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She shook her head. "Don't worry. I'm not here to feed from you." She reached into her jacket and removed Icarus's old Colt. "I'm here for this."
Perhaps I should have felt shocked. Or scared. Or ... something. Instead, a weary numbness settled deep into my bones. Holding her gaze, I rose from the cot. She raised the gun a little higher in warning. I raised my hands out to the side and raised my chin. "Just be done with it."
Her eyes widened. "You're not going to ask me to spare you?"
I shook my head. "What's the point?"
"You're pathetic," she spat.
I lowered my arms. "What do you want from me? To beg for a life that never belonged to me in the first place? To fight for the chance to let another set of masters use me? I'm done being anyone's whore, Dare." I jerked my head toward the gun. "Do it."
The gun lowered a fraction. She stared at me intently for a full thirty seconds before she spoke. "What did they do to you?"
I squeezed my eyes together, but a traitorous tear escaped to roll down my cheek. "Just do it," I gritted out through clenched teeth.
"Six? Look at me."
I heaved out a harsh breath and opened my eyes, prepared to let her have it for dragging this out to the point of torture. But when I saw the look on her face, the numbness was burned off as hot anger roared to life. But before I could scream at her or rush her and punch the pity from her face, she spoke again. "You stink of them, you know. Their scent clings to you."
Now it was shame's turn to make an appearance. "Then you know what they did."
She tilted her head. “I thought the concubine thing was just an insult because you spoke on behalf of the Troika."
I laughed bitterly. "In exchange for my services to the Troika’s propaganda machine, I was passed around like a trophy among the highest level vampires. It was something of a badge of honor to vein fuck Alexis Sargosa's daughter." Now that I was talking, the words spilled out like bile. "Some only kept me a few days. Others claimed me for months, a couple for years. Those ones delighted in turning me into their personal slave. I did everything from clean their silver to playing a starring role in their sadistic games. A few were kind compared to the others and educated me to amuse themselves. One or two preferred me to fight back so they taught me how to use weapons and my fists. Then they’d delight in disarming me and delivering punishment for being too good a student. But mostly I just served as a blood dispenser."
She'd lowered the gun and crossed her arms. "That's why you finally left. You couldn't stand it anymore?"
"No." Now that I'd admitted so much, I decided it wouldn't hurt to offer one last confession before I met the maker. "I left because after enduring their tortures, they found the one invasion I could not endure."
She frowned.
I laughed, but the sound felt flat to my own ears. "You haven't put it together yet?" I didn't wait for her to confirm what I already knew to be true. "Several months ago, the Prime came to me with good news. I was going to be given a great honor. The Troika officials loved my sweet blood so much that they were going to make me the first brood mare in their blood stables."
Dare gasped softly but I was beyond offering consolation.
"According to him, I was going to be put in a special dormitory and given my choice of men of high blood with whom to mate. If any of the children I created turned out to be AB-, they would be raised in the most favorable conditions and be given the honor of becoming concubines to the top Troika officials."
"And if they weren't high blooded?"
I looked her in the eye and ignored the phantom pain in my stomach. "Aborted."
The silence in the room was complete. Unlike the last time, it wasn't a silent gulf that kept two foes separated. Instead, those quiet moments were filled with shared knowledge of duty and loss and the longing for a tiny heartbeat against the skin.
“The night I left?” My hand went to my belly. “They just had informed me that I was to be impregnated again. I couldn’t go through that again—the loss.” I looked up again and saw empathy in her yellow gaze. “But more than that, I was terrified it would work this time and they wouldn’t abort it. How could I doom a child to my life?”
She watched me silently for a few moments. Tension zinged through the space between us like lightning. Finally, she sucked in a long, slow breath. "How can you say you want to run? They took your mother. They took your life." She stepped forward and pointed at my stomach. "They took your child. They took your choices away. How can you just run when you have every cause to turn around and fight back?"
I blinked to stall the tears. "Because I want a chance to live for whatever time I have left."
She snorted. "Running isn't the same as living."
"Unbelievable." I shook my head at her. "You walked in here ready to kill me, but now you're angry that I'm not trying hard enough to live."
She made a disgusted sound and shoved the gun into her rear waistband. "I wasn't going to kill you. He just told me to scare you a little until you agreed to help us."
I crossed my arms. "That's what I don't get. Why would you want the Troika's whore to help you?"
She licked her lips and glanced sideways. "Look I-- I'm sorry about that. But see it from my perspective. You showed up all glowing and healthy and with your reputation preceding you. How could I not be suspicious of you?"
