SWNOVELS Chapter Property
Their eyes met and held. The world briefly stopped and shrunk until only the two of them remained in it.
Rowan had the oddest sensation of staring into a mirror. The same mix of uneasy hostility, guilty curiosity, resentment, jealousy, pain, heartache, and longing reflected back at her.
Other, darker emotions shadowed Alena’s gaze, but she suspected the same was true for her. The absence of either scorn or outright rejection made her hesitate and reevaluate her expectations.
Marcus might be hard to read, hiding his opinions behind his watchful expression too well, but Alena wasn’t. Not to her—they had too much in common.
***
Life confronted Alena with the child, nay, woman, no, creature her father’s lust for a mortal created.
She refused to call it love. How could a man so utterly vampire in his view of the world have loved a frail and inferior human, especially when married to a vampire female like Carla?
Carla loved him blindly and ignored his faults. Even when he told her about the human and the coming child, she remained at his side.
It took a while before her mother realized her mistake in assuming Ilse was a fling and that the fetus would abort as nature intended.
Jealousy opened an enclosable door in Carla. It corrupted her mind so subtly but steadily that no one noticed the first signs of madness.
Alena’s heart ached for what followed, but she couldn’t help being interested too. Despite everything, she had loved her father.
***
When she was younger, she idolized him until he disillusioned her with his choices, but her love for him remained, yet how could she ignore the effects of his decisions?
She lost Carla the day Victor confessed his love for Ilse. Not all at once, but little by little.
Anger and grief stabbed through her heart. Her father’s selfishness had doomed both their mothers, and although he might not have physically killed Carla, he shattered her soul.
He actually killed Ilse, so why was there no hatred in Rowan?
If anybody had a right to that sentiment, it was Victor’s other child. Being this close to her sister slashed open old wounds and opened the door to emotions rawer than she realized.
***
Rowan watched Alena’s reaction with an unreadable expression as her sister’s face revealed agony during a flash of unchecked emotion.
She acknowledged the stab of pain in her chest and refused to admit that knowing her sister suffered and seeing it was not the same thing.
Up close and personal, such things hurt. Just when she finally thought she was immune to pain, life had to remind her that only the dead and the heartless did not suffer, and she was neither.
Rowan purposefully shifted her gaze to Marcus before offering him a cursory bow of respect, which was actually a show of contempt.
She didn’t want to be there as much as they did not want her to be there, and she had to play her part, didn’t she? During the normal course of things, their paths would never have crossed. She owed them nothing, and they owed her nothing.
She would act the role assigned to her, and when she left, she would save her friends on her own. How had she naively thought it possible for them to pretend that Victor’s shade didn’t stand between them like the proverbial elephant in the room?
***
The rumor mill revealed to Rowan that the human populace regarded Alena as aloof and distant, never cruel but uninvolved with their affairs.
Some say she was different until she fully understood what her father was capable of, and Carla slipped into her own world. The change in her happened gradually but cemented itself the day Carla committed her ill-fated suicide.
Victor trained his daughter to be a soldier at his side when they were away from home and a princess in his castle.
She could hunt with the best of the men and ride a horse as if she were born on one.
His actions gave their subjects the impression that Victor groomed Alena to succeed him. The news that he chose Marcus instead shocked and angered his people.
The swift movement of power-hungry enemies and former allies to usurp Victor’s lands tested Marcus’s mettle but also made his new subjects realize that Victor’s decision might have proven wise. She couldn’t help but wonder if Alena had known Marcus was his heir and not she.
***
“Your letter brought me here, sir, but I fear that you mistake me for someone else,” Rowan informed him politely but firmly.
Anger flashed through Marcus’ veins, but he controlled the emotion.
Her voice carried no inflection, and it surprised him and Alena to hear the unmistakable tones of someone who received a somewhat rounded education.
It wasn’t something you picked up; it showed in how she carried herself and her stance.
