Page 11 of Blood Vows
The hospital. The demon patients. The screams that weren’t mine but somehow felt as if they were. The nightmare fused them until I couldn’t tell where one torment ended and the other began.
And behind it all, behind every horror, every shriek of pain, there he stood.
The darkness always wore his shape and called out to his victims.
Called out to me.
He shouldn’t have been there. Not this version of him, not the one that haunted the edge of every fear. He was the embodiment of everything I should have hated. Everything I should have run from. Yet at that moment, when the chains rattled and my pulse thundered, I called out for him.
Not out of fear.
But for help.
It didn’t make sense. He was the one who had invoked nightmares like this, the one whose shadows had clawed through my dreams and made me fear my own death. And yet, somewhere deep inside, I had stopped believing he would ever let anyone else kill me.
Because that darkness of his, it didn’t want to destroy me.
It wanted to claim me.
Even in my nightmare, I could feel it, the way his presence filled the void, his eyes gleaming through the smoke as he stepped out of the shadows. The world bled red around him. The chains above me snapped one by one, and the echo of his voice whispered my name through the air like a prayer or a warning.
Vanessa.
The sound of it made my heart twist painfully, even as the rest of the world fell away. And then, just as I reached out forhim, the scene shifted again. The blood, the bodies, the sound of tearing flesh, all of it dissolved, and I was alone in the dark, the silence deafening.
I couldn’t tell if I was still dreaming or if this was something else. Something that had followed me back from that night. Because it wasn’t just the warehouse anymore. It was everything. The kidnapping. The witch. The Erebus brothers. The betrayal. My life had become a loop of survival, of clawing through one cage only to wake up in another. Somewhere along the way, I stopped asking whether I even wanted freedom, and instead started wondering if I deserved the two men I had fallen in love with.
Maybe this was to be my punishment for loving them despite the curse. To live forever caught between one monster and the next. The price of loving somebody, of trusting them, had already destroyed me once. It had left me with mountains of debt, bruises that ran deeper than skin, and a lifetime of hardship.
And now, here I was again.
Falling.
Bleeding.
Haunted.
Only this time, I wasn’t sure if I was more afraid of dying at the hands of my enemies or being saved by the vampires who might have already stolen my soul…as they had certainly claimed my heart.Victor had reminded me of it too, his words laced with anger, throwing my debt back at me and warning me what would come the next time I put my trust in the wrong hands.
But I was starting to realize that a life in debt still meant a life of living. There was one thing to fear, the knock of a debt collector at your door.
But it was quite another to fear the New York vampire mafia bosses turning up and breaking it down to steal you away. To be used as ransom, a weapon against the very people who cared about you.
It was little wonder why I was trapped in this endless loop of nightmares. Each one was bleeding into the next, memories of the last few days merging into a single, suffocating reel of terror. The witch’s hands, cold and cruel, flashed in my mind. The way she’d used me, twisted me, played me like a tune she already knew by heart.
And behind it all now stood him.
Tal and Victor’s brother.
Vasileios Erebus
The one whose agenda did not, by any stretch of mercy, include me surviving this ordeal. My only hope was that somewhere in that cursed heart of his, a crack had begun to form. That perhaps, without meaning to, he had grown attached. Because if he had, then maybe, just maybe, when the time came to make his choice, I’d have a chance to live.
But dreams are cruel things.
The warehouse bled away, replaced by stone and shadow. I was no longer hanging but trapped. A cell surrounded me, the bars biting cold against my skin. I pounded my fists against them until pain jolted up my arms, raw and real.
“Let me out!”I screamed, voice breaking.
