Total pages in book: 72
Estimated words: 65871 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 329(@200wpm)___ 263(@250wpm)___ 220(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 65871 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 329(@200wpm)___ 263(@250wpm)___ 220(@300wpm)
“Impressive, wolf, you’ve managed to turn your own mate against you.”
“Unhand her,” Alexei growls.
“I don’t think I will. I think she deserves better. And you’re still not married, are you? Not even a proposal, Alexei?” He tuts. “Not really good enough, is it?”
“Anya! Come here!” Alexei repeats the order, but I do not move.
“She can’t,” he says. “I won’t allow it. I told you, Alexei. I am her father. And you…”
Alexei shoots him right between the eyes. It does nothing. The UV bullet sizzles between his brows for a short moment, then the metal part of it simply falls to the ground with a light tinkling sound.
“You cannot harm me the same way again, unless you have one of your ultraviolet bombs on hand, and Elena assured me you had no more. She wanted very badly for me to command my armies to stop their march across Europe. Do you want that too, Alexei? Or will your arrogance mean you turn a blind eye to the suffering of thousands?”
“Let my mate go. She doesn’t want you.”
Alexei avoids the question. It’s not a fair question. Dom is trying to draw him into a position of responsibility for the atrocities that are being perpetrated by his kind.
“Of course she wants me. My blood still courses in her veins, and all the potions in the world won’t change that.”
“You’re playing with her mind! It’s not real. She’s not choosing you.”
“She never chose you either. Nor did you choose her.”
“What? I chose him!” I pipe up.
Dom looks down at me with a sort of pitying expression, as if he understands something I do not, but should.
“You’ve never chosen any male. Be it instinct or infection, you’ve been puppeted by biology. You and Alexei are fated mates. There’s no element of choice in that. He did not have the choice to choose you. He had to. Just as you had to choose him. The only one of us who has ever made a decision was me. I chose you, Anya. After you ate my progeny, I could just as easily have destroyed you. It would have been the proper and correct thing to do, after all. I alone made the decision to want you, to take you, to love you. Me. Not him.”
I stare at him and realize that he is right. There is no flaw in his argument. I have never chosen anything. I have never achieved anything. I have never done anything besides what was somehow preordained.
In this bickering, we have all forgotten something. I am not the only woman who has been loved in the passage. Vlad has been standing silent, too silent, and far too still since he came on this grisly scene. I do not think he has been able to process it. Seeing one’s mate dead and drained, left on the ground like a discarded snack packet has to be a sight that twists the mind until it snaps.
As his brain breaks, Vlad charges Dom. He lets out a roar of rage as it finally sinks in that the mate he had only just found has surrendered herself unto death in an effort to prevent a war. Elena is gone, and it is because nobody would listen to her. She was desperate enough to sacrifice herself to try to achieve what she believed in. And now her mate is trying to avenge her death.
It takes Dom less than a second to kill Vlad. He snaps his neck the way a farmer kills a chicken, without any malice or difficulty. Vlad’s body drops heavily into the embrace of his corpse mate, a terrible cruelty inflicted before my eyes.
There are now two bodies in the hall. This is going from bad to worse in a hurry. I do not think I can handle the toll that is being exacted all around me. It is all too terrible. It is awful. There is so much death, and it feels as though there has always been death when it comes to Alexei. Our every interaction has been marred by it.
I do not know how to react. I cannot begin to. Could not even if I wanted to. I am numb. The terribleness of what I have just seen will haunt me to the end of my days.
I look at Alexei. He has to fix this. Somehow, he has to make this right. But how? It seems entirely impossible to me. This situation is devolving into a deadly tit for tat that has no obvious end.
“You have killed my brother,” he says flatly. I have to wonder at his state of mind now, seeing what he is seeing, barely reacting to the most terrible of atrocities. “You have destroyed my most trusted advisor. You have infected my mate. And you have escaped the bonds I put upon you. You are going to regret this, vampire. Anya. Come. Here. Now.”