Read Online Redemption (Dawn of the Damned Book 1) by Connie Chance - Free Book Online

mightn’t even have been going on for long, otherwise her mother would have sought out Ejner’s help sooner. Her pure-blood father and stepmother would feed on her each evening since she was a child, if the pieces of angry conversations between Old Torben and her birth mother that she remembered were anything to go by. She’d only caught snippets of it. So it wasn’t the feeding that drove her mother to attempt to escape with her so often after her fifth birthday, lending her lashes of whipping, and threats of death. Her mother had then changed tactics, realising that this was a battle she couldn’t win, a battle against near invincible creatures, and so she sought help from the one person that could help them. Her half-brother.
    The actual abuse from her father she cannot quite remember. Not so much, other that the darkness from when she’d tightly shut her eyes and innocently think that just because she wasn’t seeing it, she wasn’t experiencing it. Apart from the blessed darkness, were the grunts, sounds that if she heard today, she fought herself against strangling the source with her bare hands, a sound that had haunted her for centuries.
    Her mind had blocked out most of it as a child, making her think that feeding on her blood was all he did. Each time she tried to remember it, all she got instead was darkness, and the grunts. A good coping mechanism that let her forget, but it never let her heal. Each time the Gunnarsens fed on her, the memory of the darkness came to her. She mightn’t exactly remember that which happened, but the very idea that darkness represented was enough to make her want to claw out her very own skin, for people had talked enough to let her know exactly what her father had done to her in that darkness. Even now, when anyone, especially pure-bloods, got close to her, it is that darkness that made her recoil, or want to lash out and scratch out their eyes, in fear that they’d attempt to feed from her, then they’d attempt to take more from her as a result of her intoxicating blood.
    Probably the most important heated exchange she remembered was that last one her mother was involved in, when she had sneaked into Ejner’s private quarters in the family home, clutching Anja’s hand in hers.
    Anja remembered her mother talking in hushed whispers, urging Ejner to help her, to take Anja away with him. She remembered her mother raising her dress with shaking fingers, and prodding fingers as her mother showed Ejner marks on her skin that let him know that his father was not only feeding from her neck, but was taking liberties that were outright immoral, that a father should never take with his child. Bite marks on her arm’s, inner arms, thin hips, inner thighs, pink scars on her buttocks that Anja never saw, but assumed looked terrible as both her mother and half-brother had breathed in sharply.
    She’d never forget the look on Ejner’s face when her mother settled back her dress over her paled features again, the darkening of those identical eyes to hers, the guilt mixed with anger, self-hate and so much more than her young mind could fathom.
    She remembered walking up to him then, distraught at seeing her big strong brother look so, and placing a caring hand on his knees.
    “It’s okay..” is what she remembered saying, but Ejner had jumped to his feet right then as though her very touch burnt him. A look of hatred and anger had crossed his face, and she’d feared that he was directing it to her, and cowered away.
    “I’ll kill him,” is all he’d said instead, his voice calm but heavily soaked with cold reserve.
    “You can’t,” mother had argued, looking so weak as a human, beside his raw strength as a pure-blood Draugr. “Just take her away with you, please.”
    “No!” Ejner had said resolutely. “He’ll die for this. He’s done this once before, with my older half-sister Cordelia. I took her away too when I found out, like you are asking me to now. But Cordelia