CHAPTER 101: THE FEAST HALL OF THE DAMNED

The world snapped into focus, and I immediately wished it hadn’t.

I was dropped roughly onto cold marble, the jolt forcing air from my lungs. My knees stung as they hit the ground, but that was the least of my problems.

The first thing I saw—

A long, endless banquet table. The kind you’d see in old castles or in the dreams of mad kings. Rows and rows of ornate chairs, carved from bone-white wood, stretched on forever under flickering chandeliers of dim gold flame. The light was sickly, casting a yellow haze over everything like the last breath of something dying.

But what chilled my blood wasn’t the vampires.It was what surrounded them.

Humans.

Completely naked.

They were placed between the chairs, like centerpieces. Some knelt with their necks exposed, faces blank, leaned against the thighs of the vampires seated at the table. Others were bleeding—not metaphorically. Their wrists were slit, the red streaming into golden goblets held by hands too pale to belong to the living. The sound was maddening—drip, drip, drip—like a metronome ticking away their mortality.

Others had their heads bowed into laps, necks fully exposed. Silent. Offering. Broken.

It was organized.

Ritualistic.

A macabre feast of blood and submission.

My stomach twisted violently.

And then I saw worse.

A few of the humans were lying on the table itself, their legs spread wide, their eyes glassy and unblinking as vampires fed—not from necks or wrists—but from inner thighs, where the blood was hottest. Where the skin was thinnest.

One girl twitched, a moan escaping her cracked lips, her eyes glassy and wide. I couldn’t tell if she was in pleasure or pain or both or neither.

It didn’t matter.

Everywhere I looked, flesh was pierced. Bodies were pale, eyes vacant, mouths slack. Not dead. Not alive. Just... drained.

A moaning symphony of the damned.

I had to look away—

But I couldn’t.

I was frozen.

On the head of the table, on the throne-like chair bathed in flickering candlelight. The throne-like seat was larger, darker. Older. Made of wood that looked blackened by centuries of ash and fire, sat a slumped figure with his face buried in a woman’s chest.

—No. No. No.

There, curled against her, was a man. His back to me, raven-black hair tangled across his shoulders, his head buried in the soft curve of her chest.

He wasn’t kissing her.

He was feeding.

From her breast.

He had bitten into her breast, drinking from her while she leaned back like she was both in pain and ecstasy. Her eyes rolled back. She was moaning softly, her body twitching in rhythm with each greedy pull.

Her blood dripped down her stomach in thin crimson trails.

Blood ran in slow rivers down her skin, tracing over the curve of her body. The sound—suck, suck, suck—was unmistakable. She arched slightly beneath him, her fingers stroking his hair with an intimacy that felt obscene.

My mouth went dry.

The air reeked of blood and perfume, of sex and rot. Of hunger. Endless, eternal hunger.

I couldn’t move.Couldn’t breathe.

I think I might have whimpered.

I wasn’t in a room.

I was in a cathedral of carnage.

A holy sanctuary turned into a playground of lust and blood, where flesh was currency and pain was worshipped.

I clutched my stomach.

I couldn’t breathe.

I couldn’t scream.

This wasn’t Blaze’s room. This wasn’t a palace.

This was Hell.

And I was the newest offering on the altar.

Lucas chuckled darkly behind me, his voice a whisper against my ear.

"Welcome to supper, darling."

The twins appeared beside him, their faces aglow in the firelight, eyes locked on me like predators eyeing the main course. The female licked her lips again.

"She smells even better when she’s scared."

I felt bile rise in my throat.

No. No, this couldn’t be real. This was hell.This was a nightmare.

This was where vampires dined on souls, not just blood.

And I had just become the next delicacy on the menu.

*****

Just then, the man at the head of the long, blood-soaked table stirred.

Slowly, he lifted his head from the woman’s bleeding breast. Her sigh was one of contentment—as if feeding a monster was the most natural thing in the world. His movements were unhurried, deliberate. The kind that said he didn’t need to rush, because everything in this room already belonged to him.

He didn’t look at me at first.

No—his eyes, dark as ink and colder than the grave, drifted lazily toward the red-haired twins. But even that sideways glance made my bones tremble. There was something sickeningly familiar about him.

He didn’t look at me first. His blood-slicked lips were parted, crimson trailing down his chin. His cold, predator gaze turned to the two redheads standing beside me.

