Two bulky vampire guards entered the room, they lifted me up from the mattress. My legs gave in, I was too weak to stand on my own. They took hold of my arms and dragged me from the room as Thane’s sister followed.

They took me to another door a little further down the passage. My head dropped forward, I didn’t have the energy to be able to lift my head.

In a large room that looked like some sort of torture chamber, they set me down long enough to tie rope around my ankles. I couldn’t stop them when they put a hook around it. Chains clanked as the hook lifted into the air and I found myself upside down. My arms hung toward the floor.

“You are really going to enjoy this Avery,” Thane’s sister said as she approached me with a knife.

Before my training I would have been shaking with fear but now I steeled myself against the pain I knew was coming.

I had no energy to fight her as I hung at her mercy.

The knife gleamed just before she held my right wrist. I gasped as she slit it, my warm blood gushed from the wound. I clenched my teeth, in response to the sudden pain. Before I would have cried out in pain but the cruelty Eve had shown me countless times had increased my threshold for pain. Thane’s sister smiled as she watched me suffer.

“It’s going to get worse,” she promised. I closed my eyes momentarily.

She reached for my left wrist. This time I knew what was coming. She slit the wrist. This time I whimpered. Blood gushed from both wrists and pooled on the floor beneath me. For a moment I remembered the blood I had taken from Silas. It was draining from me. I watched my life source drain from me. My body burned like it was on fire, it was a pain worse than the skin deep cuts she had inflicted.

“Do you want to die yet Avery?” Thane’s sister asked, sounding like she was enjoying every moment.

I refused to beg like she wanted. I was being stubborn, it was the only defiance I could exert. Besides I didn’t believe for a second that she would give me that reprieve.

“I won’t let you off that easily,” she sneered.

I didn’t expect she would so I didn’t bother to respond besides I was far too weak to even try and converse with her. My eyes shut and I concentrated on each breath I took, while my body burned like it was on fire. The pain was something I had never experienced before.

I groaned as I felt the fire in every inch of my body. There was no survival instinct, there was only suffering in each breath I inhaled and exhaled. I lost consciousness.

When I came around I was back in the cell on the musty grey mattress.

The slits still sore and red but blood no longer gushed from the wounds. I could barely lift my head. Each breath took more energy than I thought I could manage. I drifted in and out of consciousness.

Then I opened my eyes. I could smell it before I saw it. There was a glass of blood in the middle of the room. It was so close yet so far. It was only a few feet from me but in my condition it felt impossible to get to.

I closed my eyes briefly, trying to muster what little energy I had to reach the blood. My mouth quenched when I imagined how it would slide down my throat. It would stop the pain, that was tormenting my every moment.

That’s what propelled me forward. It felt like every breath, every movement was executed with the sole goal of getting to the blood that would ease the pain and quench my agonizing thirst.

There was no giving up or stopping. There was only one goal, there was no room for failure.

I pulled my body slowly along the floor, taking a moment to ride out the pain but the smell of the blood kept me going.

When I finally reached it, I tilted the glass to my mouth with a shaky hand. Some blood spilt but I swallowed a large gulp. Instantaneously, it slid down my throat easing the burn and the pain. Fearing that if I drank it too quickly I would throw up, I stopped myself from gulping another large amount. Trying to give my body time to adjust to the blood.

I don’t know how long I had gone without blood but I didn’t want to take any chances. Not when I had the opportunity to replenish.

It took all the will power I had not to drink the all of it in one go. I sipped it slowly, giving my body time to accept blood. I still couldn’t be sure it wasn’t poisoned but I couldn’t stop myself.

I was at the mercy of Thane’s sister, a puppet that had no control in the grave situation I was.

Could I even hope that this was some sort of empathy even when I doubted it?

I finished the glass and lay my face against the cold floor, feeling my body slowly begin to ease from agonizing pain to an ache. For a while I lay before I attempted to return to the mattress where I lay watching the door, not sure what to expect next.

A few hours later the door opened and a guy set another glass of blood down in the middle of the room. His eyes met mine for a fleeting moment before he retreated without a word.

This time I had more strength so I crawled to the glass. I made sure to drink it slowly like I had before.

This didn’t make any sense. Why would she feed me when she was hell bent on making me suffer?

I had hours to try and figure out what she was planning but nothing made any sense. Was she trying to build me back up so she could break me again?

It was the only thing that made any sense.

I lost track of time but eventually when I was laying on my side I heard footsteps. They weren’t as heavy as the ones where the guy had brought me blood. I wasn’t surprised to see Thane’s sister when the door swung open.

“I see you’ve been drinking the blood,” she observed as she studied the empty glass still in the middle of the room.

“Why?” I asked, my throat was still sore. It would take more than a couple of glasses of blood to get me normal again.

But I was thankful the pain was gone. When I thought back to how much I had suffered, how much suffering she had inflicted on me I trembled.

Out of everyone, she was the cruelest I had encountered and that was saying something.

She moved closer to study me like I was something that had crawled out of the gutter.

“I found out some interesting news and couldn’t wait to share it with you.”

My anxiousness skyrocketed. This wasn’t going to be good. The satisfaction on her face was enough to tell me that whatever she was going to reveal would hurt me.

For a moment I had a panic that something might have happened to my sons but she threw a photo on the floor in front of me.

I lifted myself up be the elbow to reach for it.

The couple in the photo hit me in the chest like a sledge hammer, leaving me breathless like it had unfolded physically.

It was so unexpected I didn’t school my reaction and Thane’s sister watched with satisfaction as my emotions played across my features. There was no way to hide the impact it had on me or how it battered my fragile heart.

It was a picture of Silas, with a woman. The woman was beautiful, with long blonde hair and striking eyes. But it was the way they stood together. It implied a togetherness.

“This photo was taken yesterday. The woman in the photo is his fiancé. He is to be married.”

A togetherness I had yearned for with him. I swallowed hard, fighting back the tears that gathered in my eyes.

“I feel sorry for you,” Thane’s sister said, but her tone held no sympathy. “I think you really thought he cared about you. But our kind only value yours for your ability bear our children and fight our wars.”