Short chapter, I know. But I updated quickly! I am officially on break from school, so I am hoping to get more chapters posted…and more reviews? Come on, I mean this is pretty pitiful. I know the previous version of the story had a lot of fans, but I truly think this one will (and already is) better.

The next chapter should be much, much longer than this one. So, maybe by the end of this chapter, you guys will know where I'm heading with the next one.

***Ace***

Chapter Nine

~Mia~

He tugged rather harshly on my wrist again. "We're going to be late if you don't reform a brain within the next couple of seconds." He growls.

"Why am I getting a tattoo?" I asked him rather wearily. "I don't want a tattoo. Well, I mean, I do, but I don't want to get one because I am forced to get one. So, I don't want a tattoo." I spoke in a rush, meandering through my thoughts aloud.

Rather than answering my question, he scooped me up into a piggy back position and ran at a speed I couldn't comprehend. What was worse than being on top of him, though, was how nauseated I was getting. Luckily, within a few seconds, he was setting me down in a completely different room that I hadn't seen before.

"Whose room is this?" I asked, eyeing the bed cautiously.

"Mine." He replied gruffly. A man who I hadn't seen in the corner chuckled. I spun around.

"You're Mariella, I presume." He says, standing up and stretching out his legs in a way that was very much feline. "Matthew Ghoutier. Very nice to meet you."

"I presume you believe you are a vampire too, don't you?" I ask, ignoring his outstretched hand.

Matthew laughs. "You were most certainly right, Dimitri. She is very obdurate."

"Shall we continue with the process?" Dimitri says somewhat impatiently. Matthew laughs.

"Come, sit, sit, my dear." Matthew says, outstretching his arm towards a stool set up in front of a large desk, which had stacks of binders and papers spread out across it. "Do you know what you have in mind for your design?" He asks me, taking a seat on a stool next to me.

"I don't even know what all of this is for!" I cry, frustrated.

Matthew turns his gaze on Dimitri. "You have not yet told her?"

"I thought it better you explained." Dimitri replied swiftly, taking a seat on the edge of the bed.

Matthew sighed. "Fine, fine. You must learn how to fend better, my boy." He turned his attention to me. "Every member of the royal family has a tattoo. It is a way of, oh, say, claiming your royalty. Every tattoo has a similar baseline design that is obvious, but then each tattoo is personalized."

"I'm not royalty," I say, unconsciously scrunching up my eyebrows in confusion.

Matthew's eyes twinkle. "I, along with the members of the royal family, are rather convinced you will be soon enough." I scoff.

"You seem like a kind man, Matthew, but I do not want to rule over your colony of crazies. It's just not what I aspire to be in life."

Matthew let out a guffaw. "You are a kick, my dear. Truly wonderful. Splendid!" He wiped his eyes and regained his composure.

"Why can't I get this tattoo after-if-I become royalty?" I ask.

"It's much harder to penetrate our skin with a needle." Dimitri explains. "It will be more productive."

"Let me show you the basic design," Matthew says. "It's a very unique one." He flipped open a binder and pushed aside many laminated pages scrawled with ink designs. Immediately stopping the mad flipping, he turned the binder towards me, pointing his finger towards the page which held the whole tattoo. It was large.

"Oh, hell," I mutter. "That's large."

"It does not have to be that size," Matthew reassures me.

It was a long humerus bone from which two droplets of blood fell. It was deadly and elegant, and so terrifyingly beautiful in its simplicity, I was taken aback.

"Dimitri, I feel it would be very much helpful if you would show Mariella your design." Matthew says, leaving the binder in my lap and swiveling my stool towards Dimitri. I looked up to a bare-backed Dimitri. On his right shoulder blade was the humerus, long and black, with the red droplets falling down his torso. Atop the humerus was black smoke, which slowly coiled itself into words. Amor est gravi mentis morbo-Plato. Omnis argentum oblinit habet nubes-Mary Kay Ash. Positionibus specula mentis-David Joseph Schwartz. The words formed up and over his shoulder and coiled once around his arm.

"Will you be done staring within the next century? I do have other matters to attend to." Dimitri scrutinized me, pulling me out of my trance of his insanely attractive muscles as he tugged his shirt back on.

"I know what I want," I said, swiveling my chair around towards Matthew. His eyebrows shot up in surprise.

