The Vampire King's Abused Human Mate

Chapter 3

Lucianus

She was as beautiful as I remember in the dress, trimmed in the blood gold of my station. Our station. My lips twitched as she glanced around and walked cautiously toward the main table. I remembered how timid she’d been the first time she’d dressed for dinner like this, as a proper vampire noble. She was as timid and as beautiful then.

I couldn’t help myself from touching her. The warmth of her sent a thrill through me as I thought about her could fading body from so long ago. I taster her skin and shuddered. I wanted more of her. The way that she had trembled and squirmed beneath me.

Looking back, I realized that her fear had been reasonable. It had been years since I had considered what I looked like to anyone. I preferred to spend my days drifting through the castle as little more than a wraith before going to the human world to catch my next prey.

I had missed her so much. To have her back like this, so completely untouched by time, made that battlefield from so long ago seem like nothing more than a distant memory, a nightmare.

She smelled just as she had then. My servants had done well to find her usual bathing scents and add just the hint of her old perfume. She smelled the same way she had the last time I’d had her in my arms, in my bed.

I winced as I thought about the perfume. I would have to beg her forgiveness for the spilled perfume, but all of that would have to wait. Perhaps if I kept her occupied through the night she would not be as upset and I would have time to replace the bottle.

The thought of getting her beneath me, naked and writhing as I thrusted into her warm, willing body sent chills through me. I had missed her with everything in me. The simple pleasure of waking up next to her. She twisted in my arms, a soft pleasured moan escaped her as I rolled her nipped between my fingers beneath the fabric of her gown.

I pulled away and lifted the sheet to reveal dinner for the evening.

I frowned down at the humans that were on the table, narrowing my eyes. They all looked young enough. The woman seemed the youngest of them all, but there were too few men of the right age for her tastes.

She had always preferred the taste of young men, though she had never had the pleasure of draining one to death.

“Forgive me, darling,” I said and looked at her. “It would see that tonight’s menu is a bit lacking for your tastes…”

She didn’t move. She didn’t speak.

“Darling?”

She said nothing, staring at the bodies on the table, still draining into the barrels below. How odd for her. Perhaps she was too hungry to speak, too shocked that I had managed such a feast for us in such a short mount of time.

I poked the open wound in the man’s neck. The scent of blood hung in the air and made me smile. I remember capturing this man soon after I had brought my wife home.

He’d been feisty. Then terrified when I threw him to the staff to prepare. The woman had gone catatonic before I had even dropped her in the kitchens.

“So quiet?” I asked, taking our two goblets, cast in blood gold and rubies, from the cabinet below. “Did you expect something else for your welcome home?”

How could she not think that we would renew our pact after so much time apart? How could she even imagine that I would not acknowledge the timer she had been lost to me. Did she think that I had passed these centuries without her without guilt? Without remorse? Had she no idea the turmoil her death had brought to our world? How empty it had been without her?

Not my wife. She would know how much I ached with every moment we were apart. She would know. Perhaps she was just coming to terms with all the years apart.

Maybe she too had just wished I had taken her when I’d found her rather than resisting the desire and organizing this grand feast. I filled the two glasses from the spigot and set the smaller of the two glasses in front of her. I lifted the bigger of the two to my lips and took a deep swallow.

Out of the corner of my eye, I saw her staring up at me. Pale and ill-looking. She turned and vomited over the side of her chair with a loud, heaving wretch. Something splattered onto the ground. The scent of bile and sadness filled the air.

My heart lurched with a fear that I didn’t want to acknowledge. I pushed that thought back to the back of my mind. That fear had no place here. It would all be fine as soon as the pact was complete. She had been in the human world for too long.

I set the glass down and jumped to my feet, rounding the seat to get to her as she pushed herself out of the chair, stumbling away from the throne, retching and stumbling.

I grabbed her by the arm to steady her and lifted her glass from the table. This had to be done. For us, for our future and any hope I had of her being with me into the future.

“Easy,” I said gently. “Just take two sips, okay?”

My lips twitched, watching her tremble and shake as I lifted the goblet to her mouth. She heaved and sipped, shuddering. I watched the liquid get lower in the goblet and felt the rush of it before she reared back and shrieked.

“Get away from me!” She pulled away, stumbling away from me. She crashed into the table and cried out as one of the bodies rolled off the table. “Get away from me, you monster! Don’t touch me.”

I listened to her. Her words drifted through my mind as she screamed and tried to get away from me. I watched her legs falter. I watched her sway until she was in the center of the hall, collapsed to the ground, and curled into herself, rocking.

“Please,” she gasped, sniffling and trembling. “Please, just let me go home. Please let me go. Please let me go.”

I set the glass down and looked down at her as she sobbed. The joy faded and turned cold as I realized that this woman, this human, wasn’t my wife. The bit of delusion I had allowed myself faded quickly like an extinguished flame.

She looked like her. She smelled like her. The lilt of her voice was the exact same. Had she simply held it together and played along, I may have never realized the difference. I could have deluded my self into thinking the trauma of the war had taken her memory.

But she wasn’t my wife. The woman who had died and grown cold in my arms centuries ago among the blood and fury was gone forever.

It had been foolish. I had been wrapped up in the joy and hope that had surged in me at seeing her that I had ignored everything else.

The taste of her skin was much too spicy, like thrumming blood and cinnamon. The scent of her hair had a faint scent that wasn’t common to our world.

Her eyes were younger, much younger than I ever remembered my wife being. Even when I had first met her, she had the eyes of an ancient vampire, hardened by war and the strife of the lower classes.

Perhaps she was my wife, perhaps that was not even her name, but it didn’t matter. She was not my wife. Thus, she was nothing more than a body full of hot blood to me.

I sighed, shaking my head and looking at the goblet. It was done, but it wasn’t something that I had to worry about. A blood pact with a human meant nothing to me. It would wear off with time and vanish with her death.

And there was no one else in this world or the world above that I would ever consider tying myself to in any case.

I lifted my goblet and finished the blood inside, relishing the warmth and richness of it before finishing her glass as well, as she began to wail and sob even louder. She sounded weak. Pathetic, like every other human I’d ever captured.

She would understand their pain and perhaps more than any of the other. Getting rid of a blood pact would take time. Perhaps she would starve to death or simply die of old age in my dungeon.

Neither gave me more joy than the other or more sorrow. I felt nothing.

I looked over at the servants who stood off to the side, frightened and wary.

“Take her to the dungeon.”