Trailing behind the giant gray-haired man, she fiddled with the rim of silver cuffs locked around her wrists. Being a hybrid came with its perks; turns out the said metal wasn’t as damaging to her as it was to the other vampires.

‘Vampires…’

She let out a little scoff as one side of her lips tilted up to form a bitter smirk.

Vampires, Witches, Hybrids, all these tales that she had fell in love with as a curious child yet never dared to believe in their reality had now sprung to life. These mystical beings had devoured her existence leaving only a shell behind— the shell that was getting dragged around by the puppets of one of the oldest vampires to ever exist.

Cyrus.

“Where is Cyrus?”

Her head was hanging low. Even if she had lifted her gaze, she’d have been unable to steal a glance at the scene in front of her due to the bulky vampire blocking her view.

But standing there, at the entrance of what seemed to be a large hall, she could guess from her-Ares’ memories that it was the same court room where Ares’ father had banished him from Romania.

She was in the center of the Dracula’s den.

“Cyrus the Younger presents a gift at the joyous return of his dearest nephew.”

It didn’t go unnoticed by her how blatantly Cyrus had refused to acknowledge Ares as his king, disrespecting him by just mentioning him as his mere nephew.

Slowly, the man standing in front of her stepped back, only to entangle his barbarous fingers in her long locks. With a painful tug, he jerked her head back forcing her eyes to meet the countless purebloods sitting on both sides of the throne.

A deadly silence washed over the entire place. Every pair of eyes present in that room was fixated on her unnaturally colored irises.

Every pair of scarlet orbs except for one.

One person in that room was busy staring at her no longer pregnant belly.

He was the one sitting on the throne.

Ares.

One glance at his face immediately took her back to all the events that had occurred in the past few hours leading to this unsightly confrontation.

“Isn’t she an angel? Doesn’t disturb mommy at all.”

Gently pinching her daughter’s button nose, Faith continued rocking her back and forth in her arms.

“She’s small at the moment. Wait for a month and you’ll be eating your own words.”

Felix’s words incited a little laughter out of her lips.

“You sure know a lot about kids.”

“Helping them get delivered for a few centuries gives you a fare idea.”

“Touché.”

Her gaze traveled up from her daughter’s sleeping figure to stare at the silver-haired vampire speed-moving throughout the room, collecting dirty baby clothes and empty formula bottles.

It had been two days since her delivery and he wasn’t letting her do any work at all.

In the time she had spent with him, he had done nothing to hurt her, especially after finding out that she was originally his beloved.

She didn’t trust him fully but what other choice did she have. She doubted she would win against a pureblood that too while protecting her daughter.

“Father will find out about this place sooner or later,”

His voice immediately stopped the train of her thoughts with its grave tone.

“I said I’ll not hand you over to father, but I don’t see a way out of it.”

Gone was all the playfulness.

“What do you mean?”

Her eyes had turned crimson subconsciously. Cradling her daughter close to her breasts, her sharp eyes were glaring accusingly at Felix.

“My father is a powerful pureblood. Ares will not be able to defeat him with strength alone. You will be needing an element of surprise, a variable to my father’s carefully thought-out plan. I’ll be that variable.”

“You’ll betray your father for us?”

Her words held an obvious hint of doubt in them.

“I’ll protect you and your daughter as I promised, but not at the cost of harming my own father. Whatever happens, at the end of it all you and your daughter will be safe.”

“And how do you plan on doing that?”

She watched as Felix leaned against the wall behind him. His arms were folded in front of him, his head hung low. The curtain of shoulder-length silver hair dangling in front of his face was barely able to hide the frown settled on his face.

After a moment, his eyelashes lifted up whilst his head remained in the same position; he was looking at her through his lashes giving off an oddly menacing look though it didn’t seem to be directed towards her.

“By handing you over to Father.”

“What?”

It was her turn to frown now.

“He doesn’t know of your daughter’s existence and it’s better if it stays that way. A potential heir to the throne— he’ll waste no time in eliminating her.”

She was starting to get the point hidden between his words.

“So my daughter stays with you, out of his sight?”

“Yes.”

“And when he comes to take me, you’ll hand me over to him like he originally asked you to, making him think that everything’s going according to his plan?”

“Yes.”

She turned silent after that. Her mind was contemplating her options.

She could neither fight Felix nor Cyrus and if even by some miracle she managed to trick them and managed to escape, where would she go with a child?

Escaping without a shelter meant revealing her daughter’s existence to the world. Many would come after the child of the vampire king. She didn’t have many choices.

“My father will take you straight to the Dracula’s castle in order to present you to the council. He wants to divide the elder members and gain their favor. He wants to incite a war.”

“What happens when a war breaks out amongst vampires?”

“It goes on till only one leader is left standing. It’s a fight till death.”

Prying her gaze away from the second prince, she stared down at the little bundle of joy resting in her lap.

