That night, Cassius didn’t leave.
I sat with him and bandaged his hand, even though he argued about it the entire time. Then we both lay down in his bed; I was under the blankets while he lay on top of them. I was still in jeans and a sweatshirt, and Cassius still had on black jeans, although he had taken off his shirt because it had gotten blood from his hand all over it. He lay bare-chested on top of the bed as the candlelight flickered against his defined muscles, and I watched his chest rise and fall as he stared up at the ceiling. We hadn’t said anything about what had happened, and nothing at all about what he had said to me following the outburst that resulted in his hand punching the wall. I was too scared to ask him what he had meant…I was too scared to think about how I might feel depending on his answer.
“Why don’t you usurp the rule from your brother?” I asked as I lay on my side with the blankets wadded in my fists and watched him.
“Athan is not my brother,” Cassius said without turning to face me.
“I’m sorry,” I apologized. “I know that. Why don’t you take your rule back from Athan?”
“It’s not that simple.”
“Why not? You’re definitely stronger than him. You even told me that yourself. You’re a Dhampir, and he’s just a common vampire.”
“Athan has many followers that support his rule,” Cassius said, void of any emotion.
“But your servants seem to be more willing to follow you than they would be to follow Athan. Don’t you want to stop him from continuing to threaten you?”
Cassius turned over to me so quickly on the bed that it scared me. He lay on one shoulder, which propped him up just high enough to hover over my face. “Don’t you think I want to overthrow that cruel and power-hungry bastard? Of course, I do, for fuck’s sake. But I don’t want to rule . I can’t rule. Why is that so damn hard for everyone to understand?”
I looked up into his eyes and noticed something that I hadn’t before, an internal conflict that boiled over inside him, one that he was trying desperately to quell, but that kept resurfacing. It wasn’t that he didn’t want to rule; it was that he was afraid of what ruling would turn him into. He was afraid of turning into his father.
“You might not be like him,” I said softly.
“Who?”
“Your father.”
Cassius laughed. “You don’t have any idea what you’re talking about. You don’t know me, and you don’t know anything about this world. You’ve been here all of what, three days?”
He was right; I didn’t know anything. But I did know the look in his eyes, vampire or not. I knew all too well what it was like to struggle with yourself against what called to you, and maybe someday I would tell someone about what I had gone through before I had ended up dancing in the city’s subway stations. But for now, I just lay alongside my immortal captor, and for a reason I that still had yet to figure out, I pushed him toward what was calling him.
“You can’t just keep distracting yourself with self-indulgent revelries and playing the fool forever,” I said.
He rolled over onto his back and continued his blank stare at the ceiling. “Watch me.”
The door was locked, and Cassius was beside me like a watchful guard dog. So I let myself fall asleep. This time, in my dreams, we were drowning, both Cassius and me. I gasped for breath until Quinn’s hand pulled me up from the surface of the water. And when I reached down to grab onto Cassius, his mouth opened as he tried to speak with bubbles escaping from his lips.
“What are you doing to me?” he said.
* * *
In the morning, there was a fresh set of clothes and a towel laid out beside the bed for me. Cassius was no longer beside me, but I could hear water running in the shower from off the corner of the room, so I knew he was still here. I got up and went over to the table at the edge of the room and helped myself to a cup of fresh coffee and the top corner of some kind of muffin. His servants must have already brought all of this in, and I must have been in a seriously deep sleep not to have heard any of it. I was a slave to him, too, and I wondered what the other servants thought when they saw me asleep in his bed. I mostly wondered what Quinn would think.
When Cassius walked back into the bedroom with nothing but a small towel wrapped around his waist, I nearly choked on my coffee. His body was the stuff of dreams for every woman who had ever watched one of the sexed-up vampire movies or fallen in love with the deeply disturbed, supernatural bad boys. He was only partially dried off, and water droplets ran over his pale, glistening muscles as he walked. He shook his head so that his dark hair, which was much longer than Athan’s, whipped around him and sent a spray of wet rain across the room. Then, he walked over to where I was standing and poured himself a cup of hot coffee. The dark circles under his eyes were intensely purplish.
“Do vampires ever sleep?” I asked, wondering if it was normal for them to just stare at the ceiling all night, and also wondering if he had indeed gotten any sleep at all.
“Not when they are plagued by the annoyance of a dancer in their service,” he chided.
I stood next to Cassius as he took the first sip of his coffee, and I tried to resist the temptation to look at him more than I should be.
“I have something for you,” he said. “For tonight.”
I rolled my eyes without thinking. “Another party?” I asked. “And I’m dancing again?”
“Yes,” Cassius said as he walked over toward a dresser and pulled the top drawer open. He returned with one hand held behind his back and the other bringing his coffee cup back to his lips.
When I tried to tilt my head around his shoulder to see what he was hiding, he smiled and pulled his hand in front of him to show me. I took the black ballet shoes from him and turned them over to look at. They were gorgeous. The black satin ribbons were long enough to tie around my entire calf. Normally regular ballet shoes didn’t even have ribbons attached to them, only pointe shoes. But these were unlike any shoes I had ever seen. They were such a deep and inky black that they reminded me of Cassius’s eyes.
“Thank you,” I said. “But why are you giving these to me? Do all of your dancers get these?”
