” Ava said, thumbs flying.

“Please don’t. Watch skating videos. If the comments are traced back to us, it will be infinitely worse. Let me text Alex. I’ll see what he says.”

She chewed her thumbnail for a minute, debating what to say, and finally sent over a link to the article and a simple, Did you see this?

Three blinking dots quickly appeared.

Alex: Please ignore the tabloids. They’re all trash.

Dani: You aren’t the one they’re calling a whore.

Alex: I’m so sorry they’re targeting you. If it helps, they’re saying anything sensational they believe will get people to click on the article.

Dani: They made it look like Lara was dying and I was mocking her. She was faking it the entire time and I still brought her a chair.

Alex: Believe me, I want to roll my eyes every time I’m around Lara. I should have warned you. The media are like vultures, looking for any possible opening to make a situation appear like something that it isn’t if they think it will sell. You don’t have formal media training. I should have better protected you, but things were chaotic in there.

Dani: So you’re saying this is my fault?

Alex: I’m saying Lara’s father owns seventy percent of the media outlets. He can force them to write any story he wants. Just ignore it. This will blow over.

Alexander shut down his phone. He would have to deal with Lara and her constant need to manufacture drama another time. Right now, he and Henri had more pressing matters at hand.

“You ready?” he said to his bodyguard, who was pulling on a black facemask beside him.

“Just once, Your Highness, when you text and inform me that we have plans for the evening, it would be refreshing if you were referring to a hockey game where we consume far too many spicy barbecue wings.”

Alex squeezed his shoulder. They dissolved in a swirl of smoke, reappearing seconds later in the palace dungeons.

The air was noticeably colder, barely above freezing. Water dripped from icicles that hung from an exposed pipe in the ceiling. The lone guard on duty, who was shivering before a crude heater, started to shout, but was instantly quieted when Alex pressed a cloth doused in chloroform over his mouth.

While Henri checked the rest of the corridor to make sure they hadn’t been overheard, he went to the closest cells, where prisoners were already emerging from beneath painfully thin blankets at the futile hope of rescue.

“Can you get us out of here?” a woman in the first cell whispered hopefully.

She was small, coming barely to his shoulder, with dark, curly hair. Her hands were locked in front of her with silver manacles that gleamed so brightly in the dark, dank prison block, they almost seemed to glow.

Fae magic.

Inwardly, Alex swore. They were connected by a thin silver chain to a collar at her throat. Bindings like these were expensive, and very effective for holding vampire and werewolf prisoners. The silver alloy drained moon magic, preventing wolf shifters from changing into their stronger beast form and fighting back. Fae magic was required to hold the strongest vampires, and it effectively locked the prisoner in place, preventing them from scattering themselves into ash and escaping.

“When did they collar you? Do you know where the keys are kept?”

“The king has them.” A boy in the next cell, who couldn’t have been older than fifteen or sixteen, pressed his dirty face up to the bars. “He wears them on a chain around his neck.”

“You’ve never seen any of the guards with a copy?”

The boy leaned in, voice urgent. “The only time he removes the manacles is when he comes for one of us. You know, when it’s time for him to feed again.”

The boy sounded so terrified, and yet so resigned, that Alex wanted to be sick. “You’re aberrants.”

He looked down the row of cells, to the dozens of faces staring back at him. He wasn’t naïve. He knew his father had been kidnapping magically gifted humans off the streets for decades, driven by the insane belief that draining their blood and their life energy might somehow increase his own strength.

Had it? He couldn’t be sure. He held few memories in which he hadn’t feared his father. As a child, he’d told himself the king was feeding from the prisoners he captured, and letting them go. That it was wrong, as any feeding that happened without consent was wrong, but… this went so horrifyingly beyond that he wanted to be sick.

As he’d gotten older, he’d been forced to accept that his father was a monster, slaughtering humans like they were just another cut of meat at the butcher shop. Judas Visconti was far from the only cruel and sadistic vampire out there. There was a growing movement in vampiric society that wanted to stop treating the killing of sanguines as a taboo topic. He recalled what Finneas had said, that the race of vampires would, for better or worse, have to decide for themselves what sort of society they wished to become.

Thirty years had passed since the pandemics had fractured society, dividing the world into wolf and fae, human and vampire. Alexander sometimes wondered in the generation that had passed since the world fell and rose again as something new, if some of his kind, those who hadn’t had the benefit of being raised by human mothers like him, had lost their compassion entirely, had forgotten how very close they once were to those they wished to treat as a food source, animals to be hunted and killed without thought or consequence.