Sever the Crown: Vampire Reverse Harem Complete Series

by Mysti Parker

  “What is it? Are you hurt?” He slipped an arm around my waist, but his fingers accidentally pressed into the wound.

  “I’m fine,” I said through clenched teeth and shook him off. “Make with a ladder or whatever. I need a shower.”

  Charles held up his wrist and punched a couple numbers on his smart watch. A trapdoor thing slid open in the bottom of the treehouse, followed by a whirring sound, and then a wooden platform lowered. As it got closer, I could tell it was a sort of elevator, closed in with three wooden sides and held up with heavy chains.

  When it came to a stop, we stepped onto it. Charles typed another code on his smart watch, and up we went. The takeoff knocked me off-balance, knocking me over into him. He was solid as a rock and put his arm around my shoulders to steady me.

  “I got you,” he whispered against my ear, then caught my earlobe between his lips and gave it a gentle suck.

  Hot shivers jolted through me. My lady parts clenched as though they were trying to vacuum him up inside me. His section of the symbol flashed in time with the rhythm of how I imagined us fucking. If I didn’t get away from him soon, it would become an awkward situation for everyone.

  The rest of the ride was smooth-ish. We ended up in a large, unlit space. Charles stepped off the platform and offered his hand to help steady me. I could already tell before he flipped on the lights that this was one amazing house.

  As soon as Charles hit the light switch, a “Whoa” from Zac confirmed that we’d stepped into a luxury treehouse worthy of its own special on HGTV.

  “This is the great room,” Charles said. “Combined living room and kitchen.”

  The spacious room had polished wood floors and walls. Huge windows lined two-thirds of the space. Through the glass, lights twinkled from faraway houses. What made the place even more unique was that it was built around the huge oak tree trunks and limbs that stuck up through the floor like gnarled, bark-covered pillars.

  I walked over to one of the trunks and touched the rough surface. It certainly felt like a real tree. “It’s great all right. Did you build this yourself?”

  “What do you think that woodshop is for? It’s not really a kidnapping den.”

  Well, that was a relief. I wandered toward the big red leather couch sitting in the middle of the room and started to touch it, but stopped when I saw the dried blood all over my hands. The guys were at various levels of nasty. We’d all benefit from a shower. That thought brought on a vision of all of us sharing a long, hot bathing session. Three pairs of strong hands soaping me up…

  Then the pain in my side erased that notion and brought me back to an unpleasant reality. “Can we do a rain check on the complete tour? I really need a shower. Oh, and I don’t have any clean clothes.”

  “Zac and Charles should go fetch Birdie so we’ll all have our clothes,” Ashe suggested. “I’ll stay here with Wren.”

  “That’s a no go, Ashley,” Charles said, shrugging out of his trench coat. “I’ll stay here with Wren. You and Yoga can go get the car.”

  “You think I’d leave you here alone with her? Hell no!” Ashe moved himself between Charles and me. “And don’t call me Ashley, Charlie.”

  “And what did you call me?” Zac took off his wig and threw it on the floor.

  “Call me Charlie again, and you’ll be smoking a cigar from your ass.” Charles opened a cigar box that sat on a small table behind the couch and retrieved a skinny Laguito. “Listen, if I wanted to turn you in, I’d have already done it a long time ago.”

  Ashe gestured around the room. “Why bring us back here, then? It’ll be the first place they come looking.”

  “No, it’ll be the last place, most likely,” Zac said, shaking out his hair. “They’ll expect us to go the opposite direction.”

  “Yeah, what Yoga said.” Charles lit the cigar, drew the smoke in his mouth, and let it out in a sweet-smelling plume right toward Ashe. “I can protect her best here.”

  “Again with Yoga,” Zac said. “Why do I feel like a punchline all of a sudden?”

  Ashe waved the smoke away. “What’s to keep someone from lighting this place up if they do happen to find you? And what about all the windows with no curtains? Unless they have an SPF 3000 coating, how will you keep the sun from burning us to a crisp?”

  “Flame-retardant coating on all the wood. Sun-blocking steel panels timed to slide down over the windows before daybreak. And a whole host of other goodies designed to keep a queen safe and sound. Wren, are you sure he’s your mate? He’s awful wet behind the ears.”

