Willowy hands gently stroked over the golden bracelet sitting on top of the vanity like some sort of sentiment alluding to the gentle moment it drew to her mind.

Although the bracelet was her possession, her hand decided to leave it there in half-hearted hopes that it could remain a sentiment to that other side of her that the girl had brought out despite her ceaselessly unceremonious attitude. Chewing her lip, she let her hand, clad in gold and ruby rings, trail along the side of the vanity as she traipsed towards the bed.

It was just before dawn, the sky outside still dark besides the promise of day lingering in its corner in a soft orange glow. It was a good distraction for her eyes which had calmed by the time that had elapsed but were still contracting with the emotions running rampant within her.

She glanced down slowly, her eyes seeming to drag their feet as they did so, upon the girl who was the object of her moral struggles. She lay in the bed, her face still pale, with a damp rag resting upon her forehead which Holden had placed there to bring her fever down. Her closed eyes seemed to be sinkholes in her skull, circled with a darkness that only physical ailment could bring.

I should have stopped.

Digging into her lower lip with her teeth, the Queen carefully took a seat on the bed, careful to avoid the girl's frail body. The entire room was silent as the flickering candle on the nightstand beside the bed cast dancing shadows across the girl's face. There was nothing but the sound of her shallow breaths causing her chest to loosely rise and fall and the occasional pop of the candle's wick burning under the tiny flame.

The Queen knew not what to feel. She told herself that the girl's misbehavior could not have simply gone undisciplined, for she did kill four of her men and tried to escape. She had even attempted to kill her, preceding the revelation that her gun was out of bullets. But something in her was weighing the Queen down, making her heart swing heavy in her chest. She could hardly breathe because of how achingly tight her throat had been clenched all throughout the night. It was a maelstrom of emotions flooding her at an unrelenting rate that caused her to inhale deeply and then exhale, watching the way her breaths caused the girl's hair to waver against her shoulder.

She could see the redness of her neck despite it being covered with gauze and layered with her blonde locks. Holden must have bandaged the wound, but the skin around it was tainted with a crimson bruise, the other side of her neck that she had grabbed slightly marked up, as well.

Never before had seeing the marks she inflicted upon a human affected her so. She gulped the hard, dry lump in her throat, her eyebrows threading as she reflected upon herself. She was an often introspective person, being a leader with a lot of decisions and concerns constantly weighing on her mind, but never had she felt so stuck inside herself. She didn't even realize how long she had stayed there in the bed, sitting by the girl's side, staring down at her with a troubled expression.

Guilt was toxic to someone like the Queen. She did not need it. She could not have any emotion, especially guilt, weigh upon her and affect her superior choices. She had to always think and act logically, analyzing every situation and reacting appropriately.

This was not an appropriate reaction. But there was nothing she could do; as much as she wanted to flip a switch and turn her feelings off, which she was usually capable of doing, she felt suddenly in the dark and unable to locate that switch. It was lost somewhere inside her, or, rather, she was lost inside herself.

She realized the length of time she had spent contemplating her unregulated feelings when a ray of light shone through the window and struck her across her face. She glanced up, eyes sparkling in the light, to realize that the top crescent of the sun was beginning to peak between the mountains.

Glancing back down to the girl beside her, she lifted the rag from her head and placed her palm gently against her skin, evaluating the temperature and deeming it low enough to not need the rag. Since the Queen's venom was dangerously stronger than any other vampire's venom, she would be feeling the effects for quite a while longer. She expected the girl to be asleep the majority of the day, but even afterwards she would still be a little disoriented and catatonic.

Resting the rag on the nightstand, the Queen blew out the candle and watched the strings of smoke emanate from the now dead and blackened wick. She was grateful for Holden and the apparent liking he had taken to the girl. Without his aid, she probably would have died right there in that hallway.

Sighing, the Queen continued to watch her. She felt a tinge of awareness that she shouldn't have been sitting there watching her for so long, but she could not make herself move. She felt stuck, sitting on the side of the bed and simply looking upon her.