"Really? That was very quick. Are you positive you do not want to look through the books?" Matthew asks me.

"I'm positive." I tell him. As I start to describe to him what I have in mind, he begins to sketch, and I see my creation take shape in a beautiful form. We must have sat there for an hour, me talking and he sketching. When it was done, he revealed it to me. I was completely satisfied.

"Let me see," Dimitri says, standing up from the edge of his bed. I hold the sketch pad tight to my chest.

"No. You can't see it, at least not until it's on my skin." I tell him.

"I insist." He begins, his eyes growing darker.

"I insist you don't." I tell him, standing up from the stool. We stood in opposition. Matthew laughed.

"Dimitri, give the girl what she wants. You certainly can wait a few weeks until it is done: you have eternity stretched out in front of you." Dimitri whipped his head towards Matthew, glaring, before he backed away towards his bed.

"Would you like to begin today or tomorrow, my dear?" Matthew asks me, slowly prying the sketchpad out of my hands.

"Today. Let's get this over with as quickly as possible." I tell him, taking a glance at my design one last time. It was an ornate water fountain surrounded by an oddly shaped pond. The neck of the water fountain was the humerous, which had a saying carved into it, and, mixed in with the falling droplets of water, were large, tawny feathers and rose petals that fell down into the water beneath. It was my design.

"Where shall it go?" Matthew asks me.

"My neck. I want the sprouting water higher than the neck of the fountain, and the droplets will be on my neck. It will work vertically down from there."

"That is very much due able. I will begin with the base of the structure today."

I went into the bathroom to take my shirt off and put a robe on backwards, so that Matthew could get to my back. When I emerged out of the bathroom, I saw a large examination bed in the room, which I laid down on.

Dimitri was flipping through the channels on his plasma screen which was strategically up in the corner. I saw The Big Bang Theory on and insisted he kept it there. He rolled his eyes but turned up the volume as he handed the remote over.

As Matthew wiped my shoulder blades down with sterile cotton balls that were icy from the liquid, I turned my head to the side to focus on the T.V. I couldn't believe I was getting a tattoo. A tattoo!

I feel Matthew put the stencil on my back after hearing the snap of latex gloves. "It may tingle a bit, okay deary?" He says. I nod my head, because words wouldn't come out of my mouth.

The faint humming of the little needle drummed through the room, filling my ears. I turned one desperate look at Dimitri, but he was focused on the place where my robe had fallen down, exposing more of my chest than I was comfortable with. I yanked the side of the robe up, which immediately got his attention back to my face. I scowled and turned back towards the T.V. as Matthew brought the needle down to my back.

~Katy~

"Jeanelle, have you seen Mia at all this week?" I ask her as I bound up besides her, my book bag jostling between my shoulders.

Jeanelle shakes her head, her wavy almond hair swaying from side to side.

"No. I start to worry, though. She hasn't answered her phone in a while."

"Well, we're her friends. I say we get to know where she is."

Jeanelle clutches her large stack of books to her chest tightly. "I don't know, Katy. I think we should just leave it alone. She'll be back."

I could see the doubt in Jeanelle's face. "Nooo, I don't think that's it." I think aloud.

I turn to face her. "Jell, come on! We'll just drop by her house after school and ask Charlotte."

Jeanelle tucks her face behind her thick hair.

"Jell!" I whine, tugging on her agate blue sweater. "It'll just be like we are going over to her house. Nothing much. It's like the time you forgot your pajamas at her house when we slept over when we were thirteen, remember?"

Jeanelle peaks through the curtains of her hair. "You still remember that."

I throw my hands up in the air. "Of course! Now, will you please come?"

She sucks in whistled breath through her teeth. "Fine," She says in resignation as she squeezes her eyes shut.

I squeal and throw my arms around her. "Thank you thank you thank you!" I chant.

She cringes at my touch, but gives me a hug back.

The bell rings, so I leave Jeanelle standing in the hallway as I skipped off to class.

~Mia~

After checking over the beginnings of the design a few times, Matthew lightly patted my back with a cloth and gave me the okay to leave. Dimitri had sat there through three episodes of The Big Bang Theory and Sheldon's quips, which, when I laughed at, he offered me a sidelong glance.

I nearly sprinted from the room. I felt incredibly energetic. My back didn't hurt; rather, it felt alive and tingling. Matthew would continue the tattoo every day until it was finished, and I couldn't wait for tomorrow.

