Dorthy is greatly against the idea, at first. She is not blind to the king's obsession with Persephone, but tears and begging of an old friend eventually persuade her. Persephone writes her first long letter to her beloved. Her heart pounds as she writes the words and waits for the ink to dry, as though any moment her lord will burst through the door and take away her last connection to the world away. But at last he does not, the ink dries and Dorthy stashes it in her rather hefty bosom.
Persephone wishes her friend good luck before she leaves to hide the message away before she could send it. The young woman is now alone with only her master coming home to look forward to. If you can even call it something to look forward to. The songbird tries to read, but her mind is too nervous as thoughts of the letter getting caught roll through her mind, tormenting her with the fear wrapping and twisting her imagination. She can see the fury on Clymenus' face, contorting his beautiful features into the picture of rage itself, his hands going through her throat to steal her breathe and possibly chock the life out of her. Before she knows what she is doing she touches her throat and feels its coldness.
More fears come from the darkest recesses of her mind. She was being completely selfish. If the king finds out...what will he do to Dorthy, or Jacob? Is this how she repays them and their parents? By putting them into a situation that will take their lives. The thoughts, fears, and regrets tighten around her mind and body, strangling her from the inside with thorns of guilt and worry.
Several agonizing hours pass and the vines don't let loose on their grip on her mind for a second. Then the door opens. She jumps and her heart is in her throat as she slowly turns to look at her lord...and finds nothing.
He is there, but there is nothing on his face. No anger, no rage, no hate, just an expressionless face. But is it just a mask? Is he ready to pounce on her with all his fury at a moments notice and rip her still beating heart from her body? Her heart pounds in her chest as he approached. It takes everything, and even more, in her not to jump back. He touches her cheek...
and gently kisses her.
She is stunned, but relief floods her as the vines and thrones surrounded her soul finally loosen their grip. She is safe. Dorthy is safe. Jacob is safe. It was all well. She doesn't remember the last details of the evening, she remembers him talking and making love afterward, but not much else. She is blissfully free..for right now. The year passes, as it does. She continues to write her love letters, but knows better than to receive them it is too dangerous, no matter how her heart longs to hear word from Jacob.
Every time she sends a letter the vines return their grip on her soul, tightly crushing her with doubts, fears, anxieties, and guilt. But, as the year goes by their grip loosens, but never go away. Her moments of joy are knowing that her love is still being sent to Jacob, it was her only peace. Her only heaven.
Then all hell broke loss.
She remembers it all too painfully clear. She is sitting, drinking honeyed tea with milk when the door bursts open. There is her master, his face twisted to a face of a monster in rage. In his right hand is..a letter...her letter...to Jacob.
The blood stops flowing in her veins. He throws the paper at her and then marches forward like a solider about to kill. He graves both of her shoulders and lifts her out of the seat, roughly. The teacup, spills, and breaks, but neither one of them cares.
"How long?" He hisses, she flinches at the fury in his voice. He was going to kill her, she knew it. She tries to speak, but the words die in her mouth. Silent tears began to roll down her cheeks. He shows no sympathy to this.
"How damn long?" He repeats himself, and he is losing patience faster than a broken damn spilling its sea. Once again, she can't find the words, and the tears keep rolling down her face.
Then he slaps her.
She falls to the ground. He had used his full vampire strength against her and she tastes the metallic taste of blood on her tongue. She feels his approach.
"A year!" She cried out and then lowers to the floor in perpetration the death she is knows she is about to receive.
"You betrayed me for a whole year! A whole fucking year! When I did everything to make you happy!" Then he pauses, but she hears his shallow breathes, as though he is trying to regain control of himself. She prays he is. The longest moment of silence passes between them. Persephone is caught between life and death with her master holding her fate in his unstable hands.
"Songbird." His voice is calm. Too calm. "Get up." He orders. The consort is too scared to refuse him and slowly removes herself from the floor and gets up. Her face is a horrid red mess of tears and snot. He reaches out for her and she turns her head.
Then she hears a tear of her clothing. She freezes.
No, no...this is a fate worse than death.
At this her fighting spirit is renewed and she tries her best to fight him off, but there is no way a mere human woman can fight against a vampire, especially an enraged one. She cries, kicks, punches, and begs. But nothing stops him as he strips her of all her clothing and forces her on the floor.
He rapes her.
When he is done, he simply gets up and fixes his clothing, as though nothing had just happened. He ignores the bleeding, naked, bruised, and sobbing woman on the floor and leaves.
Everything goes black then.
She doesn't remember the next days, her mind is in too much of a torment to register anything, except to shirk whenever her lord touches her and she can't get through a secession of sex without crying. She begins to think somewhere in his monstrous heart he fells regret because one day he says..
"Your friend, Dorthy, has been spared her life." He doesn't mention Jacob, but she doesn't have to be told that he is dead. She weeps so hard for her love, her innocence, her dignity, and most of all herself. She feels that she is like a shattered mirror, and the more she tries to desperately unite the glass shards the more they cut her.
She is shattered...gone. Persephone knew he could take away anything from her, but she had never thought it would own mind and soul.
She wishes someone would tell her that she was going to be all right. That one day she will wake up whole again, but she knows that for this songbird that dawn will never come in her world of eternal night.
Then the agonizing months pass. Her stomach swells and she weeps knowing it is a child, likely born from the rape she had experienced. Clymenus is, of course, happy. So the months pass as the proof of her rape swells in her stomach.
Finally, comes the agonizing time to give birth. She screams and cries in her bloody bed until the babe comes out, a little son, as expected. At first, Persephone has no desire to hold him, much less look at him. However, the nurse pushes the helpless bundle into her arms and she looks down on the tiny and wrinkled face.
For the first time in months her heart softens.
She begins to cry, but she does not know why. She just clutches her baby tighter to her. She nurses him like she had seen other mothers do back in the manor. She is nervous with Clymenus finally makes his appearance. When he sees her with their son...there is something in his eyes. Something that she can't quite identify. But later she would see exactly what it was.
Jealousy.
Three years pass and her world centers around her son. He is the only she is still going and can't imagine her life without him. But in her adoration of her son she misses the fact that Clymenus never takes time to bond with his son and will punish him harshly for the smallest offense. She knows that her lord is a strict man and has a cruel hand. She learned that in the worse way possible. She just prays her little son never knows how bad.
Then it happens.
She doesn't remember the circumstance, it is too much of a blur to her. But Dragos has done something to terribly upset his father and now Clymenus has him on the floor and is kicking and beating him. She lets out a shriek and throws herself in the middle in an attempt to protect her precious child, her only light. Her lord lets out a growl.
"I am sick of you spoiling and coddling him! He will never grow to be a great vampire king at this rate!" The songbird brings her son up to her bosom and looks at him full of fear. What was this mad man going to do with her and her son?
He calls in a guard, "Escort my son into his room. He is barred from further contact with his mother." She lets out a wail and begs him not too. He roughly graves her and pulls her back as her child is taken away from her, screaming for his mother.
His mother that he will never see again. When he is gone, she cries again. He lets her go.
"This is your own fault, Songbird, if you haven't had spoiled him so much you would still be with him." He then takes his leave.
Persephone realizes that her light is gone. She has nothing, but darkness to look forward to until her miserable death. She goes to the table and picks up a steak knife.
Without another thought, she slashes and cuts her own throat. She falls to the ground with an agonizing cry. As the blood drains from her, her vision gets cloudier.
But she smiles.
Finally, the songbird is free.
Wow, that had to be one of the hardest chapters I have ever wrote. I had to take several breaks from this while writing and put it off for far too long.