She remembered the taste. It was like nothing she had ever tasted before, the girl's blood. It was a sweet metallic, like a penny dipped in sugar. It was invigorating and inebriating all the same. In the moment, she was absent, the taste of her blood sending her senses into another dimension and causing her to be oblivious to what was going on there on Earth. But now, it all came rushing back to her.

It hadn't taken long before the girl had been gripping her weakly, falling into the daze that the venom was giving her. She remembered feeling her small body fall against her, followed by the grip on her shoulder falling away. Then Holden was able to pry her off the girl, and that was when she felt the enormous amount of guilt come crushing on her chest like an avalanche. In her stupor from feeding, she fled the castle to resist finishing the girl off. She could only vaguely remember what had happened next, but she knew that she had fed on dozens of humans that night in attempts to quell her thirst, which it eventually did.

As she stared down at the girl, she couldn't help but think she should've punished her in a way that wasn't so sadistically selfish. She could have thrown her in a dungeon, had her whipped, or even beat her to a pulp herself, but she had chosen the punitive option that would fulfill her own pleasures and used her misbehavior as an excuse.

Crawling disgust filled her at the fact that she had, essentially, plundered the girl mercilessly. A voice in her head, one she had grown used to over the years of being a heartless monster, told her that there was no need to feel guilt for a simple human.

But her heart responded with the dreaded fact that Lily was not simply a human. There was something about her that drew the Queen in, and it wasn't just her scent. It was the way her blonde tresses rested against her shoulders so perfectly. It was the way her baby blue eyes seemed to be constantly privy to what the Queen was always feeling—she could never hide from her. It was bothering, but it was true. There was something different about her, something that made her never want to hurt her. Her animal instincts had driven her to lash out, but her heart seemed to die all over again the more she thought about the wrongdoing she had committed upon the girl.

She couldn't do it again. She was afraid that she would, that fear infecting her like poison. She clenched her jaw as the sun rose and illuminated more of her face. Keeping her eyes trained on the girl, she let herself be vulnerable. She gave up the fort she always kept around her, the moat designed to always keep others out. The girl was unconscious, which gave her the freedom to do so.

"I'm sorry," she whispered, the shakiness in her own voice surprising her. The majority of her brain scolded her for apologizing, for appearing so weak even when she was essentially alone in the room. But she ignored it, no longer being able to keep that facade up. "I'm so sorry."

It eased her slightly to apologize to the girl, even if she couldn't hear it, but still there was that sinking feeling inside her that she recognized as fear—fear that she would lose control again one day, or the girl would inevitably tick her off and cause her to lash out again.

She needed to something about that now. There wasn't much she could do, but there was one thing.

So she trailed her eyes down the girl's blanketed frame and to her hand that lay limply at her side. Reaching forward, she took her warm hand in her cold one and enveloped it, holding it as gently as she possibly could. "I promise," she began, letting her thumb stroke against the back of the girl's palm. Her voice was thin, threatening to break. "I will never hurt you again." She let her words out in one breath, feeling a little bit of that weight lift from her chest.

Her eyes gazed upon the girl's face, noticing that her brows were threaded even in her sleep, just how they were always threaded either in confusion or in defiance when she was awake. The Queen smiled softly, feeling a warmth spread in her face. Taking a deep breath, she decided she should probably leave. She had been in there for a while, and she needed to go ruminate all of the things on her mind before the Lords and Ladies of the lands came to visit the castle later that evening.

Bringing the girl's hand up, she leaned down slightly and pressed her lips against the back of it, letting them linger there for a second. After a few moments, she ended the soft peck and laid her hand back down beside her hip. Then, after looking at her for a few moments longer, she replaced the rag on her head just for good measure and exited the room, ignoring the dark blood stains on the wall beside the door. She never liked that guard, anyways.

✞

The soft padding of rain against the window above her bed caused her to come to consciousness—well, a venom-blanketed consciousness, which meant she was basically a confused vegetable whose eyes were slowly blinking open through the crust that had glued them shut.

