Page 1 of Blood So Brutal

Chapter 1

Huntyr

The sound of my heart beating became the one thing that reminded me I was still alive. I slipped my bloodied, bruised hand up to my chest and felt it there, thud after thud.

Vampyre.

It was impossible, right? I would have known if I was one of those violent, depraved bloodsuckers. I would have known if I’d spent my entire life killing my own kind. But my twenty-fifth birthday was right around the corner, and vampyres didn’t develop cravings until then.

My head fell back onto the metal bars behind me. The damn archangel had no reason to lie to me. If he believed I was the heir to the vampyre kingdom…

Hells. The missing pieces in my life were exactly what he needed to make sense of it all. I never knew my real parents. Lord was the one who raised me, who told me the story of who I really was.

Did he know? Had he known all along? Maybe that’s why he shipped me off here. Maybe he knew my twenty-fifth birthday was approaching, and he wanted me to be somewhere far, far away when my cravings for blood developed.

Tears stung my eyes, but I blinked them away. I wouldn’t cry down here in these dungeons, not with the enemy watching every move.

Asmodeus and his errand boy, Luseyar, visited every day since they shoved me into this cage. Asmodeus would insist I show him my magic, and I would tell him time and time again that I possessed no magic.

I was starting to believe it myself.

Footsteps in the distance skyrocketed my already-racing heart. I grew accustomed to those footsteps over the last week or so, and I could identify the all-powerful archangel easily. He was always walking too fast, too eager.

But these footsteps were different. They were slow. Lazy. I could picture the way Wolf walked with that annoying swagger of confidence, his massive wings trailing on the ground behind him as if he didn’t care enough to pick them up.

My thoughts halted.

Wolf didn’t have wings. Not anymore.Not after his own father cut them off for not exposing my magic.

Good. He deserved it.

Wolf’s wings being taken from him was one of the hardest things I’d ever watched, but I wasn’t going to let him manipulate me. I wasn’t going to letthemmanipulate me. I couldn’t trust any of them anymore, not after what they did.

Wolf tricked me.

He made me think he truly cared about me, made me think I couldn’t get through the Transcendent on my own, and for what? So he could keep tabs on me while delivering me to his father?

He probably never felt anything for me, either. I could picture him laughing at how foolish I was, at how easily I fell into his trap.

Anger swarmed me again, followed by a sharp pang in my chest. Every time he came down to these dungeons, I was reminded of how stupid I was to trust him, how naive I was to think he actually cared about me.

No, he was working for his father, Asmodeus. This was all part of their master plan to find the last living heir to Scarlata Empire.

None of it was real.

For all I knew, his wings getting sliced from his body wasn’t real either—just another way to manipulate me, another way to turn me into someone they could control. I turned my head away from the front of the cell as Wolf approached. When his footsteps stopped a few feet away from me, I held my breath.

“Huntress.” His voice was a mere whisper. He hadn’t been in here since that night, since his bloodied body was dragged from the floor outside my cell. The mark of his blood still stained the floor, alongside a sole black feather to remind me of the atrocity.

I squeezed my eyes shut and pushed my hand deeper into my chest, shoving my fingernails into the skin to distract me from the ache festering there.

“Can you at least look at me?”

I kept my mental shields up, forcing myself to pull as far away as possible from our bond. It was a difficult task, but for a few minutes at a time, I could separate the messy emotions that combined in a raging tornado within me. My anger, his resentment; it all added to that never-ending ache in my chest I could never escape from.

I hated him for what he did to me. After everything, I chose to trust him. Hells, he was a vampyre and he hid that from me our entire time at Moira Seminary. Still, I chose him. I let himdrinkfrom me, for fuck’s sake.

And here I was, trapped in this disgusting cell with nothing but a bucket to piss in.

---