The high cheekbones.The jawline carved from granite.Those eyes, though older and more cruel, held the same dark fire I’d seen before.

No. It couldn’t be.

But it was.

That face.

God, it couldn’t be.

But it was.

He looked like Blaze.

No—he was Blaze.

Or rather, a twisted, older version of him. Like Blaze if he had been soaked in centuries of cruelty and born again with malice for marrow. Same high cheekbones, same sculpted mouth, same undertones to his pale skin—but his aura? Wrong. Just wrong.

Like Blaze if he had died, rotted, and been reborn into something ancient and unspeakable. Blaze—but aged by centuries and corrupted by darkness.

Just as I pieced it together, his eyes snapped to me.

My lungs stopped. My stomach dropped like lead. His gaze raked over me slowly—taking in my face, my body, the way my hair clung to my skin. I felt stripped bare, even fully clothed. Seen in the most terrifying sense of the word.

His gaze crawled over me—slowly, intimately, unnervingly clinical. Like a butcher examining fresh meat before choosing which blade to use. A bead of crimson rolled lazily down his chin, from the mouth that had been buried in flesh just seconds before.

He didn’t blink.

Didn’t breathe.

"Looking like a certain someone, doesn’t she?" The female redhead—Thelia, apparently—purred the words, her voice curling through the room like smoke.

The moment she spoke, the entire room froze.

The grotesque banquet of blood halted mid-sip. Vampires lifted their faces from wrists, thighs, and throats. Their eyes gleamed with something between curiosity and bloodlust as they turned to look at me.

Okay.

I might’ve just peed myself.

Scratch that—I definitely did.

Now would be a great time for the ground to swallow me whole.

But it didn’t.

The man—Old Blaze, I mentally dubbed him—tilted his head ever so slightly, inhaled deeply, and a growl escaped his throat.

"Her scent," he murmured. It was almost reverent... and yet somehow disgusted.

Oh, fuck. My period.

My damn body betrayed me again.

"You should taste her blood, Father," Thelia said, her eyes never leaving mine. The tip of her tongue flicked at the corner of her lips where my blood still glistened.

Father.

That one word sealed it.

This... thing. This ancient, blood-soaked monster—was Blaze’s father.

Which meant Thelia and Marcus—the redheaded twins from hell—were Blaze’s siblings.

What kind of family tree is this?

"No so fast, Thelia," Marcus said in that coiled, dangerous voice. His smile never reached his eyes. "You forgot to mention something important."

I wanted to scream mention what? but I was too terrified to speak. My skin prickled with every breath. The air was thick with blood and dread.

"She’s not ours," Marcus added. His eyes narrowed on me, cold and calculating. "She belongs to Blaze."

Belongs.

Like I’m a fucking object.

Thelia didn’t care. She flashed forward with her vampiric speed, yanking my hair so hard it snapped my neck back. Pain exploded down my spine.

"Let’s let him see her properly," she hissed, forcing my face into the light.

A wave of whispers rippled through the room.

Gasps.

Shock.

Even a few murmured curses.

My face, now bare to them, stirred something. Recognition? Horror? Disgust? I didn’t know. But one by one, expressions changed. Lips curled. Eyes narrowed. The feast had stopped, but now the hunt had begun.

Except from the one at the head of the table—Blaze’s father. He didn’t gasp. He just stared, his expression turning into something cold, unreadable... and disgusted. The kind of look you give when you realize you missed a spot while cleaning and it’s covered in rot.

"She’s his little plaything," Thelia said, loud enough for all to hear. "Looks just like him. A mirror made of flesh."

Blaze’s father narrowed his eyes, expression unreadable but sharp as a guillotine blade.

"She’s Blaze’s," Thelia said smugly, still gripping my hair, her voice oozing contempt. "A female doppelgänger of his cursed pet. Tell me, Father... isn’t that poetic? He lost one and went and found another. A mirror image. He thinks he can cheat fate."

His frown deepened.

The room held its breath.

The air grew still—dead still. Even the flames in the chandeliers dimmed, casting long, crawling shadows across the blood-stained floor.

And in that silence, I knew—

Whatever curse they meant...

Whatever pet came before me...

I wasn’t just in danger.

I was a mistake resurrected.

A ghost with skin.

And every monster in this room wanted to see if I’d break the same way the last one did.