The ceiling she stared up to as her eyelids blinked open was blurry and spinning. She felt as if her entire body was spinning around and around, not giving her a chance to catch her breath. Her stomach turned painfully within itself, grumbling from a mixture of hunger and nausea.

Feeling a soft weight on her head, she reached a shaky hand up to her face, one that seemed to echo in her vision as if she were raising multiple hands at the same time, all blurry and sometimes tightening together before spreading out again like an indecisive hologram. Not knowing which of the multiple clones of her hand was the real hand, she tried her hardest to reach for her forehead, but her hand dove right into the pillow beside her ear.

The huff she tried to give came out more like a wheeze, causing her to erupt into a fit of coughs, her lungs feeling stiff almost as if they hadn't been used. As her coughing continued, she heard quick footfalls coming near her. A voice in her brain grew alarmed, but her body was too fatigued to pump adrenaline.

Luckily, she heard a voice, one of the only voices she could trust nowadays, say a quiet, "Alright, little dumbass."

She heard movement in the pillows beside her before a hand slipped behind her neck and gently leaned her body upwards, an extra pillow being placed behind her back. The hand led her to lean against the added height, her coughing immediately dying down.

The weight on her forehead was taken away, and she opened her heavy eyelids to see one tan hand holding a rag and another tan one reaching towards her forehead, the back of it pressing against her head.

"A little high, but not too bad," the familiar voice said, and she lazily raised her eyes to see that mop of curly black hair and coal-black eyes. "Well, good morning, Sleeping Beauty. Well, more like Sleeping Zombie."

She felt his hand pat her cheek a little roughly, the annoyance it brought her causing her to be pulled further out of her daze. Turning her head away from him and screwing up her face, she groggily mumbled, "That's the fourth fairy tale reference."

"Is it?" Holden asked with genuine curiosity. "I suppose it is probably getting weird now."

Lily reached up, feeling how damp the hairline of her blonde hair was. "Weird..." she repeated, her chest twitching as she let out a weak chortle that was completely mirthless. "Everything is weird."

Holden's face grew serious as he looked upon the girl, how pale and weak she looked. It was well into the next day, evening setting upon the mountains, yet she still had a fever from her blood loss. He was beginning to worry that she might not make it, but her waking up gave him a sliver of hope regardless of his dread for her attitude. He assumed that all her sass had probably built up inside her after being asleep for so long and was just going to come barreling out like a stampede of horses.

"Lily," he began, looking at her even though her head was turned to the side and her eyes closed. "Do you remember what happened?"

His words were cloudy to the girl's, almost as if they were threatening to vanish before he got them out. Her eyebrows threaded as she reflected upon his words, the clockwork of her brain quite rusty. "I was kidnapped," she mumbled. "By vampire people."

Pursing his lips, Holden nervously sighed before pressing, "Yes, but do you remember what happened last night?"

Turning her face towards him, she attempted to look up at him, which resulted in one eyelid halfway closing. "I went night night," she mumbled innocently, although a sudden throb in her neck jerked her away from her dreamlike cognition.

The guard chewed his lip to restrain the laughter that the girl's response conjured up. "No, Lily. You tried to escape."

The throbbing in her neck increased, her upper lip contorting as she slowly reached to the spot, surprised when her fingertips brushed against the cloth fabric of a bandage. "How rude of me."

"Yes, it was quite rude," Holden said, his smile borderline amused and sympathetic. "And the Queen caught you, and..." He trailed, not knowing quite how he should put it.

Leaning up, Lily inhaled deeply as dizziness shrouded her mind. "And what?" She opened her eyes fully that time, her blue irises filmy and still swirling with the venom taking its sweet time in leaving her bloodstream.

"Well," Holden began, reaching over to the nightstand to pick up the glass of water atop it, handing it to her. He watched as she shakily brought the glass to her lips. "She bit you."

One hand laying on the bandage on her neck and the other holding the glass to her lips, Lily's movement froze at his words. Her eyes flickered at him from over the glass, an undecipherable look crossing them.

