by Bailey, G.
“Behind here is the training room. As a family, we love to exercise, and self-defence is a good way to do just that and learn valuable skills,” he explains to me as he pushes the door open, and we step inside. Right in the centre is my sister and a young guy fighting on mats. He pins her down, and she laughs right before he kisses her, and I feel awkward watching, so I clear my throat to let her know we are here. Her head snaps up, and they both look to us with guarded gazes.
“Anastasia has arrived. Do come and introduce yourself, Damon,” Stewart suggests. Bethany and Damon share a look before they walk over, hand in hand. Damon has thick black hair, very deeply tanned skin and excessive muscles under his tight black shirt. He looks like a model, and I can see why Bethany would be into him.
“Anastasia, lovely to meet you,” Damon offers me a hand to shake, but before I can accept it, Bethany lowers his hand and steps closer to me, her resting bitch face in full working order.
“Walk with me, sister,” she says so coldly that I almost flinch.
“I think Anastasia is tired and needs to rest in her room,” Stewart replies, his curt tone leaving no way for Bethany to argue with him, and Bethany smiles.
“Okay,” she says and holds her hand out to me. “How about a truce, little sister? We might not be on the same page, but we came from the same book after all.” Not knowing what else to do, I slide my hand into hers, and I feel a small piece of paper in her grip. “See you around.” She lets my hand go, giving me the note, and I close my hand into a fist as she walks away.
“Can I use the bathroom quickly?” I ask Stewart as we head out of the training room.
“Of course,” he replies and shows me to a small toilet. I shut the door and run the tap as I read the note, relief coursing through me.
Annie,
They believe the prophecy means more than family.
But I don’t.
You are my sister, and we are getting the hell out of here the moment we can with Phoebe. It’s us against the world, as it always has been.
Don’t choose a house.
We will rule this world, and I have a plan that is going to work. Be ready.
Fight for your family.
Love, your sister forever, Bethany.
Chapter 14
Anastasia
My knight needs a princess to save his broken heart…
“Alexander, did you draw on your father’s new car?” a woman with dark skin, curly brown hair and eyes the very same as Alex’s demands as I stare at her. We are in a greenhouse of some kind, and in the middle is a large swimming pool which moves softly like waves. A boy, no older than twelve, is sitting on the edge of the pool with his sock-covered feet inside the water. “Alexander George, don’t you dare ignore your mother!”
“I’m not ignoring you,” he replies, and I stare in shock at the dark-haired boy. That’s Alex, and that must be his mother. How am I seeing this? I chuckle. That’s where Alex got his short temper from then.
“You could have fooled me,” the woman sighs and sits down next to Alexander. “I know what this is all really about.”
Alex just huffs in response, kicking the water. “Did you overhear my conversation with Diana on the phone?” she asks. It hurts my heart to know she was friends with my mother, and now they are both gone. Judging by Alex’s age, that means my mother kept in touch with Diana even after she left here. In another world we would have grown up with each other. Alex and I are all that is left now, and yet so apart in every sense. This world around us is making it impossible for us to be together and find out who we are.
This world is drenched in pain and loss for us, and where exactly is the hope? Alex doesn’t answer her, and she places her arm around his shoulders. He leans onto her arm, and she kisses the top of his head. “My angry little boy who wants to fix the whole world, I do love you. Nothing about us will change because you were born in my sister’s tummy. You know you have two older sisters but they passed away years ago, the empire turned them different and your birth mother died in childbirth. You were mine from the second I saw your sweet face.”
“So Skye isn’t my sister?” Alex enquires with such vulnerability in voice.
“Skye may be your niece by blood but she is your sister in every single way that counts. You will protect her, won’t you?” she asks, and he nods.
“As long as there is the sun in the sky,” he replies, and she grins at him. I get a feeling that is a sentence they share. It means more than I can understand.
“Now you know why I called her Skye. Because you are my sun and you will always protect her,” she softly replies, and he smiles at her, both of them hugging as the dream fades from my eyes, and for once I never wanted the dream to stop.
The silk sheets under my hands feel too soft, too unusual and unfamiliar as I wake up and blink up at the white ceilings. I sit up and look at my room in the House of Dawn and how it is simply boring. White everything from the walls to the floors, and other than the bed and a white glass coffee table in front of the window, there isn’t anything else in here. My dream stays in my mind as I shower and get dressed in the walk-in closet. I ignore the eighteen odd dresses with designer labels attached to them and find a chest of drawers at the back with one pair of jeans in them. In another drawer, well hidden, I find a mint blue jumper that is slightly too big on me and hangs off my one shoulder. It will do. I find my way back to the kitchen after leaving my room, and I make myself toast and find some strawberries in the fridge. I sit at the counter, eating away as uncle Archibald walks in, coming to a stop.
“In the dining room, there is a buffet table full of food. You do not make your own in this house,” he commands, and I huff around a smile.
“Sorry, I can’t be sure there is no poison in anything you feed me,” I sarcastically reply, and he stares at me like I’m the devil.