  “Yeah, I’m sure.” I leaned as casually as possible against one of the tree trunks, but I didn’t have a lot of time before the silver shot rendered me useless. It had to come out, ASAP. “While this conversation is riveting, I really need that shower now. Zac, Ashe, go get Birdie. I’ll be right here when you get back.”

  Ashe turned to me and gripped my arms. “I’m not leaving you here.”

  “Yes, you are. I survived the past twenty years on my own. I’ll be fine for a few minutes.”

  “But the last time I left you alone…”

  Poor Ashe. He still felt guilty about my getting kidnapped at the library. Though I wasn’t 100 percent sure I could trust Charles, I figured there had to be a reason he was chosen as my mate. And that wasn’t to get me killed.

  I cupped Ashe’s cheeks in my hands. “I’ll be okay. I promise. Go get Birdie with Zac so we can all have clean clothes. When you come back, all I want to do is to curl up in your arms and sleep the day away.”

  He sighed and then looked at me for a long moment. “Okay, Wren, but I still don’t like it. Keep your phone close. Call us if anything at all seems off.”

  “I will.”

  He searched my eyes then hugged me gently and whispered, “I love you.”

  “I love you, too,” I whispered back, though it felt so surreal. I’d never said it out loud to anyone but my mother.

  Charles cleared his throat. “Soap operas are so 1980s. How about that shower, Your Majesty?”

  “Yes, please.”

  “As you wish, my lady.” Charles took his truck keys from his pocket and tossed them to Zac. “Toodle-loo. I’ll take right good care of our queen.”

  “I bet you will,” Ashe muttered.

  “By the way, you should call on your way back before you turn into the driveway. I’ll activate the perimeter defenses when you leave. My number’s in your pocket.”

  Wide-eyed, Ashe checked his pants pocket and pulled out a folded strip of paper. “What the…?” He immediately patted his back pocket, looking somewhat relieved that his wallet was still there.

  “What kind of defenses?” Zac asked.

  “The good kind. This way, Wren,” Charles said with a chuckle and started up a spiral wooden staircase in the center of the room. “You boys go play. Mom and Dad need some time alone.”

  Ashe’s fingers curled into fists.

  “Calm down,” I told him. “He loves riling you up. Don’t give him the satisfaction.”

  Charles had already blurred up the stairs by the time I started up. I had to go slowly, though, so I wouldn’t bury the shot farther into my flesh.

  Ashe’s gaze lingered on mine until Zac tapped him on the shoulder.“She’ll be fine, Ashe. She could rip his arm off and beat him to death with it if she wanted to.”

  “That’s not what I’m worried about,” Ashe said, following Zac to the elevator.

  From upstairs the strip joint anthem of “Pony” by Genuwine blared from an impressive sound system.

  All I could do was smile and shake my head as I trudged up each step. Ashe glared up the stairs with red eyes as he and Zac disappeared on the sinking elevator.

  Upstairs was a slightly smaller space with a king-sized bed covered in a thick, black comforter. Above the bed, a ceiling fan with wooden, leaf-shaped blades turned lazily. Charles stood by a stereo and clicked the music off when I reached the top.

  “Thought they’d never leave,” h
e said then walked to a door and opened it. “Here’s the bathroom. Plenty of everything in there, including a clean robe. I’ll be right out here if you need anything.”

  “Thanks.”

  As I walked past him into the bathroom, he leaned close and repeated, “Anything.”

  “I’m good.” Before I shut the door, I remembered to ask for something that was soon to be a necessary evil. “Do you have tweezers in there?”

  “Plucking your eyebrows?”

  “Uh, yeah, they’re a mess.”

  “You ladies and your eyebrows. Guys never notice unless you have a unibrow, you know.”

  “Do you have some or not?” I had no patience for his snark now, not when I had to hold on to the doorframe because my side felt like I’d been injected with lava.

  “Yeah, sorry, in the top drawer. I’ll get out of your hair.” He tossed his fedora on a hook, where it did a perfect spin before coming to a stop. Then he flopped on the bed with his booted feet hanging off and turned on the TV with a remote control.

