Page 37 of Vampires & Bikers

Then he said, “You were close to her once, I believe?”

“That was a long time ago,” I finally said.

I didn’t know that he knew about that. Harris was even more connected and better informed than I’d realized. Years before Vlas was crowned our king, Taheeraand I had spent one night together. I was younger then, more of a party animal and a player. She was an attractive woman and she had come on to me. I went with it, turned on by the way she was pursuing me but the experience became unpleasant. She liked to dominate and became quite violent with me. I played along to a point but when she started hitting me, inflicting pain, I told her to stop. She then promised to tone it down but her fangs were out and she wanted my blood. I had pushed her away and she’d never forgiven me for that. I had avoided her since then.

When I heard Vlas was thinking of marrying her, I had tried to warn him, but she was from one of the oldest vampire families and their union solidified Vlas’s power. She was ambitious, though, and I didn’t like that.

I had tried to talk to Matteo about it, but he had changed the subject. “She’s our queen,” he had said stiffly and I didn’t push it. He was extremely loyal to the royal house.

Whenever I met her after that, she pretended not to know me.

It was like she’d never seen me before.

But I knew better.

Chapter 17

Ruby

They come to me in the dark.

I don’t know them.

Their voices are unfamiliar to me. They talk to me, pick me up, put me in the chair and ask me questions. I have stopped answering them. They hit me, punch me, smack me. There is blood running down my face and at some point, I spit out a tooth but they have lost the power to hurt me.

I don’t feel anything anymore.

Instead, I go back to the past, revisit my memories.

I think of how Grace and I would drink at the club, after our shift, exhausted from many hours of working. We would drink shooters and get drunk and silly, sing songs and compare notes of the evening. That was our thing, the silly competitions. Who had the worst shift or the worst job. Sometimes, it was who had the worst date ever or the worst sex ever.

It was usually split fairly evenly between us.

The thing about Grace was, she hadn’t given up yet. Even though she had to dance at a club and had to endure drunk customers harassing her, grabbing her and sometimes even trying to force her to have sex with them, she always managed to look on the bright side. She’d say she would get out someday, that we were both going to get married and raise our babies together. The thought of which always made me laugh out loud. I was never going to have children. Why not? Grace wanted to know, she said she wanted a whole messy house of at least four to five children.

But I knew how hard it was to have children, how many things could go wrong. My mother had lost many babies and they never knew why. I was the only child carried to term and for years, she had carefully watched over me, scared that something would happen to me. Especially in a place like Buzzard Creek, where life was cheap and accidents seemed to happen more than elsewhere.

The bond between us had been close from the start.

“You are special,” my mother would tell me every night when she put me to bed. “You are my Ruby, a jewel of priceless value, the most precious of any gem.”

My father loved me too, but he was more distant. I knew that my health and happiness was of paramount importance to my mother. If something happened to me, I don’t think she would survive.

When I was bullied in school, I didn’t tell her. I didn’t know how she’d react if I told her Tammy Sullivan kept shoving me into the dirt, stealing my lunch every day and calling me a little bitch. The school I went to was outside of town, there weren’t that many shifters. Tammy was one of the HH or higher humans, whose DNA had been enhanced and improved. The higher humans were taller, smarter and often, more attractive. Most lived in the Capital but there were some in the rest of the country. They tended to look down on the shifter families as being trash.

I endured Tammy’s bullying for a while but when it started escalating, I decided I needed to fight back. I took a knife from our kitchen and one morning, when I walked to school and found my way blocked by Tammy and two of her friends, I knew what to do. When she told me to hand over my lunch, I refused. When she came closer, warning me to do as she said, I pulled out the knife and warned her to get back. She laughed at me and I never reacted well when anyone did that.

I threw the knife at her, not really taking aim, but it found purchase in her shoulder. She fell down, screaming. I pulled the knife out and ran to school, throwing the weapon away. When I was called in by the teachers and asked about the incident, I denied it, saying Tammy was trying to get me into trouble. They didn’t believe me but there was no proof. I’d warned Tammy’s friends that my father’s shifter friends would come for them if they talked.

That was the end of my bullying.

But there was nothing I could do in my present situation.

I couldn’t fight back in any way. They had the upper hand and they knew it. I only had my mind to hide away in and I found that it had more hidden chambers than I’d thought. Beautiful places I had forgotten about.

I thought of the river trips we’d taken in the air boat when I was younger, out in the swamps, passing the mangrove forests and the birds out there, flapping their wings. We’d felt so free back then, young and strong. I loved being out in nature like that, away from the town. It felt like we could do anything, go anywhere.

I tried to remember my friends’ names, they were kids from school. There was a Frankie and Mungo. What had become of them? Frankie had gone away, I think to the army. But Mungo? He'd always been a free spirit, didn’t like to follow the rules and didn’t exactly respect authority. He didn’t finish school and I hadn’t thought of him in years.

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