Vampire King Chapter 30

Getting His Head on Straight
Kane
It’s difficult for me to decide what to do first, call Vampire King Peter to see if he has Opal and demand justice for what his ***h daughter has done here or to go interrogate Jacob. In the end, I decide to head to the dungeon first. I want to see the face of the a**hole who tried to kill my Emory. Even though I can’t kill him like I wish to because it would essentially be an act of war, that doesn’t mean I can’t hurt him.
I wish that Rainer would’ve killed him in battle, to some degree. After all, if that was the way it had played out, Jacob would be dead, and I could use the fact that he broke my laws and ran from my guards as an excuse for his death. His father would still be mad and come at me with his military, no doubt, but Jacob wouldn’t be alive to know about it.
I’d originally told Rainer to bring them both back alive if possible because I wanted to hurt them myself. Now, I am fairly certain I will kill him if I’m not careful, and I don’t want his father to be able to use this incident as a way to unite other clans against me. As it is right now, he will be standing in a very bad light when the other vampires hear what has transpired here, even though I’m sure he’ll try to spin it one way or another. But if I kill him while he’s imprisoned, and it gets back to Peter and then the other clans, it will not look good for me, no matter how heinous Jacob and Opal’s crime is.
I find him in a back room in the prison, writhing on the stone floor in pain. He’s naked from the waist up, barefoot, and missing an arm. His leg is twisted at an odd angle, and I imagine it’s trying to reengineer itself into the correct angles needed for him to function, but since it wasn’t set properly, his cells are having troubles with it, and chances are, it will take weeks, if not months, for it to straighten itself out unless we rebreak it and fix it.
But I’m still not convinced that Jacob has weeks or months to live, so I suppose it doesn’t really matter.
When he senses me entering the room, he stops grunting and groaning and looks up at me. The man looks nothing like the fellow I’d had dinner with only about seven hours ago. He looks like a common criminal or worse. He looks like a prisoner of war. He’s covered with sweat, his eyes glazed over, and dried blood streaks his chin
That’s not his blood, though, and when I see it, I can’t help but walk over to him and ram my boot into his face, kicking him right where Emory’s blood still lingers.
“Argh!” he shouts as he goes flying backward into the stone wall. It splinters a little, and so does his torso, but he begins to mend almost immediately. His jaw is crooked, and with only one hand, it’s hard for him to pop it back into place.
“Well, you really f***ed up this time, didn’t you, Jake?” I ask him.
He’s spitting blood, trying to fix his face, so he can’t answer me. He just scoots up off of the wall a bit, trying to sit, but with his mangled body, he’s having a hard time of it.
A couple of guards stand outside of the cell, the only witnesses to what will happen here, and if I wanted to ensure no one ever finds out, I could do what a lot of leaders do and get rid of them next. But I won’t. We are in the process of rounding up every guard who ever took a bribe from these two a**es and executing them, so I’m pretty sure I’ll have everyone’s loyalty from now on. I’ve put Rainer in charge of retraining them. No one will want to screw up and make him mad, no one in their right mind anyway. Jacob has learned this lesson too late. 1 just want to know why,” I say, shaking my head at him. He’s
Getting His Headon Straight
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righted his jaw now, so it’s no longer misaligned, though it is swollen. “Why the f**k would you and your sister do something like this? Do you have a death wish?”
“She got away, didn’t she?” he reminds me, his voice a bit hard to understand because of his jaw.
“That’s true,” I agree. “But you didn’t. You had to know there was some risk involved in this, didn’t you?” He only looks at me blankly. “Were you always supposed to be the one to take the fall when it went to *it? Or did you just come up with the short straw?”
“We weren’t supposed to get caught,” he spits out, glaring at me. “If your f**ing brother hadn’t sold us out, we’d be back in our rooms, snug in our beds, while a couple of guards got caught red handed with your b**h feeder’s body.”
I want to kick him again just for calling Emory a **h, but I keep my boot where it’s at. I’ll save b him for more important moments, like when he’s not answering my questions.
“So this was her idea?” I ask him, and he nods.
breaking
“Initially, it was her idea. The two of us talked about it together and came up with the scheme. We couldn’t believe it worked so easily. Of course, if Opal hadn’t been in your room last night and figured out that you’d tried to f**k the feeder but failed, well, we wouldn’t have had the ammunition we needed to design such a believable story. And of course, she came running right toward your open arms, longing for acceptance from you, something she didn’t get from her father, obviously.”
Part of me hates that he’s being so straightforward. It’s not giving me the opportunity to bash his head in the way I so want to.
“Why did the two of you want to kill her so badly, though?” I have to ask. “Why not just leave her the f***k alone?”
“Because she is a threat to Opal’s queenship,” he says, as if that should’ve been obvious to me. “You clearly have feelings for that woman. F**k, you might even be in love with her, though I’m not sure how anyone knows that so quickly. Anyway, Opal was afraid you’d latch onto the feeder and make her your queen instead of Opal.”
“But Opal can give me a baby, and Emory can’t,” I remind him. “We had an agreement that was meant to give us both an heir, nothing more than that. She had a number of men on the side, as you know. Why would she care if I had Emory?”