  I was two hairs shy of asking him to join me in the shower, but I didn’t want to bother him with what had to be done first. After I shut and locked the door, I had a look around the bathroom. It wasn’t big and had no windows. But the black clawfoot tub with brass fixtures was nice. It had a shower and a black and white harlequin-patterned shower curtain. The rectangular black sink had one of those modern trench-style faucets, where you could see the water flowing like a mini-river that ended in a waterfall.

  The woman staring back from the mirror startled me. Charles and Ashe wanting a piece of this had to be purely driven by the symbol’s binding power. Blood matted my hair and covered my chin like a grotesque rust-colored beard. Blood streaked my neck and had dried stiff on my clothes. Sticky globs of what I assumed were dead vampire bits were stuck all over me. One even hung off my ear. I tore my gaze from that nightmare image and undressed. Underneath my clothes, I found a scarier sight.

  Where the silver shot had lodged in my side, black lines webbed out between the wounds. Red, inflamed skin ringed each hole. I pulled open a drawer and rummaged through an assortment of half-empty toothpaste tubes, hotel soaps, and a dirty dinner plate of all things until I found the tweezers. But before I started digging out the shot, I turned on the water in the tub so Charles wouldn’t hear me if I couldn’t keep quiet for my solo surgery.

  Gritting my teeth, I held the tweezers and went for the least inflamed one first. I got a hold of the shot easily, but pulling it out blasted pain through my side and down my leg.

  “Shit!” I closed the sink stopper and dropped the silver pellet into the basin. It clinked on the porcelain.

  The next piece came out easily, too, but that time, the pain rippled up through my head and made me dizzy. I bumped into the sink and held on.

  “You okay in there?” Charles yelled from the bedroom. “If you’re having trouble reaching your back, I can wash it for you.”

  “Just fine!” I tried to hide the discomfort in my voice but did a shitty job of it. He went quiet, so I kept digging.

  The next couple pieces of shot were deeper than the others, so I had to dig around like a bad game of Operation. Bright flashes of light exploded in my eyes along with sharp pains in my temples.

  “Fuck,” I groaned through gritted teeth.

  “Still good in there?” Charles called from the other side of the door.

  “Yeah, give me a break, will you?”

  “Okay, sorry, Your Majesty.”

  “Stop calling me that!”

  He went silent again. Queens didn’t live like this. They didn’t have to fight and kill and eke out a living just to end up digging silver shot out of their ribs. I’d let it go for too long. The silver was poisoning me from the inside out. I had to get the last one—it was the biggest and deepest. Oh, the joys of being queen.

  Stop stalling, Wren. I grabbed a rolled-up washrag that lay on a shelf and stuck it between my teeth, then bit down on it. The hole oozed thick red blood that bubbled from the effects of silver. I plunged the tweezers inside and felt an agonizing, fiery stab like I’d been speared in the side with a silver sword. My vision went black, followed by a whole different world that appeared out of a dark fog.

  I was back inside that long-ago dumpster. It was freezing and dark, except for what I saw from the crack in the lid. The icy refuse I sat upon stank to high heaven. Each time I shifted my weight, a different aroma popped up—rotten food, shit-filled diapers, cat litter, moldy cardboard. You name it, it was in there. But that’s not what made me want to vomit. Out in the alley, my mother’s head had just been sawed off. The last guy I’d killed tonight at the bar held her head up by her hair, laughing as it swung like a pendulum. Her sightless eyes seemed to lock on mine. I was eight—it wasn’t like I could do anything, but rage pushed tears from my eyes that froze on my cheeks and filled me with foolish bravery. I lifted the dumpster lid.

  The squeal of the hinges drew their attention, but before I could open it enough to be seen, a man screamed at them and started shooting. They ducked behind other dumpsters and shot back at him. Then they all ran after him. Their footsteps thumped through the snowy alleyway and around the corner. A horrific scream from the same man they were chasing pierced the air. Then all went quiet.

  The fog faded, and in the mirror, I saw the reflection of the tweezers holding a big piece of silver shot with bubbling blood dripping from it. My legs went numb. I dropped the tweezers in the sink and went down, smacking my face on the wood floor.

