Desecrated Beauty (Twisted Fairy Tales #1) by Kyleigh Castronaro

him.
    She tried to shake his hands off of her, but he held fast. They stared at one another; her: fuelled by hatred and him: fuelled by passion.
    “Why me?” She asked the burning question on her mind. She didn’t expect him to answer. Like all the times before he would change the subject and she would be left in the dark again.
    “Why not you?” he countered with a smooth cock of his eyebrow. She growled in frustration, receiving a chuckle in response. “Because you took my Rose,” he said, repeating himself like always.
    “You owe me a debt,” she finished for him with a sprinkle of sarcasm. She pushed both her hands into his chest and forced him away from her. He wanted her to live with the guilt of having killed her friends. That had to be it then. He wasn’t going to physically hurt her, but he would mentally torture her.
    “When you’re ready I’ll tell you the truth, Isabelle.”
    “Fuck your truth, Lord Nero.” She shoved him again, and this time he released her before she turned and stomped out of the dining room. Her single-minded thought was to get away from him so she heading back upstairs to her bedroom. But she knew even there she wouldn’t be able to escape him. She had nowhere to go.
    Halfway up the stairs she turned and looked at the front door. It only took her a few seconds to rush to the door, slipping through it and past the bewildered guards standing on lookout. She hurried down the steps and started across the vast plains of the property. Nero didn’t follow her, which she was thankful for. It was for the best if he didn’t have a death wish. He might be old and difficult to kill but right now vengeance bubbled through her veins and she would find a way to get it.
    Quill stomped around the grounds for as long as it took to cool down. Her mind was racing too much to focus on any singular thought or emotion. She yo-yoed between feeling heartbroken, guilty, worried and severely pissed off. Then there was, of course, the hopelessness she felt at being trapped here with nowhere to escape to anymore.
    As she started to feel a little more calm, she realised someone was following her and she frowned, turning around to face him. He at least had the decency to not even try to act like he hadn’t been skulking around behind her as he stepped from the shadows and approached her.
    “Are you my bodyguard?”
    “I’m just here to make sure you don’t go anywhere.”
    “Where can I go now? My home, as I knew it, has been destroyed now. He saw to that. It’s like he needed to give me a reason to stay with him.” The vampire guard didn’t say anything to her so she turned and kept walking. There was nothing else he could offer her if he weren’t willing to at least offer her words. She was sure Nero would be faithful to his promise that none of his people would be willing to get involved with her.
    She was his.
    The words made her shiver at the implication behind them. What did that mean for her future? Would she eventually become a subscriber to him? Would she eventually fall to her knees and offer him his neck?
    No. Never. She would never do that. No matter what happened she would never let him have that part of herself.
    Rounding back around the property she walked back up the steps, feeling childish and embarrassed as the eyes of the guards at the front door watched her go back into the house like a chastised child. She walked up the stairs to her bedroom and closed the door, uselessly locking it as she slumped onto the bed and stared at the wall.
    She didn’t know what else she could do now that the anger had subsided and given away to defeat. She hated the feeling but without Nero she had nothing here. She had to rely on him. Perhaps that’s what he had wanted. She would feel better if she had a weapon though and for a moment she considered making one.
    Then the thought struck her: somewhere here, behind one of those forbidden doors, she could find a weapon that he kept in some secret