“You are not like your sister in manners, it seems,” he growls.
“No, I’m not,” I curtly reply. He opens the fridge and gets a bottle of water before leaving the room without another word. I look around the kitchen as I finish off my food and get myself a bottle of water, pausing when I see the keys hanging on a hook by the fridge.
Well, they never said I had to stay here all of the time, and after that dream, I want to see Alex. I unhook three of the car keys, just in case, and head out the back door of the kitchen, sipping on my water. The cars are all lined up by the back entrance, and luckily the first key I press is the nearest car to me, a red mini. I slide into the car, putting my bottle of water on the passenger seat and doing up my seatbelt. It’s almost funny how no one looks or checks who is in the car as I get to the gates and they open for me.
I drive straight out and head back down the road, right to where I saw that burnt out sign. The gates hang loose at the sides, ivy growing over the metal bars which look like dozens of snakes wound together. The driveway is hardly there as I drive down the outline of a road under the grass and weeds until I come around a sharp corner and see what is left of the House of George. The mansion must have been impressive once. The frame is hardly there, but I can just about see the outline of the huge oval shaped building. Brown bricks lie scattered like the wind around the base of the house, and with weeds covering them, I can’t see where the entrance to the house must be. I stop the car a good distance away and get out, leaving my keys in the car as I wrap my arms around myself. It’s silent here, not a sound to be heard, not even birds like I’d expect. When I hear a massive rustle of branches and leaves, I turn just in time to see Ki-Ki knocking over a tree as she slides over to me, her snake eyes a very concerning, sharpened colour. I don’t move as she gets closer and closer until she stops right in front of me, and her snake tongue hisses, the edge of it just missing my cheek.
“Ki-Ki doesn’t like it here, does she?” I ask out loud, knowing he is close. I can feel it in my blood, in my soul.
His low chuckle answers me, and I almost smile as he steps out of the treeline, only I can’t
. We are standing on a gravesite for his family, and it was my family who caused this.
“Come with me, Tassie,” he suggests and turns around, not waiting for my answer. Ki-Ki slides off into the forest in the other direction of Alex, and my feet are following him without a second thought. The small walk through the forest ends when we come to a tiny cabin, and Alex pushes the door open, and I follow him in. The tiny cabin has only one other door, most likely to a bathroom, and everything else is crammed into a long room. One side has a kitchen with two counters, a sink and a small fridge. A cooker rests in the corner, and a tiny table with one chair is pressed against the wall. A double bed takes up the other side of the room with a single sofa chair next to it, facing the grey stone fireplace that is lit up and flooding the room with heat. None of those things are important though, it’s the random items littered on shelves and everywhere that catch my eye. Statues of snakes, an ancient painting of an old couple which is burnt in the corner, and one wall has about ten gold necklaces with bright yellow gemstones hanging from them. Alex sees where my attention is, and without me asking, he explains.
“Each female born into the House of George is given a new necklace, a token of affection for her birth,” he mutters. “The rumour is that our very first ancestor was so in love with his new daughter that he wanted to give her the stars. Only the stars were impossible to capture, so he found a stone that looks very much like a star and decreed every time the earth was blessed with a woman in the House of George that they would be given a star crystal.”
“And what do the males get?” I enquire.
“The privilege of being a male heir to an important house, that is what,” he answers with a smile, but it doesn’t quite reach his eyes that drift back to the necklaces. “Those are my family’s, and I found them in the rubble of the house years ago. Someone has to keep them for my family.”
“Does Skye have one?”
“Yes, and it is wrapped around her favourite dagger,” he remarks with a big grin, and I shake my head. George women are crazy, it seems.
No wonder I like Skye.
“Why does she have a dagger in the first place?” I ask him as he sits on the edge of the bed.
“I once promised my mother I would always protect Skye. I can’t do that all the time when she is in that house, so I taught Skye how to fight. How to protect herself, and for now, a dagger is better than nothing,” he tells me, and I see his breath hitch as I move closer and sit down next to him on the bed. I think I saw that moment…but how do I tell him that? Alex, my angry man who I saw as an angry little boy who loved his mum. I look around the cabin, realising this small place is full of more ghosts than I could ever understand.
“Have you lived here all alone, all these years?” I ask him, and his eyes darken.
“Not at first…I was adopted by a rich house called the Treasurens,” he starts a story I know he doesn’t want to tell me, or anyone, about. I hold my breath, waiting for whatever he needs me to know. “They were a lonely couple who desperately wanted a child, and there I was, an angry teenager with royal house blood and no parents left. Only the wife wanted more than a son, and it soon became clear she wanted me in her bed when I was too young. I flipped out and left, and to make sure I never told her dirty secret, she keeps the fact I live here silent. I found my second mum in Liam’s mum. I even call her mum these days, and I would do anything to protect her.”
“She should die,” I firmly say, and he chuckles, his lost and dark eyes on me. I don’t move as he cups my cheek, his hot breath fanning over my lips.
