Page 11 of Will It Hurt?

So I forced myself to traipse lightly across the shallow expanse of Nat’s mind, casting aside the useless anxious ponderings until I arrived at the crux of his nerves.

“Belle?” Still naked from the waist up, I turned to face him with crossed brows. His eyes were on the ceiling as he attempted not to stare at my nudity.

“What have you found?” I demanded.

“Please don’t kill me,” he babbled, trying to hand me the laptop.

“Don’t be silly.” I took the device from him gingerly, holding it with the tips of my fingers. “If I wanted your blood, you’d have been an empty bag of flesh a long time ago.”

I stared at the laptop. Technology was not my best friend.

Something about flashing screens and tiny keypads didn’t come naturally to me.

I had a tendency to flinch at bright light and struggled to hit a single key on most keyboards, which meant that I often avoided all technology except for my iPhone— that was easy enough to navigate if I was forced to make a call.

I set the grey brick on my vanity and pried the device apart.

Nat padded closer and draped something soft against my shoulders.

A robe to cover my breasts.

Fine, I thought, shrugging it on. If my nakedness bothers him so much...

The laptop lit up. From my limited experience with these things, I was aware that I needed to give them time to turn on. But the screen was already filled with a message.

TRAIN JOURNEY BOOKING CONFIRMATION

LDN EDI

16:00 - 20:30

It was dated five days ago .

“So, Belle’s up north?” I asked, turning to glance at Nat. “That’s where she’s been hiding?”

“I…”

Oh shit, oh shit, oh shit.

Nat’s inner cursing was driving me up the wall.

He leaned forward and tapped something into the keyboard. A bead of sweat dripped down his forehead and landed on my robe.

Another notification popped up.

This time, the message made me freeze.

“It can’t be.”

Nat stood back abruptly, his heartbeat thundering with a wild rhythm.

“I’m worried that she may have done something drastic.” He swallowed loudly. “After what happened with the boy…”

I watched my nails lengthen and sharpen, turning into deadly points as frustration curled through me. The polished oak of the vanity suffered beneath my claws.

Curse it all!

The chair scraped backward, screeching loudly against the hardwood. Nathaniel grimaced, but didn’t back away.

I studied the screen again, tracing each word with my gaze.

ACCEPTED: APPLICATION FOR VOLUNTARY NEUTRALIZATION

It was inconceivable. No, preposterous.

Belle wouldn’t have taken such drastic measures. Not without consulting me first...

“Where is Indira?” I asked, only belatedly realizing that shards of wood had come off the vanity and embedded themselves under my nails. The sting was nothing compared to the worry that gathered between my ribs.

“In her chambers,” Nat said. “Awake. ”

Chapter Four

Jinn

I had no doubt that we presented an odd image.

Me, taking long-limbed strides across the courtyard in a silken robe and bare feet.

Nat, hefting the laptop and scurrying behind me as quickly as his short legs could carry him.

I heard the rasp of his breathing—a habit he had yet to break from his human days—and the anxious tumbling of his thoughts as we crossed the labyrinthian halls of the Mészáros Estate.

It was a curious place that had once filled me with terror.

I remembered the chill of the rain and the spark of thunder as I’d walked to the estate’s iron gates over a hundred and fifty years ago, soaked to the bone.

My sodden loafers had squelched in the gravel as I’d dragged myself up the steep slope to confront whatever awaited me beyond the imposing marblesque columns.

Now, I called it home.

The layout of the estate was an anomaly.

Visitors often commented on the wide open courtyard and the wrought iron railings with a mixture of awe and confusion.

The truth was that a Hungarian Count had modelled this freestanding building after his home in Budapest. He’d wanted all the comforts of home within the debauchery of London, or so the tale went.

The stone walls had once been a stark white, but they had long since turned a deep, foreboding grey, seasoned by centuries of wind, rain, and snow.

Ivy crawled along the walls, twisting in forked tendrils that seemed alive—some days, I quipped to myself that they were the only things alive in this house.

The darkened courtyard was quiet, the cobblestones beneath my feet smooth. A heavy mist had drifted from the city, the smell of petrol fumes and the general stink of humans descending over the open space. A cherub-centered fountain pulsed in staccato jets as we rushed past.

Above, arched windows were barely lit from within. One or two rooms glowed a deep orange, but most were still silent.