“Who do you think will win?”

“Whoever proves to be the most cunning.”

“It’s an obsession of wanting to rule a powerful kingdom against the need of protecting your people from that very obsession. Obsession seldom loses, Felix.”

Felix let out a small huff as he passed a hand through his silver hair, letting them fall back gracefully on his shoulders.

“Then maybe the need to protect your people has to hold a bit of obsession of its own.”

His gaze was turning more and more serious with every passing moment.

“He’s coming.”

His words made her blood turn cold with dread. Any information she had on him, all came from tales. A near encounter with him had almost left both him and Ares at the verge of death.

She remembered Gabriel claiming Cyrus to be more guileful than him. This came from a former vampire hunter who had slaughtered the previous vampire queen. She could hardly imagine how someone more devious than Gabriel could turn out to be.

“Come here. We need to get you to the basement, now!”

Felix’s urgent tone freed Faith from the clutches of her dreadful thoughts.

Hesitantly, she stepped out of the bed whilst holding her sleeping daughter close to her chest. She wanted to ask him more about the situation but the notion of Cyrus barging through those doors any moment had her tongue paralyzed. She could do nothing but follow Felix quietly. No matter how much she tried, there didn’t seem to be a way to avoid this mess. The only way out was moving forward and facing it, and that’s what she was going to do.

The sudden clanking of metal made her blink as she realized that they had reached the cell in Felix’s basement and he was holding the door open for her.

‘Chivalry?’

The irony of the situation made her shake her head a little.

Just as she was about to walk into the gloomy cell, Felix placed a gentle hand on her shoulder stopping her in her tracks. As she lifted her head to look at him, she saw him staring down at her arms grimly.

She could tell by his gaze, he was asking her to hand her daughter over to him.

‘There’s no other way.’

Reminding herself of her situation, she pressed her lips together as she lowered her eyes to look at her daughter. She was still sleeping soundly in her arms.

“Have you decided on a name?”

“Aria Antanasia King.”

Felix seemed a bit taken back at her response.

“Antanasia? That’s the name of-”

“Ares’ late mother. I’m aware; he told me.”

A small smile was dancing on the corner of her eyes as she stroked baby Aria’s cheeks. Her daughter gave her strength; she knew she wouldn’t blink twice before laying her life down for her Aria.

“Your father killed one Antanasia before. Can I trust you to protect this Antanasia?”

Detecting moment in her peripheral vision, she looked up in the direction of the disturbance, only to find Felix kneeling before her on one knee. He raised his hand to place it on the left side of his broad chest whilst he slowly lifted his eyes to meet her frowning gaze.

“I, Felix de Cyrus King, vow to protect you and your daughter Aria Antanasia King with my own life. I accept you as my queen and pledge my loyalty to you as long as there is life flowing through my veins.”

“Uh…”

She remembered Ares doing the exact same thing in the past when he recognized her as his beloved.

‘Is this a ritual amongst the vampires? Is that why Henry asked the vampire guard to bow and accept me as his queen when I first arrived at the castle?’

Felix was holding her gaze with an indescribable intensity. His eyes were rapidly switching between tinges of crimson and silver, refusing to let one color take over. The specks of red marring his pure eyes appeared as small drops of blood swirling in the vitreous of his eye. It looked as if his irises had turned translucent, baring his insides in front of her.

“Here, hold her.”

Unable to handle his burning gaze anymore, she motioned him to stretch out his arms. Gingerly, she handed him her daughter, looking longingly at her. Surprisingly, the baby was still fast asleep.

“Don’t let anyone harm her.”

“I won’t.”

Throwing one last dejected glance her daughter’s way, she turned around and walked straight inside the cell. Felix didn’t waste any time in locking the door behind her.

She was once again trapped behind these god forsaken silver bars despite being completely undeserving of this treatment. It would’ve been a lie to think this all wasn’t affecting her sanity.

Every time some tragedy befell her, it stole a part of her innocence. Bit by bit, she was losing herself, to the point it felt like she was no longer the same person she was a year ago.

She was a wife now, a mother too.

Her child was all she could think about at the moment. Nothing else mattered.

Tentatively, she raised her quivering fingers to grip the bars as her storm-colored irises found Felix’s silver ones.

“Take ca-”

She was in the middle of completing her sentence when a familiar face appeared in her vision, making her face drop.

“What is he doing here?!”

An accusing look settled over her face immediately as she stared dumbfounded at Felix.

“I asked Antonio to come here.”

“You…”

With all the strength she could muster, she tightened her grip around the bars and tried ripping the door open. Only after Felix placed a gentle hand on top of her knuckles did she decide to stop rattling the door.

“Relax, Faith. Antonio already received his punishment for harming you. I need to be here when my father arrives. Antonio will get Aria out of here. He’s my turned vampire. He cannot refuse my command. There’s no one else besides him that we can trust at this moment. Please understand.”