“This is why you’re mine. You’re like me. Passion and destruction all laced together until no one can ever tell the difference,” he gruffly says.
“I can. I can tell who you are even when you hide it from the world,” I whisper back, the cabin seeming ever so much smaller now.
“Maybe you’re wrong,” he replies with a smirk I might once have seen as cruel, but now it’s nothing but taunting.
Daring.
“Maybe I’m not. If you really wanted to destroy everything you touch, then why am I so alive when you hold me?” I ask, tilting my head to the side. “In another life, we would have grown up together, and no doubt we would be together. In every single version of our lives I can imagine, you would be in my life.”
“You’re trouble, Miss Noble, and fuck, I love it.” His lips crash into mine with a fevered passion that makes my toes curl in my boots. His hands rip at my clothes at the same pace I pull his off before he pushes me down onto the bed, kneeling between my legs. His lips leave mine to trace down my jaw as his hands touch and caress every part of me before his lips find where I want them. As his lips circle my nipple, his hand slides between my legs, and his thumb finds my clit. I gasp, my back arching against him, and his dark chuckle only turns me on more. He rolls onto his back and pulls me on top of him, my legs parting around his thighs as his swollen cock lines up at my entrance. His hand cups my jaw as I close my eyes.
“No, your eyes stay on mine as you ride me,” he demands, and my eyes bang open as I slowly lower myself onto his cock, and he fills me like he has always meant to have. He pulls my head down to his lips as I roll my hips back and forth, loving how he feels inside of me. His teeth bite into my lower lip until I slightly taste my blood, and for some reason the tiny bit of pain makes the pleasure so much more. He grabs my hips and takes control, pounding into me as our foreheads rest against each other’s, our eyes locked together like we could never look apart even if we tried. I cry out in pleasure as I come, and he crashes with me, his eyes never leaving mine as he finishes.
“Where do we go from here?” I breathlessly ask him, and he rolls us over on the bed, holding himself above me.
“Wherever the fuck we want as long as we are together. You and me, baby, we can destroy the world if it gets in our way.” He kisses me once more, his cock hard once again as he slides inside me.
Alexander George is my world, and one way or the other, we will crash together, that I’m sure of.
And the world better watch out.
Chapter 15
Anastasia
Words are a smart mans toys in a game.
“Did you know your father loved chess?” Archibald comments as he comes into the conservatory I was hiding out in. I lower my book on the bench, admiring the many roses that live in here, before looking to my uncle. I thought I’d found a good hiding place but perhaps not. It seems I can’t hide anywhere in this mansion without someone finding me. Yet somehow Bethany escapes me at every turn. I won’t answer him right away; I get the feeling he is a man that is used to getting his own way, and nothing else matters to him. Shadow runs pasts the window at the same second I turn around on the bench, placing my feet on the ground and standing up. My uncle’s hand rests on one of the wooden chairs surrounding a stone chess table that is all set up.
“Did he play here?” I ask, waving a hand at the set, and he nods.
“What do you think his favourite character was?”
“The queen, of course. Everyone knows the queen is the key to victory; she simply has to be protected at all costs,” I answer. I’ve never been good at chess, that was Bethany. I wonder if dad taught her and she remembers.
“As much as the king needs his queen to protect her,” he counters, but I don’t change my expression, keeping everything to myself, because trusting this man is similar to trusting a starving dog not to bite you.
“What do you need, uncle?”
“To show you our work. It’s time you understood your family legacy and why you should stay here,” he replies and turns away, not asking me to follow as he knows I have no choice and need to. I bite my tongue and head after him through the main house, my eyes always searching for a glimpse of my elusive sister but never finding her. We get to a lift by the kitchens, and he presses a button to call it up. The atmosphere is tense as the lift opens up and we go inside, neither one of us saying a word as a bright blue light scans us and the do
ors close.
“Welcome to Dawn, Archibald and Anastasia.” A robotic voice speaks as the lift goes down. My uncle looks at me, I see his head turn in the corner of my eye, and for a moment, I realise I could be in danger. I don’t know anything about my uncles’ work, and yes, they might need me, but they could just as easily kill me and try to get Phoebe.
“When you crashed your car, we took a blood sample from you. Or should I say a team did,” he randomly tells me.
“You sent that team to crash a car into me for some blood?” I demand, and he narrows his eyes.
A cold smirk stretches across his lips. “That team was sent to collect blood samples from every familiar with a wolf so we could be sure they were not you. The teams before them were sent to collect the wolves, but they had trouble, so blood samples were easier. I never allowed them to hurt you and risk your life, that was not in the plan.”
“Why did they then?” I enquire.
“Who knows?” he darkly chuckles as the doors open. “The moment I heard about the crash, I killed them both.”
A gulp down the disgust as we step out into a big laboratory filled with people in white cloaks, running around, and they don’t notice we are here. Or they don’t care. The room stinks of bleach with a slightly metallic tang to it, and all I can hear is glass clanging and low whispers.
“Welcome to your family’s legacy, Anastasia Dawn,” he states with a proud smile.