In the many years I’d spent within Mészáros, the estate had been several things. A headquarter for the Night Council of Vampyres, a refuge for lost souls, a hideaway for undead criminals…

The list was endless.

But through its interminable iterations, there was one constant: Indira Maghendra, overseer of Mészáros Estate, and the person I had the misfortune to call Mother.

Indira didn’t appear the least bit startled as I barged into her room a minute after sundown.

She seemed… poised, almost. No, that wasn’t the right word.

It was as though she was posing for me as she lounged in the freestanding copper tub with her toes curled over the edge.

Her hair, a hue of inky black I so admired, was piled on top of her head in a style more suited to the century I’d been born into.

“Jinn.” Something about her tone indicated that she’d been expecting me.

“Indira.”

We had long since divested ourselves of formal titles—mother, child, family. It was an unnecessary mimicry of banal human lives. Indira, centuries older than I was, preferred honesty over farce, and under her tutelage, I had divested years of British niceties to access the true animal I was.

Today, however, the sight of her made me pause in the doorway.

Nat came crashing into my back with a muffled oomph. I decided to ignore him.

There was something different about Indira—a kind of softness I hadn’t seen before. She stared back at me with a questioning look as I studied her in the bath, my gaze tracing the plump curve of her cheek and the set of her lips.

There!

As she moved, the corners of her eyes crinkled, the creases more obvious than ever before.

Indira was a Blood Wytch—a powerful cross between a vampyre and a wytch, the only one of her kind…

That I was aware of. She had been turned in a vampyre attack on her coven centuries before I’d graced this earth, and the brutality had left her at death’s door.

She had crawled back from it, inch by painful inch, only to find herself changed.

Not entirely a vamp, but not entirely a wytch either.

We had all assumed that our honorary mother was immortal like the rest of us, but the new creases on her skin was proof that she… wasn’t?

The thought sliced through me uncomfortably.

But that wasn’t my priority right now.

“Is this about Belle?” Indira asked with a relaxed purr as she dragged her perfectly polished nails over the tub.

Rouge was her color palette. Every corner was lined with deep red, from the upholstery to the carpets to the little ornaments of dancing pigs on her side table.

I wondered if someone had once said the color suited her, and she had since made it her life’s ambition to surround herself with it. They weren’t wrong. With her naturally dark skin and black brows, the smattering of rouge on her cheeks and lips made her seem…

Ravishing.

No, that wasn’t right.

Ravished would be a better description.

As Indira lounged in the tub, her handmaid watched us from the shadows, her posture reverent as she waited for a command.

A thick black ribbon sat flush across her neck—a sign that she had already been drunk from this evening.

The ribbon wouldn’t be removed until twenty-four hours had passed, just in time for Indira’s next drink.

A second handmaid drifted in the background, idly dusting a display cabinet.

Unlike me, Indira tended to switch between donors often.

Why limit yourself to tea at an open bar?

It was a refrain she often uttered in my presence.

What I hesitated to explain to her was that I preferred a meal that would not disappoint. Time and again, I used the same donor. Months, years, decades. The last donor had stayed with me for over twenty years before family commitments had taken her away to the country.

I had wished her farewell with nothing more than a firm handshake and an envelope with crisp notes.

“Rando blood” as Nat would put it, held no interest for me.

Indira snapped her fingers. The handmaid stepped forward to sluice water over her exposed shoulders.

“You know it’s about Belle,” I said as I watched her.

The last few days had descended into a hazy nightmare. I’d spent our waking hours hounding the nest for Belle’s whereabouts, the passing time only escalating my fears.

Everyone, including Indira, was quick to remind me that this wasn’t the first time that Belle had vanished. And while that was true, this was the first time she’d disappeared while upset.

I crossed my arms and met Indira’s dark gaze.

“I have a feeling you’ve known where she was all along.”

“Yes,” she confirmed, sighing in bliss as the handmaid scrubbed her with a scented cloth.

“Why didn’t you tell me?” I demanded. “You saw how worried I was…”

“That’s your problem, Jinn,” Indira sighed. “You worry too much.”

“Worry too—” I choked on the words. “Belle is my child, my creation. Imagine if one of your children went missing—”

“Ah, but I’m not stupid enough to turn the unworthy.”

A pounding began between my brows. “Belle is not unworthy.”

Indira speared me with a look. “She is weak, Jinn. She struggles to control her darkness. It takes over her too often.”