Page 108 of Gilded Wicked Mirrors
But this was the first alive person—creature?—she’d ever examined. It was different. For one, she had to ask permission todo things before poking and probing. But before doing that, she needed to set up the equipment and control the sample.
She needed her blood.
Being relatively used to pain—as a dancer, she pushed her body to the edge of pain daily—she decided to prick her finger for a sample rather than draw it from her veins. She placed four drops onto a slide, her mind whirling with disturbing thoughts.
She kept going back to the threatening notes.
If Quinn didn’t find the killer or the mirror in the next three days, one of her friends would die. It wasn’t an empty threat. She knew it. But she was nowhere near getting answers, and instead of trying to find the killer, she was studying a vampire.
Her heart crescendoed, the pounding rattling her ears, and her hands trembled.
“What’s wrong?” Emrys asked. “I can hear your heart racing, and your face looks like you swallowed sour milk.”
Quinn placed her slide down, causing it to clink. “The killer threatened to kill one of my friends if I don’t find the third mirror, and instead of looking for it, I'm studying you . . . And I am going to let you study me. It’s foolish.”
“Do you think you can find the mirror when you’re frantic and upset?” he asked, his tone calming and smooth like honeyed wine.
“No,” she said softly. She could barely spell her name while in a frantic state.
“And what calms you down?”
“Dancing.”
“What else?”
She raked through her mind and settled on. “Science. Figuring out how things work.”
“Precisely.” He smiled. “That’s what you’re doing. You’re not wasting your time being here and studying me. You’re exercising your brain.”
“Oh.” How did he have the ability to put her so at ease and calm her down when he’d only everbeen an irritant before?
“And I promise, we’ll find this monster before the ball,” he said, his tone a dark conviction.
“You can’t promise that.”
“No, maybe not, but I can promise I'll rip out anyone’s throat who tries to hurt you or your friends.” He placed his hands in his lap, like he was waiting for her to proceed with her examination.
But instead of asking him to draw his blood, she said, “Are you still choosing a wife tomorrow?” She tried to flash a warm, supportive smile, but it came off more like an uncomfortable grimace, which matched his.
He nodded. “I have to.”
“Why?” she asked as she gathered the serums needed to test blood type. “You’re not bound by the accords anymore.”
“But my family is,” he said. “Some of the vampires that I’m responsible for are bound to the third mirror. If our secret gets out, they die.”
“Oh,” she breathed. “How does it work? Obviously, Kiara is not your mother.”
He visibly swallowed and played with his cravat nervously. It was an emotion she’d never seen him wear before and went against his whole careless persona. “We agreed in order to keep vampires a secret every twenty-five years I would marry a new bride chosen by the council to be New Swansea’s next ruler. A couple of years after the ball, my new bride announced her pregnancy, and she always had a baby boy whom we raised in Aberdare to keep him away from ‘the corrupt city’ until he turned sixteen. I use my glamour to age until I fake my death sixteen years after my son's birth. I then use my glamour to look sixteen while I return to the city and mourn my father’s death. And so, the cycle repeats with different girls.”
A new wife every twenty-five years, and he never got to choose them. He had no control over his destiny because he wanted to protect his vampiric family. It was a choice she didn’t think she could ever make.
Quinn was too selfish. She needed to control her life and destiny.
“How does no one notice the pattern?” she asked.
“The mirrors erase people’s memories if they get too close and don’t know about the Accords.” Now, her forgetfulness in the library made sense.
“Have you ever loved any of your wives?” she asked, not truly knowing why she wanted the answer. To satiate her curiosity?
