Page 40 of Claimed

I don’t know what that means exactly, but I do know it means that my mother’s ability to turn into the scariest of monsters is linked directly to her desire to protect me.

My mother showed me who I was. This vampire is showing me who I am not.

I am a she-wolf, fully realized, but I may as well be a pup dangling in his arms. I am helpless, controlled, and captive. I don’t know if a shift is possible, but I don’t want to fall from the sky by becoming impossible to hold.

We land many miles away and I am put into a vehicle with the vampire. From there, the journey is blanketed in darkness. The moment I am put in the car, the vampire wraps a black velvet blindfold around my eyes.

“Relax,” he says. “This will be over soon.”

His words do not bring the slightest bit of confidence, but I have no choice.

I am so deeply exhausted, and entirely under the vampire’s influence that I find myself dropping off to sleep. By the time I am aware of the car coming to a halt, there is daylight creeping in underneath the blindfold.

Don’t vampires have to avoid the sun? How is he functioning? The power of this being is deeply concerning.

“Come,” he orders as the car stops.

I have no choice but to do as I am told. My body is already moving. He is speaking to a part of me that has been taken by his consciousness.

I am led inside some kind of structure. Finally, the blindfold is removed. My surroundings are relatively modern and brutalist in style. We’re talking polished concrete and steel construction, the kind of house that is so cool it looks entirely uncomfortable to actually live in.

I used to wonder who would live in a place like this, but it makes sense now: vampires. Vampires don’t need softness like normal humans do. Rattling around in a big square gothic place with next to no windows makes sense for them.

The vampire, Dom, is with me. There are many others, but they are not in our immediate vicinity. They move around, doing their own things, speaking to one another in a blend of languages both dead and alive. I can hear them echoing now and then as they open and shut doors elsewhere in the house or whatever this place is.

He leads me into a room that has a bed in it, which immediately feels odd. It has the look of a bed that was made once and never used. Vampires don’t sleep the way we do, I think. Either that, or this is the guest room of the guest room of the guest room. The guest-iest room that ever was.

“This is where you will be staying,” Dom says. “You are allowed to decorate it as suits you.”

That seems like a generous offer, but I don’t understand it. I don’t know what the point or purpose of this is. He clearly has some kind of agenda, and some assumption that I will be staying.

“How did you know where to find me? Like, where in the castle?” I start with a couple of simple questions that he might answer. He likes explaining his abilities, I’ve noticed.

“I told you. I would always know where you were.” Dom smiles at me. “You consumed the blood of my progeny, and in doing so, you consumed a little of me.”

“Yeah. I know. We swapped spit or whatever. Drank from the same vessel.”

“That is an admirable description, actually,” he says. “We did drink from the same cup. Well, I drank. You destroyed it.”

“Needed to be broken,” I say.

“Maybe. But, regardless, that is why I know you. Why I can find you, why you are, in some sense, my child.”

“That’s stupid.”

He looks at me with an ancient kind of indulgence. “Is it?”

“I’m your mortal enemy. I’m a wolf. I’m not your child. And okay, I might have killed your kid, but those thralls weren’t your children. They were your food supply. If anything, I’m the dog that stole your dinner.”

He throws his head back and laughs.

“That might be a more accurate description, but this has become a political matter. For political purposes, you strike me as a fatherless little thing. It will be good for you to have somepaternal influence. And, by taking you as my child, and you being the mate of the alpha, that creates an alliance between our houses, which is a good thing to have when one wants to avoid wars that have been brewing for quite some time.”

He explains this all in very slow tones, raising his brows to make the point that I have clearly missed from the outset.

“Elena was right? The vampires are coming for the shifter packs?”

“The vampires are rising,” he says. “It is cyclical. If I want to protect the packs as I always have, I need to make alliances that place them under my protection. In the past, I have mated with a shifter female. But you, sweet little thing, are already mated, and I find you charming. So I will take you as my child.”

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