Read Online Rites of Blood: Cora's Choice Bunble 4-6 by V. M. Black - Free Book Online

feeling of resistance that I’d had, only the anger and fear that he’d taken that choice away from me.
    Choices. It had seemed like I had so many, but when all roads but one were dead ends, what did a choice even mean? All I wanted was one real choice, one viable alternative. But in Dorian’s world, my future had been mapped out even before I had been changed, and now there was no escape.
    “I’ve already told you that missing the introduction simply was not an option,” Dorian said. “And I thought I was helping with the dancing. I didn’t mean to cause you distress.” His eyes tightened at the last word. “But there are circumstances in which I think even you would call certain alterations justified.”
    He reached the top of the stairs and pressed a latch, and another door sprang open. I recognized his bedroom from my glimpse through the door the other day.
    “I don’t think so,” I said, frowning up at him as he crossed the room.
    “Before my research made our offer appealing to those humans whose need was great enough to overcome the obvious risks, many agnates with objections to killing the innocent chose our candidates from among the dregs of society,” Dorian said. I blinked at what seemed an abrupt change of subject. “The desperately ill, the hopelessly mad, and the criminal. Do you remember meeting Zhang Wei?”
    I nodded. He was a cognate, one of the handful among the guests who weren’t some admixture of European, Middle Eastern, or North African descent, and he’d shared Isabella’s dead-eyed gaze.
    “In his human life, he lusted after his brother’s wife,” he said, opening the door that led to my bedroom and carrying me through. “He seduced her or raped her—the story isn’t clear, and at that time in China, there was little attention paid to the difference. When she threatened to tell her husband, he killed her children and splayed out their bodies on the marriage bed that he had defiled with her for her to find, and after she made the discovery, he attacked and killed her, too.”
    I shrank back in his arms. “Damn.”
    He continued the story. “Ling-Ling visited him the night before he was to be executed. He survived the feeding and was bonded to her. She needed him, wanted him, loved him, as she must—but he was a monster. Until she wiped all of that away.”
    He set me on my feet in the center of the room.
    “How?” I demanded, a cold horror in the pit of my stomach. “How could she love someone who had done something like that?”
    “I have killed so many more, Cora,” he said sadly. “How could you want me?”
    He was right. I knew he was, but still I needed him, craved his touch, his voice, his presence. The bond was a kind of madness, but at that moment, I couldn’t even want to get away, as I knew I should.
    I shivered. I really was crazy.
    “And what about you?” I challenged. “What if I were a doll-woman, too? Could you feel for it what you claim to feel for me?”
    “Cora, I don’t want you to be an Isabella,” he said. “Unlike Etienne, I do not believe that is the best for you. But if some terrible accident befell you and crippled your mind or disfigured your body in a way that couldn’t heal, I would not—could not—change.”
    There was a peculiar reassurance in that, a security that was frighteningly inviting. At the same time, how real could a feeling be if it were so completely involuntary? Could he even love, if the love wasn’t based on who I was but on some strange chemical reaction? How could that be a love at all, if it didn’t matter what I was? How could it be more than a compulsion?
    And what did I feel for him? What name should it have? If I could call it lust and stop there, I wouldn’t be so afraid.
    “But you’ll change me anyway,” I said. “In other ways, if it’s important enough to you—or if you want it badly enough, maybe you’ll change me without even realizing it.”
    “You also change me,” Dorian said, his