  Charles banged on the door and shook the knob. “Wren! Are you hurt? What’s going on?”

  I tried to talk, but my mouth wouldn’t work. I wasn’t numb, but believe me, I’d have rather been. I still felt everything—every nasty, sharp pain from the wounds and the pain that spread like an electrified web through every muscle. I simply couldn’t move.

  “Wren!” He pounded on the door so hard, the whole frame shook.

  Next thing I knew, the door came crashing open. Wood splinters and pieces of the lock flew everywhere. He stared at me wide-eyed for a moment, then looked in the sink.

  “Goddammit, Wren, why didn’t you tell me you’d been shot?” Charles scooped me up in his arms and negotiated us past the busted door.

  Only to come face-to-face with Ashe, who uttered just two words.

  “You’re dead.”

  Chapter Four

  Charles

  "Not yet!" Yoga leaped in front of Ashe and faced off with me, his lips peeled back in what I supposed was meant to be a snarl. Looked more like he had to shit. He carefully took Wren out of my arms and then turned to Ashe. "Now comes the death."

  Ashe already had his fist flying, and while I looked helplessly after the trail of blood dripping from Wren, he barreled it into my nose. I stood there like a man and took it, but god damn. That hurt.

  I wiped the blood streaming from my nose. "You done?"

  "The fuck did you do to her?" he shouted.

  "Take a closer look, Ashe. She has a bullet hole in her, and you would've heard the shot if it came from me, and I would never do that." Kidnap her, yes. Shoot her with a dart gun, yes. Shoot her with a shotgun, not ever. Just looking at her bleeding out while Yoga laid her on my bed twisted my guts up to my throat. The tattoo on my wrist flared hot with pain like it was echoing hers, and I tasted silver on the air coated with the scent of Wren's sweet blood.

  Ashe paled as he stared over his shoulder at her like he'd sensed it, too, and then rushed toward her. "Wren..."

  "She's not healing. It must’ve been a silver bullet." Yoga pressed on the wound with one hand and patted her cheeks with the other. "Wren!"

  "She needs blood." Ashe's fangs glinted before he bit into his wrist, then held the flowing blood to Wren's lips. Even in sleep, they curved into a pout. In death, they might too.

  I screwed my eyes shut for a second. No, I couldn’t think like that. Still, it would be my luck to find out I’d been tattooed into the true queen's
royal harem, only to have her die soon after. This was what a sucker punch felt like, each second like another sharp jab, while she lay there unmoving. And I couldn't do a fucking thing to stop it, or to help. It was the worst feeling in the world.

  I stood there staring like a creeper, useless. Not something I cared to think about often, but that one word scuttled inside my ear every once in a while like a parasite, a reminder with teeth that I served no important purpose in life, or in anyone else's except for being a liar and a cheater.

  Before my dad died, I’d had a purpose. I’d started training to be a part of Queen Bronwen’s Royal Knights, but when Queen Ravana took the throne, my exact words were, “Fuck that crown-chasing bitch.” I wanted no part in anything to do with her since the smell of her treachery had first been detected by my dad. He once found false documents stating Bronwen wasn’t a real Delacroix and therefore shouldn’t be queen. When that didn’t work, Ravana escalated things quickly.

  See? Crown-chasing bitch if there ever was one.

  "Wren, drink. You have to drink," Ashe begged and adjusted his wrist to her lips.

  Timing was everything when it came to silver poisoning in vampires. Wren should've known that but had probably tried to beat the clock by getting the bullet out herself before the silver seeped into her system. But she'd been too late. And now she might die.

  “Come on, Wren,” I ground out, moving to the foot of the bed. I reached out to touch her, wishing I could do more, my fingers brushing against the soft flesh of her toes.

  Yoga bowed his head over her, his hands still supplying pressure to her wounds and slick with her blood that now stained the sheets and kept spreading. His dark hair stuck to the sweat on his face.

  Ashe and I seemed to be holding our breaths even though we didn’t have any. The seconds ticked by, each one slow and twice as painful as the last. I didn't know how long I stood there waiting, every bone in my body ready to snap under the pressure.