Page 56 of Bloody Kingdom

“You saw me rip those men apart,” I remind her. “You watched me kill people tonight.”That. Is not okay. She needs to be shielded from the bloodshed of my world.

Her face hardens. “We don’t mourn the lives of rapists, Silas. We dance on their graves and celebrate that there’s one less evil person on this planet.” My mouth opens but the finger she presses against my lips promptly silences me. “And before you spew some bullshit about you also being evil, just know I don’t want to hear it. I’ve heard enough of that tonight, there are much bigger things I want to talk about.”

Sighing heavily, I place one last kiss to her temple before moving to sit on the bed beside her. “I suppose there are some things you would like to discuss.”

“That’s putting it mildly.” She sits back on the bed, her bare legs crossing under her.

“Where do you want me to start?”

“We can start at the beginning, but you should know something first. I found the room in the basement.”

Many things have been confirmed for me in just a span of a couple hours. First, my mother’s drunk ramblings were right. Vampires are real and Silas is one of them. Two, they’re as deadly as the lore makes them out to be. Silas ripped a man’s head clean off with little to no effort. Three, Silas fucks like a god. It doesn’t matter how many different ways I’ve imagined what it’d be like to sleep with him, nothing my mind could conjure up would compare to the real thing.

There isn’t a drug on the market that could recreate the euphoria that filled my every cell as Silas fucked me. Much like a drug, I’m hooked on him. I just had him, but I already need him again.

Now isn’t the time to be thinking about sex, but my brain can’t help but wonder.

Silas’s face hardens, his lips flattening into a stern line when I admit I went searching through his office and subsequently his shrine in the cellar. There was no point in keeping it a secret from him. He would have found out eventually, besides it’s better this way. This way he can’t try to keep me in the dark on certain things that I already know about.

“When?” he finally asks after a moment of tense silence.

“A couple days ago,” I tell him honestly. “I could sit here and tell you that I’m sorry I snooped through your private quarters, but we both know I’d be lying. We also know you don’t like liars, so let’s push past it and keep going. You can be mad at me later about it.”

Silas swallows hard. “Did you touch anything? The items are irreplaceable anddelicate, Quincey. They’re not to be handled.”

My hand reaches out to touch his thigh reassuringly. I find that I don’t enjoy the way he stiffens at my touch, but at the same time, I know he has a right to be upset with me. No matter how desperate I was for answers, I still betrayed him by invading his privacy and going against his explicit orders to not ever enter his wing of the house. “No, I promise I didn’t touch anything. It was all so old I knew I’d damage it if I did.” I pause for a beat before asking, “Just how old are we talking, though?”

“Are you asking about the age of the items in the cases or my age?”

I bite my lip nervously. “Both I suppose.”

“The items vary in age, but most of them date back to the seventeenth century.” I knew they were old but hearing just how old is still shocking. “The same century that I was born.”

My eyes widen. “That would make you—”

“Almost four hundred years old,” Silas answers before I can finish. “Three hundred and eighty-seven, to be exact, but there’s no point in keeping track anymore. Age is irrelevant to me. I will remain the same for the rest of my days.”

He’s over three hundred and sixty years older than me. I’ve always been attracted to men older than me, but this takes it to a whole other extreme. He’s lived through so much of history. My measly twenty-four-years of life mean nothing in the grand scheme of his life. My decades of life are a mere blip in time to him.

I want to react, want to jump up from the bed and ramble on about how insane this all is, but I remain seated next to him. “How…” I clear my throat nervously. “How long have you been like this? A vampire?” That word still seems absolutely ridiculous to speak aloud now that I know they’re real.

“I was turned just after my thirty-first birthday,” Silas explains. “It wasn’t my decision to become what I am. It’s a life I never would have chosen for myself.”

I knew this without him having to tell me. Who in their right mind would choose to be a vampire? Being bound to the night and feeding on nothing but blood does not seem like an idealistic life. “It seems incredibly lonely.”

“It is,” he admits. “Getting attached to humans is never wise. If you’re in a location too long, the whispers and speculation start when you don’t age with time like the rest of them. Plus, human lives are so short and watching people you grow fond of die year after year when you will never know the peace of death yourself is taxing.” His midnight black eyes lock on to the painting across the room. It’s more modern than the pieces in his cellar or at the estate. “For many vampires, they take mates. It’s less solitary to go through this life when they have someone by their side.”

“A mate?” I repeat. “Is that like a wife or something?”

Too antsy to sit, Silas stands from the bed so he can move freely through the expansive—albeitdestroyed—room. I haven’t gotten around to asking him what happened in here yet. It looks like a tornado went through the room. “No, it’s not the same. When you’re married, you’re joined by law. A simple piece of paper declares that you belong to another. It’s also easily broken by a divorce. Taking a mate binds you to them by blood. The connection is permanent. The only thing that can break the bond is death.”

“So, the ‘death do us part’thing is very literal for vampires?”

Silas scoffs under his breath. “And a vampire’s life is very long, taking someone as your mate should never be taken lightly.”

The woman’s things preserved in the cellar come to mind. Awkwardly I ask him about her, “Did you ever have a mate?”

Silas’s pacing screeches to a halt, a pained expression crossing his devastatingly handsome features. I think he’s going to say yes, that she was his mate, but he shocks me by shaking his head. “I’ve never taken a mate because I had a wife.” He doesn’t look at me as he talks, it’s almost as if he can’t. “She died shortly after I was turned.”

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