Byron buttoned up her suit jacket and said formally, “If that is how you truly feel, Miss Honey, then please, do feel free to leave. The Debrek clan believes in consent above all, and if you feel like you have been forced into a relationship with me, and my family, then you most certainly should leave us and return to the normal, single life you seem to crave. I’m sure we can come to some sort of agreement in exchange for your blood, so that you are not tied to me. Just remember you came to me that night in my bedroom, not the other way around.”

Before Amelia could reply, Byron was gone in a flash.

“Bloody vampire super speed.” Amelia smacked her hand to her head in frustration. “Why did I say that?”

* * *

Victorija lay against a stone wall in a farmer’s field, by the side of the road, sheep gently grazing and baaing in the background, and the bodies of two backpackers she had come across, lying dead beside her. Her confusion and hurt had erupted in a moment of blind rage and violence.

She stared at her bloody hand that had ripped out and crushed her grandmother’s heart. The cascade of memories that Lucia had evoked in her had unlocked a part of her memory her father had conditioned her to forget existed. She remembered herself as a young child, running through her grandmother’s garden in Venice. Victorija liked it there. She could be free to play and laugh without being scared her father would punish her. He never showed that side of himself in front of the Grand Duchess.

Victorija had a vision of sitting on her grandmother’s lap, while she used her magic to entertain her as a small child. She saw in her mind’s eye her favourite teddy bear floating before her, dancing in the air. That happy memory then switched to Victorija pulling out her grandmother’s heart, and crushing it.

She felt tears roll down her cheeks, and when she wiped them away she saw the fresh blood of her victims all over her other hand.

“See what I’ve become, Grandmother?” Victorija shouted into the sky. “I’m a monster, and all because you abandoned me, because they all abandoned me. My so-called family.”

A car pulled up and Drasas got out. “Principe? Are you well?”

She couldn’t reply. Everything was black, and her hope to build the Dreds to something more than the Debreks was over. The secret to building her army was love, and that was something a Dred—something she—could never feel.

Victorija looked up and saw a worried looking Lillian in the back of the car. Her lip rose in a snarl. Lillian had outlived her usefulness. She picked herself up, and walked to the car.

Before she stepped in, Drasas said, “Where to, Principe?”

“Paris. There’s nothing for us here now.”