I clenched my fists beneath the stained sheet so hard my nails tore into my palms. The violation of privacy I had just endured had carved a deep wound into my soul.
"You watched me down to my very core... and I heard the sound of your breath." I said with a suppressed fury. My voice dropped like a threat rising from a dark abyss. "If I am not to be your only 'special' one, if you are still crawling over the skin of others... I will stab myself."
I lunged for the small, rusted knife on the table. The coldness of the metal seeped from my fingers into my soul.
"You have a 700-year investment in me, don't you? My blood levels, my hormones, everything is in your hands... But I can move fast enough to stop my own heart. You wouldn't want to find your own property as a useless, blood-soaked pile of flesh, would you, Master?"
The air in the room grew heavy in an instant. Even the mechanical hum of the system seemed to cut out. Dante's voice echoed in my mind, stripped of all mockery, replaced by a pitch-black seriousness.
"Are you threatening me with my own property, Dorian? When even your death belongs to me, where do you find the audacity to press that blade against your skin?"
Wrapping the sheet tighter, I stared at my reflection in the mirror—at that wretched but unyielding version of myself.
"Feel free to test me," I whispered. "Either only me, or no one at all."
I pressed the cold tip of the rusted metal into the sensitive hollow of my eye socket, hard enough to bruise the flesh. My pupils trembled with a wild desperation.
"Whoever else you're whispering poisonous words to, or however many boys and girls, you're spreading open to feed them their own cream... the count is about to drop by one!" I said,my voice fracturing against the cracked walls.
"You won't do it! It will only be me!"
Dante's dark, deep laughter rippled through the damp air, but he didn't answer immediately. This silence drove me even more insane. As my jaw shook violently, I pushed the knife a millimeter further.
"You can't buy my soul!" I thundered. "Do you hear me? I'm not for sale like the others! Either end your ownership of them, or..."
Dante's voice appeared this time not in my mind, but like a warm breath right at the nape of my neck: "Oh, Dori, keep going... This ambitious streak of yours, the ferocity as you press that blade into your skin... it turns me on even more."
As tears flooded my eyes, I kept my grip tight on the knife. "How many others are there?" I asked in agony. "Do you play with everyone's pride like this? Do you humiliate them too?"
Silence was Dante's most dangerous weapon. A few seconds later, that voice—soft as velvet yet utterly possessive—leveled all my defenses:
"Only for the one who is rebellious and tight... And noisy." Dante said, his voice as heavy as a confession, as certain as an oath.
"If it pleases you to hear it; I am too obsessed with you full-time to bother controlling anyone else's stupid biological inadequacy."
[SYSTEM MESSAGE: PRIVATE STATUS UPDATED. EXCLUSIVITY OWNERSHIP PROTOCOL ACTIVE.]
Dante's whisper caressed my mind.
"The others were just data, Dorian... But you, you are my unending hunger. Now drop the knife and enjoy your master's undivided attention."
My fingers loosened, and the knife fell onto the rusted rails with a metallic clang. I had nowhere left to run; Dante had not only chained my body but had wrapped my own wild jealousy around my neck like a collar.
No matter how much I hated the situation I was in, I was so furious that I couldn't share that pit with anyone.
Perhaps human genes were programmed to be selfish, and I was so arrogant that I would have torn the world to shreds at the first opportunity. Just like my ancestors who started a nuclear war, fled to their private islands, and forced us to become fodder on the scales of vampire justice.