"And... You lost a lot of blood," he added, pressing his lips together sympathetically.

Swallowing down the few sips of water, she lowered the glass. "How much?" she croaked. Everything was beginning to come back to her—the gunshots, the elevator, the Queen...

Holden hesitated, his eyes flickering to the floor before back up to her. "You nearly died. If I hadn't have stopped your bleeding and lowered your fever..." he trailed.

Lily swallowed a dry lump, glancing down to her glass and letting out a breathy chuckle. "So the bitch really did try to kill me."

"Lily, I don't think that was her intentio—"

"How could it not have been?" she asked, looking up at him with incredulous eyes.

"You don't understand the power that holds a vampire when they feed. She tried to stop, but—"

"I thought the Queen was supposed to be the most skilled at controlling her thirst. I thought that's what makes a vampire strong or not?" She squeezed her eyes shut and winced as more pain filled the sore on her neck.

Noticing her expression, Holden reached forward, "Here, I should clean that for you."

"Don't touch me," she immediately growled, freezing his hand in its travel. She stared at him menacingly, her lips formed into a scowl. She was angry and confused, still foggy from the venom but awake enough to know she had been wronged.

His eyebrows creased as he pulled his hand away, hurt flashing over his eyes. "Lily, I understand that you have been hurt and you are angry. But don't for a second think that I had anything to do with it."

"You're the one who brought her up there!" she exclaimed, vaguely remembering Holden approaching her the night before, and the Queen being right behind him.

His eyes popped out, a bitter laugh emanating from his chest. "Are you serious?" He looked at her in disbelief. "Lily, I came up there to warn you. I told you stop. The Queen told me to stay put and to not go looking for you, but I defied her for your sake."

Lily's angry expression fell as the memory of his pleading words came to mind. Her cheeks heated up in embarrassment as he continued, his face hardened by his anger.

"You held a goddamn gun up to my face while I warned you to stop. I'm the one who pulled the Queen away from you. I'm the one you picked you up and brought you up here. I'm the one who cleaned your wounds, lowered your fever, and made sure you didn't fucking rot away on this bed."

"Okay, okay," she softly spoke, frailly standing up from the bed and looking into his eyes with hers that she could barely keep open. She felt like she was going to faint right there, but she was determined to stand so she could apologize to him for being a brat and thank him for being so kind. "I'm sorr—"

"You take all of this for granted. The Queen may have hurt you last night, but it was only because you were acting crazy. You killed four fucking guards." His voice was jagged with his anger, his eyes no longer looking at her with companionship but rather with betrayal. "Both she and I, especially me, have shown you so much unnecessary kindness. But it's my fault for thinking it would be possible to be friends with a piece of trashy human scum."

As he spat his last words, he sharply turned around and made his way to the door. He felt embarrassed to have shown compassion to someone who took it for granted and didn't even deserve it in the first place, since she was nothing but a bloodbag.

"Holden, wait!" she called out after him, not caring that he had insulted her. She knew that she deserved it. She attempted to limp after him, but vertigo stripped her of balance and caused her to catch the side of the vanity to keep from falling. "Holden!"

He swung open the door, his fury causing it to slam so hard against the opposite wall that it crushed through the surface, the handle staying stuck in the hole it made and leaving the door wide open. But the angry guard did not even bother to close it; he only stormed off down the hall.

Sighing, Lily did not have the energy to deal with that. She could only swallow her guilt down with the glass of water that she chugged in ten seconds. Plopping the empty glass down onto the nightstand, she slowly made her way into the bathroom, her body threatening to fall over.

Approaching the mirror, she nearly gasped at her reflection. She was ghastly pale, dark circles surrounding her eyes. Her eyes weren't the bright blue that they usually were—they were dimmed and glazed over, the whites of them horribly bloodshot. Her veins seemed to glow from under her skin, whether from how transparent her paleness made it, or from the venom that had coursed through them and caused them to strain. It wasn't too bad, though, she just looked like she had done seventeen lies of