“No.”
“Then why—”
“Do you like them?” he interrupted.
“Yes,” I answered gratefully.
“Then there isn’t anything else to know,” he said. “I’ll have Quinn come and fetch you after your shower.” Cassius grabbed an armful of clothes that were hanging against the back of a chair.
“Where are you going?” I asked.
“To prepare for my party, of course,” he said as he resumed his detached air. “Don’t worry; the door is heavily guarded. No one will be coming in or out of this room without my permission.”
The party that evening was even more full of people than the previous one had been. I wondered how it was possible to throw giant revelries almost every single night. But apparently, revelry was something that vampires enjoyed, and Cassius was famously known for throwing the best and most flamboyantly indulgent parties, which drew great numbers of partygoers and lasted well into the following day. I was starting to lose track of time; without being able to see the passing of day and night, it all seemed to be blurring together.
When I walked into the main hall with Quinn, Dregon was there in Athan’s place. I found it amusing to think that perhaps Athan was too intimidated by Cassius to attend his festivities tonight, although I had no proof of whether or not that was the case. I didn’t like Dregon. Even when I knew him as “Greg” at Inside Out, he always had kind of given me the creeps. Now that I knew he was Athan’s second-in-command, he creeped me out even worse. Quinn seemed to have the same feeling about him because he watched him suspiciously as we entered.
“What’s up?” I asked him when I noticed how concerned he seemed to be by Dregon’s presence.
“He never attends Cassius’s parties,” Quinn said as he tilted his head toward Dregon’s direction.
I shrugged, not knowing anything about most of these people or their relational dynamics. One of the lace straps of my dress fell over the tip of my shoulder as it moved, and Quinn gently lifted it back into place for me. For a moment, his finger hesitated on my skin.
I was already getting kind of used to being dressed up in new clothes each day. I guess that what they said about being a prisoner was true; after a while, you get used to it and even start to get excited about the bone you are thrown, like a caged dog.
The dress was black lace and some sort of gossamer that clung to my body in the way I would imagine a wet butterfly wing would cling to itself. It reached the middle of my thighs and matched the deep-midnight ballet shoes that Cassius had given me. I had wrapped the satin ribbons all the way up to nearly my knees. Sen was with Quinn when he came to pick me up from Cassius’s bedroom, and when she saw my wild, loose hair hanging down to my waist, she offered to braid it for me. In a matter of seconds, she had nimbly twisted two long, black tendrils of hair that started at the top of my head and stretched down the back of my neck like reins. Sen seemed fascinated by my light-blue eyes and told me that she had never seen anyone who had such dark hair with such starkly contrasting light eyes. I told her that made us even because I had never seen anyone with cat-eyes before. She laughed, and I immediately liked her. I thought that brought my friend count here up to two now.
“Hello, poppet,” Dregon said as he approached Quinn and me.
I grimaced and didn’t want to answer him. Who uses a word like poppet anyway? “Dance with me,” he said, grinning.
“No, thanks,” I answered as I moved my stance a little closer to Quinn.
“That wasn’t a request,” Dregon said, without the grin this time.
“Mara answers to Cassius,” Quinn said. “Not you.”
“She’s a slave,” Dregon said as he grabbed my hand from my side and pulled me toward him. “She answers to any vampire who calls her. Feel free to run and tell your master I said that.”
I saw Quinn’s eyes narrow and his mouth open as if he were about to throw some sort of curse at Dregon.
“It’s okay,” I said quickly to avoid making another scene. “I’m sure one dance will be fine.”
I hated that I even said that, and I hoped that Quinn would still go get Cassius. Cassius seemed to be playing the dual role of both my captor and rescuer.
As Dregon pulled me to the center of the room to dance among the crowd of swaying vampires, I noticed that he didn’t seem to be dressed in party attire as the other people did. He looked as though he were wearing some kind of militant uniform, probably to support his ego, I would imagine. I tried to make small talk as he wrapped his arm behind my back and took my hand, hopeful that it would make the time pass quicker and keep him from trying to do anything other than dance with me.
“So, are you here on business or pleasure?” I asked as I glanced down at his uniform.
“Both,” Dregon answered.
“Is that smart?” I asked, pretending to be coy. “Mixing business and pleasure, I mean?”
“I always derive pleasure from the jobs I do.” He pulled me closer toward his chest as we moved across the floor. His grip was tight and uncomfortable. “In fact, you’ve just helped me remember that I haven’t claimed my prize yet from the last job I did; the job where I brought you and those other dancers through that stupid game last week.”
Wow, has it already been a week?
“What kind of prize?” I asked.
“I always make sure I take a prize for myself with every job I complete as a reward for my efforts. I think maybe I’ll take you as my prize this time. You can be my pretty pet and concubine.” His fingers had started to dig into the sides of my waist.
My heart started to beat faster as my nerves raced out of control. “I don’t think Cassius would like that very much.” I tried to steady my voice, but the shaking was still noticeable.
Dregon laughed and let go of me as the music paused. “I don’t think I care what Cassius would like.”
As soon as I was freed from Dregon’s hands, I ran toward the door, hoping to find Quinn still standing there. But instead, Cassius was just walking in. When he noticed the look of fear on my face, he immediately grabbed my hand and pulled me tightly beside him.