My Blood Awakened, His Reign Ended novel · Chapter 1 of 24
Chapter 1: The Blood Altar
In front of the whole Court, Lucian bleeds Isobel for the human he favors, postpones their blood pact, and gives her bridal chamber and wedding dress away. She cuts the dress to pieces and is thrown in the dungeon, where a man in the next cell says her mother's name.
At noon, in front of two hundred courtiers, Prince Lucian opened my wrist over the Blood Altar and filled a silver bowl.
He did not look at my face once.
He looked at the bowl, and then at the door, where the human girl was waiting on a chair.
I slid down the altar's black edge with my sleeve soaked red.
Nobody in the hall moved to help me.
Lucian carried the bowl across the floor.
Lenora drank it with both hands.
The color came back into her cheeks so quickly that I noticed it, and then I noticed that I had noticed.
The old scar under my left ribs throbbed the way it always did when the knife went in.
I had never known why.
Lucian knelt and pulled her against his chest.
"Does it still hurt?"
"Not anymore." Lenora wound her arms around his neck. "I only feel awful. I've kept you waiting for your blood pact with Isobel."
"Don't." He pressed his mouth to her hair. "You're what matters."
I held the altar and made my legs lock.
"Then don't wait," I said. "End it. I won't marry you."
The hall went quiet.
Lucian rose slowly, and his face went dark.
"Isobel, I gave you my word. You don't have to say cruel things just to make it harder on Lenora."
"I said it because I mean it."
Lenora took a shaky breath. "It's my fault. She's waited two hundred years for you. If she wants to curse me, she can."
Lucian stroked her back.
When he looked at me again, his eyes were flat.
"The blood moon is in three days. We'll hold the pact then. What is there to be so upset about?"
I had nothing left to say to him.
In three days, I thought, it would not matter what he decided.
Lenora held out her shawl as I passed. "Isobel, you're shaking. Please take it."
I took it, because my hands were cold, and I walked out of the Great Hall with my own blood drying on my sleeve.
When I reached my rooms, three maids were carrying out my chests.
My jewelry was already gone. So were my gowns, and the cedar box with my mother's combs and her letters.
"Put that down," I said.
The nearest maid glanced at me and did not stop. "The prince's orders, my lady. Miss Lenora is unwell, and your chamber is the best in the house. The bridal chamber is hers now."
I followed them down the hall.
The doors of that chamber stood open.
Lenora stood in front of the mirror in my wedding dress.
On her head sat the crown with the red jewel Lucian had hunted for ten years.
The day he set that stone, he had put my hand on his heart and said, Isobel, I will love no one else for all eternity.
I had waited two hundred years for that dress to be finished.
Lenora saw me in the mirror and tugged at the laces, flustered and teary. "I only wanted to see it. I'm sorry. I would never take him from you."
Lucian came in behind me and gathered her up in his arms.
"Don't take it off, it suits you." He smoothed her skirt and turned his cold look on me. "It's a dress. I'll have the seamstress make you another."
A cold fury broke loose in my chest.
I picked up the shears from the sewing table and walked straight at them.
Lucian pulled Lenora behind him. "Isobel, what are you doing?"
My bloodline came up under my skin.
The candles shook, and Lucian, who was two hundred sixty years old, flinched.
"I don't want it," I said. "And nobody else gets to have it."
I cut the dress to ribbons while Lenora covered her face and said I had humiliated her.
Lucian's power slammed over me. His hand closed on my wrist.
"Apologize to her, or you'll spend the night in the dungeon."
The dungeon was for criminals.
Its iron drank a vampire's strength and left a pain that sat in the bone.
"No."
He sent for the Elders.
There were three of them, and they stood in a half circle and pressed their bloodlines down on me together.
My power had not come back yet.
My knees hit the floor.
"Since the Princess will not apologize," the eldest said, "a day and a night below should teach her."
Two guards took my arms.
I twisted around and looked at Lucian.
"Remember this," I said. "When the blood moon rises, I will make every one of you pay."
They put me in the last cell and shut the iron door.
The cold came up through the stone and into my teeth, and I sat in the dark with Lenora's shawl in my lap.
Then a man's voice spoke from the cell beside mine.
"You walk like Maren Ashmere," he said.
It was my mother's name.
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