“That man tried to kill my baby before!”

“And I tried to kill you but here you are, trusting me with your child’s life.”

A deafening silence fell over the entire room. Faith’s chest was heaving up and down as she stared helplessly at the hybrid holding her daughter.

‘What choice did I even have in this situation?’

“Go.”

She let go of the bars the moment that word escaped past her lips while her head dropped low in a sign of defeat.

“You will not regret this Faith.”

Felix’s promise reached her ears but she refused to look up and meet his eyes. She could hear shuffling of feet, Felix was handing little Aria over to Antonio. She couldn’t bear to look up and after another moment, Antonio was already rushing up the stairs to take Aria to a safer place.

“Why…”

Felix who had been busy staring at the stairs turned to look at her upon hearing her broken voice,

“I don’t understand the question, Faith.”

She was sitting on the floor, her back leaning against the wall as her lifeless eyes leered at him coldly,

“Why is your father so obsessed with ruling the throne?”

“Because he considers it his right.”

His reply had come instantly.

“What right does he have to rule?”

“He has every right. He was the conqueror of east after all.”

Her eyes narrowed at his response, urging him to continue talking,

“My father’s name is a title; he earned it after he went to war in The Far East, collected resources, defeated enemies and united vampires from all over the east under one monarch. Ares’ father, Arthur King, carried a similar mission in The West but it was a time when Persia, Central Asia, held much more power than The West. Despite being younger my father had achieved more than his brother yet in the end, Arthur was appointed the king.”

Faith’s frown deepened yet her lips remained sealed.

“My father beheaded every head that didn’t bow down to him. He demanded absolute submissiveness. Vampires feared him more than they respected him. He was labelled a power-hungry killer. Ares’ father, on the other hand, returned as a war hero. The respect he earned from his subjects compensated for the lack of his achievements.”

“Why didn’t your father just kill his brother then?”

She finally broke her silence. It was hard to miss her gray-blue eyes glinting in the darkness of the cell as they pierced a hole in Felix’s soul.

“He couldn’t. They were equals, born out of the same flesh, same lineage.”

“So Cyrus decided to do the next best thing he could manage. He killed Arthur’s mate to weaken him, but he failed in the end as Arthur turned his emotions off to deal with the pain. Unfortunately in doing so, Arthur became distant with his son as well.”

“No, Faith. You got one thing wrong,”

Grayish Blue halos glimmering in the black void of the cell turned to slits as Felix let out these words.

“My father didn’t fail. The former king died and the current king’s absence only delayed my Father’s plans. Everything is going exactly as he wants. Ares is far younger and inexperienced; He has never been to war. The only thing stopping my father from claiming the throne was Ares’ absence in Romania and that has also been fixed now. There’s no stopping him.”

With every word he uttered Felix took a step back,

“There’s nothing much I can do besides protecting you so believe me, just this once.”

With that he was gone, leaving her alone with her scattered thoughts.

She had no idea how long she remained in the same position, knees drawn towards her chest as she calmly awaited whatever life had in store for her.

She didn’t move, not even when she felt eyes on her. She hadn’t been able to hear any footsteps, but the way the air around her changed, the way her skin felt like something was crawling all over her, she knew who was standing before her cell.

Cyrus.

It wasn’t long before multiple pair of eyes joined him in staring at her as if she were an animal getting exhibited at some zoo. She had refused to let him see the fear and doubt in her eyes causing her to direct her hate-filled gaze down towards the ground.

“You look just like your mother.”

His voice, she couldn’t describe it. It was alluring in an extremely deadly way resembling a siren’s song.

“Look up.”

She didn’t budge.

There was some movement in front of the door followed by creaking sound of a door getting rotated around its hinges. What happened next was too fast for her mind to detect. She could only register a sharp pain in her scalp before her head was pulled back and she was forced to stare in a pair of emotionless silver eyes.

He was an older version of Felix. Only his built was bigger and his eyes, they appeared apathetic, completely wiped of emotions. There was nothing in them. His stare was empty.

It scared her.

‘This man has no sense of remorse.’

“When I ask you to look up, You. Look. Up.”

With that, he let her hair go.

“Chain her hands and bring her to the car.”

That’s when she noticed the two men standing behind Cyrus who immediately moved on his command to secure her wrists with silver cuffs. There was another person standing behind in a dark corner of the basement, partially hidden by the shadows. She could only see his silver eyes trained on her and they were giving her the same look as their father had given her.

A look lacking any kind of emotion.

‘He sure is a great actor.’

That was the last she saw of Felix. He didn’t come to the castle with them— the castle full of vampire elders where she was standing at that moment. Everyone’s attention was directed at her, but her eyes were trained on a set of green irises belonging to the man sitting on the throne, the king. A visibly mad king.