House of Royals(34)

Her House.

Let her keep it.

“I don’t want to take anything from you,” I blurt out. “I’m not a vampire, and I don’t exactly feel like a princess, so I’d like to just keep living my life as normal.”

Markov chuckles and shakes his head at my ignorance. Micah stares death at me. He hates me, I can feel it; and he knows nothing about me. Nothing, yet he knows as much about me as I do, I suppose.

“That’s good to hear,” Jasmine says, her voice once again sweet. “Because I do love this House and don’t want to lose it. But we do need you.”

“You know what will happen if we claim her and take her public,” Micah hisses. “The King will come as soon as we do.”

“And why are you so afraid, Micah?” Jasmine cuts back. “Are you afraid you won’t survive his visit?”

“It is not me I worry over,” he says, his voice dropping as everyone looks at him. “But you know how the King loves his games.”

“He does, indeed,” Markov agrees in that low voice. Even his eyes are drawn inward and dark.

“I have ruled a shamed House for fifteen years,” Jasmine says. Her voice is calm and low. She is fire and ice. Calm and collected one moment, exploding with vengeance the next. There’s a reason she rules this House. “I have born the shame of abandonment long enough. I will take the risk of the King’s games to gain our respect.”

“What does it matter if you have a Royal?” I ask. Because truly, I don’t understand that part yet.

“Without you and your blood, we get none of the Royal inheritance,” Anna says. It’s the first time she’s spoken, and she sounds just as harsh as she looks. “The Royal family supports every House throughout the world. They’ve had thousands of years to earn money, and they use it to keep their influence throughout the world strong through the Houses. It also is a line to all the other Houses, creating allies, sometimes enemies. Without a Royal, we are cut off from all of that. We are in a form of exile, you could say.”

“Basically, we really need you or we’re just a bunch of outcasts,” Cameron sums up as he munches on a bag of chips. He’s always eating, yet he’s a beanpole.

“Where are all these other Houses located?” I ask. And it’s surprising that I haven’t thought to ask until now. But I remember Ian saying there were twenty-seven Houses.

Jasmine waves her hand to a map on the far wall. It’s a map of the world, an old, torn, and wrinkled one. There are large pins stuck in various places. One here in Mississippi. Others that look close to Las Vegas, New York, Seattle. Several in China, Russia. South America. They’re scattered across the globe. And all ruled by descendants of King Cyrus.

“Will the King just come and make sure I’m actually of the Royal bloodline once you claim me?” I ask. I’m trying to keep my head from spinning out of control with all the information.

“He will do far more than that, my love. He will want to check and see if you are his resurrected Queen,” Markov says with that coy, thin-lipped smile.

“What is that supposed to mean?”

I look around to all the faces that surround me, expecting this to be some kind of joke that I don’t get. Because I don’t. But no one is smiling.

“After the King turned himself into the genesis vampire,” Lillian says. There’s a darkness in her eyes that extends beyond this story. “He forced his concoction on his wife, as well, not knowing she was with child. He cursed himself then and her, too, in a way. He thought they could be together forever.

“They both craved blood and frequently fed,” she tells. “But after only eighty-nine years of immortality together, Sevan seemed to grow ill. She was constantly hungry. She drank and drank and it was never enough. She was withering before the King’s eyes. And after only a few weeks of this, she died.”

“But I thought the Born were supposed to be immortal,” I say, trying to keep everything straight.

“The King and his Queen were not Born, though,” Christian interjects. “They are the genesis of vampirism.”

“And as Lillian said, the King and Queen were cursed when he changed his wife against her will,” Markov picks up the story. “The Queen died. And the King mourned her for fifty-one years. But one day, one of the King’s great-great-granddaughters died and resurrected.”

“The longer she was awake after resurrecting, the more she started to remember from her previous life,” Jasmine takes over. “She was the Queen, resurrected in the literal sense of the word. New body, new face. But it was her. And the King had his Queen back.