Someone had bothered to teach her proper comportment and elocution. Given her past circumstances, she should have had a baseborn commoner’s rough language patterns and mannerisms.
Brought into this world as the daughter of a former lady whose family lost everything in the wars, Rowan had no access to education. As far as either of them were able to tell, Victor did little more than sire and abandon her.
***
It was the second unforgivable thing Alena blamed Victor for and felt guilty about. She grew up with all the privileges of a princess, being a close relative to the vampire king, while Rowan received no care. If their father had any sense of decency, he would never have allowed a child to grow up under such circumstances.
Alena had broached the subject once, and Victor became so angry she never dared mention it again. He rarely lost his temper, but criticizing his decisions was a sure way to earn her father’s wrath. He forbade her to mention Rowan’s name ever again.
***
“Who would I mistake you for, Dhampir? You are the only one, Rowan,” Marcus said the word with emphasis, and although her anger chagrin briefly flared, she kept her expression impassive.
She hated the word Dhampir. To her, it had become a derogatory term that most vampires used with more negative emphasis than they did human or rat.
She knew Marcus baited her because she so clearly irked him.
“You mistake me for someone who cares,” Rowan clarified with more than a suggestion of disrespect.
***
Alena stepped forward, her teeth gritted, and her mouth set in a firm line.
Why did Rowan’s words anger her? Why did she want the Dhampir to care for their plight? Especially when they had so obviously not cared for hers.
Neither of them had expected such blatant antagonism from her, and it reminded her that, despite whatever ill-fated education Rowan received at some point, her sister was little more than a stray dog.
They should not find her behavior either shocking or disappointing, and they could not deny the facts: Rowan was a mercenary, a hired killer, a pariah, and an outcast.
“I told you this couldn’t work,” Alena declared quietly, but when Marcus’s gaze veered from Rowan to her, his eyes flashed more fiercely than her own cold, evident displeasure.
Alena almost stepped away from the unexpected ferocity in him, but it took a mere moment for her to grasp that he wasn’t just angry at her, but also at the hopelessness of their situation.
Rowan was their last chance to save their people. Even without her defiant arrogance and defensive antagonism, she had nothing to offer them. What would Rowan know of a millennia-old prophecy?
Her displeasure had made her forget her place. Marcus wasn’t her father, and she didn’t hold the same position she did before. She was neither his daughter nor his wife; just his first in command, and Marcus was her master.
“I apologize for speaking out of turn, my lord,” Alena added belatedly.
***
Rowan wondered if he noticed Alena’s resentment at having to admit her servitude with that word.
It hadn’t occurred to her that despite Alena’s position in their hierarchy, she now belonged to Marcus like every other inhabitant of his lands did.
***
Marcus noticed and paid heed to Alena’s anger at her changed circumstances but pretended not to know.
She needed time to deal with the feelings of betrayal born from Victor’s choices. He could grant her no quarter despite his concern for her or his understanding and faith that she would adjust.
She would have no regard for him if he didn’t keep her in line. Victor left some huge boots to fill, and Marcus suspected he would have to do more than fill them to earn her respect.
“You care; otherwise, you would not be here. You live with them, and you have killed your own kind for them,” Marcus’s indicated the two humans behind Rowan.
They glanced at him with apparent distrust and fear in their eyes but also something else. Was it hope? They didn’t react to his words, but Rowan’s eyes blazed, and her jaw hardened, proving Marcus’s point for him.
The humans bowed their heads to her and wandered away from the building tension. He reckoned that they feared their presence would hurt the chances of him listening to Rowan.
Marcus spotted her admission in her eyes, but he didn’t feel vindicated; he felt sorry for her.
Those frail humans represented her world, and it saddened him. If Rowan were his daughter, he would not have denied her existence as Victor did, nor would he have allowed her to suffer, and he wouldn’t have given a damn about the consequences to himself.
***
Marcus was right; she cared for her humans. Despite her origins and the threat she represented to them, they took her in when no others would.