Cartwheeling and backhandspringing down the halls, Dimitri watched me somewhat bemusedly. "Feeling alive, I can safely assume," He addressed me, his accent looping through his words as he gave me a toothy smile.

"It's like…Well, I don't know what it's like." I tried to explain to him breathlessly. "Like I could just conquer the world!"

As I was turning away from him, he grabbed my wrist. "You could conquer the world. If you joined me and my family, you would own the world. It would be at your fingertips." He looked at me earnestly. I watched his lips move, and the four o' clock shadow that he had growing, which really made him look attractive. I couldn't stop looking into his eyes and at his mouth.

"I don't want to rule." I said, but it sounded more like a question.

He laughed and dropped my wrist. "Already being convinced? That's quite a good sign."

I smacked him with an open hand. "Don't do that to me again."

He looked at me in bewilderment for a split second before turning furious. "You do not tell me what to do, human," He hissed. "I am your master. You do not get to hit me." He grabbed both of my arms. I quickly brought up one of my legs and kneed him where it counted. He fell to the ground in pain, and I took off at a sprint towards my room.

Right as I slammed the door shut, I heard thudding against the door. I quickly turned the lock and pushed the desk against the door. I then proceeded to close and lock all of my windows, including the door opening to my small circular balcony.

"Open the damn door!" He shouted. I could almost feel the fury radiating off of him.

"No!" I scream back.

He pounded on the door again and again, willing it to open, but he didn't have the acclaimed 'vampire' strength to break it down. I could hear him pacing outside of my door before punching it one last time so hard that I could see the indentation of his fist before I heard no more noise again.

I fell back into my bed. This was a nightmare.

~Dimitri~

This was not the first time I hadn't been appreciative of the protective doors Father had installed for the security of the residents within the castle. It was the only kind of wood and metal combination vampires couldn't break through easily. Even I had trouble with it, and I was royalty. Fucking royalty! She was not allowed to treat me the way she was carrying out. If anything, the roles should be reversed. She should be the one banging on my door, but not to kick my ass. She should be banging at my bedroom door for sex or something like that. She should be the hopeless one, the servant. Not me. I was royalty. The future heir to the throne! She did not have that authority, the idiotic hybrid.

I decided to try her balcony. Running outside at a pace that human eyes couldn't even follow, I jumped up onto the balcony and tried the doors to see she had locked them. I jumped down, picked up a rock, and threw it as hard as I could into the surrounding woods. Why was she so fucking difficult?

I turned back towards the doors to see her standing there smugly, hands on her hips. I stared back at her, dumbfounded. How could she look so calm and collected when she was going up against the heir to the throne?

"Unlock the doors." I told her through the glass, desperately trying to stay calm.

She tapped her foot. "If I unlock these doors, do you plan on touching me in any way? That includes strangling."

I turned around angrily, unconsciously ran fingers through my hair, and faced her once again. "No," I managed through grit teeth. "I will not strangle you."

She scrutinized my face for a moment before cautiously turning the lock on the door, her eyes on mine the whole time. She swung open the door and stepped away.

I walked in slowly, not exactly sure why I was in here if I wasn't going to hit her. She sat down, folding her legs into pretzels on the bed before returning her gaze to me. "Well?" She asked. "You're in here. What do you want?"

"There's a gala in two evenings. You will be my escort, and if you are going to be seen with me, you need to look beyond stunning." She stared at me with a "so what" look on her face.

"You have to get a dress. Your two clothing maids will bring up a rack of attire for you to choose from. This is an important gala, so if you pull one of your stunts there, I will rip your head off, no compromises. Just because I allow you to horse around privately does not give you the authority to defy me in public. Am I understood?"

She rolled her eyes. "Sure, whatever." Instantaneously furoius, I was on top of her in a millisecond, pushing her completely down on the bed. "No. I must be completely understood." She looked up at me, breathless because I had knocked all of the air out of her lungs and momentarily stunted her diaphragm.

"Alright," She said, looking up at me earnestly. I nodded slightly in satisfaction. It wasn't until a few moments later that she was fidgeting because I was staring at her…and still straddling her.

I quickly pushed myself away and unlocked her bedroom door, swinging it open and striding out. I heard her let out a long breath as I walked away.