“You don’t do s**t like that,” he spits at me. “You are not the kind of guy who just f**ks around with someone when he has feelings for them, so she knew you’d end up wanting the feeder to be your queen, And then what? Opal would be left with nothing. So it was just easier to eliminate her right from the get- go. And she figured we were doing it soon enough that you wouldn’t be that attached to the b***h, but obviously we were both wrong there.” He rolls his eyes at me, and I can see his point.
That doesn’t justify what they did, though. “Do you realize if the two of you would’ve come to me with these concerns, we could’ve sat down and talked through them, gotten together with your father, and drafted a new document that insured that Opal was queen of both your kingdom and mine until after our child reached the age of majority, and we agree that it’s time for us to both step down and let the child rule? That’s what people with morals do. That’s what respectful adults who deserve to rule kingdoms do They don’t kill innocent people just to get them out of the way.
Jacob shrugs “Opal and I have always done what needed to be done to make sure things work out for us. Call it immoral if you want to, but from my perspective, killing is killing, whether it’s in a castle or on a
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battlefield.
“So you don’t think it matters whether or not the person you’re killing has consciously accepted the risk that they might die by entering into an activity, such as fighting in a war, where there’s a possibility they may be killed by the enemy?” Surely, he sees the error in what he’s saying!
His response tells me that he does not. “You can die anytime doing anything. Some people are destined to die on a battlefield. Others are destined to die in a library. Really, the **h should’ve known better than to leave her room. I know Opal tried to tell you the **h started the incident in the garden the day before, but we both know that’s not true. We weren’t going to kill her then, but we were going to f**k her up.” He looks away for a second before he swears under his breath. “S**it. Lex really did trip us both on purpose, didn’t he? A**ole And to think I let him suck my d**k
I have to close my eyes for a second to will that image away. “I really don’t want to hear about any of your sexcapades, especially not those concerning my brother.” So much for Lex trying to tell me he’s only into
women.
“Anyway, she should’ve stayed in her room. We couldn’t make it in there. Those two **h maids were
bodies always hanging around. Opal wanted to kill them, too, but she thought it would be too many floating around.”
I shake my head again, glad they didn’t kill Nellie and Helga. Those two women deserve a reward for what they did to help Emory. They will get one, too.
“Well, I guess if your theory is right that some people die on a battlefield, and some in a library, then we can add some people die in a forest when an angry second-in-command rips them apart and others are put to death for their crimes.”
It’s his turn to shake his head, and I can hear the bones popping as he does so. “My father will run your borders over so quickly, you won’t survive the night. I know you think you have allies in the vampire community, but you don’t. Not really. Not like my dad does. Unlike you, he sells our young b**es to the other Vampire Kings, so they won’t shut him down.”
I have heard whispers that King Peter is involved in an underground sex trafficking scheme, but whenever I’ve spoken to him about it, he’s always denied it. Now that I’ve heard his son say that it’s true, I realize I have even more reason not to cooperate with King Peter.
But I also have to think about my own clan, and the fact that I have already signed an agreement with him. The baby that was supposed to be born of this union isn’t just important to my kingdom, he or she is important to him as well. He will be furious at Opal and Jacob for this.
But he won’t want to see either of them die, so perhaps I can work this to my advantage.
“All right, Jake. I’m going to go call your father. I’ll see what he has to say, but you should get used to the idea of finding out really soon what the answer to that age old question is-do vampires have souls or when they are killed, do they simply cease to exist?”
He narrows his gaze at me and says, “F**k you, Kane. You’re just as much an a**ole as any of the rest of us. You can’t honestly think that no innocent lives have ever been taken by your hand or your command.”
am done listening to him. I signal for the guards to let me out, and I leave him to continue his writhing on the floor in pain. It is too bad that I didn’t get more chances to inflict damage on him, but there will be plenty of time for that in the future.
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I make my way back upstairs to my office and pour myself a glass of blood before I go to my desk, sipping on it and feeling the energy course through me. I’m not quite sure how to handle this situation with King Peter, but I can’t just start making demands, not unless I’m willing to start a war, and while I am confident that I have lots of allies who will come to my defense, so does Peter.
I pick up the receiver and dial his number. I’m not surprised when he answers on the very first ring.
“It’s about f*ren showing up her battered and bruised, telling me your guards chased her out of the kingdom. trying to kill her, and the other one is in your dungeon, ready to be tortured and executed, for what?”
Anger boils up inside of me as I already hear the twist he’s putting on this story. Through gritted teeth, I tell him, “For f***king with the wrong feeder
Getting His Head on St**ght
I make my way back upstairs to my office and pour myself a glass of blood before I go to my desk. sipping on it and feeling the energy course through mo. I’m not quite sure how to handle this situation with King Peter, but I can’t just start making demands, not unless I’m willing to start a war, and while I am confident that I have lots of allies who will come to my defense, so does Peter.
I pick up the receiver and dial his number. I’m not surprised when he answers on the very first ring.
“It’s about f**k** and bruised, telling me your guards chased her out of the kingdom trying to kill her, and the other one is in your dungeon, ready to be tortured and executed, for what?
Anger boils up inside of me as I already hear the twist he’s putting on this story. Through gritted teeth, I tell him, “For f**ing with the wrong feeder.”