Gilded Entrapment

Gilded Entrapment by Blake Ironmore. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or transmitted in any form—digital, audio, or print—without prior written permission from the author. Edited by Untangled Yarns: Fiction and Nonfiction editing by Sandra Nguyen. Cover and Interior Design by Natalie Narbonne of Original Book Cover Designs. www.Blakeironmore.co.uk ISBN PB: 978-1-915448-02-6 ISBN HD: 978-1-915448-03-3 Copyright © 2022 By Blake Ironmore To my baby girls, I hope you will always be proud of me. 1 MERRICK WILLOW-RAVEN I rode the human beneath me as his hands gripped my hips with desperation. I wasn’t sure how I had gone from breaking it off with him to riding him like my life depended on it. All I knew, as he stared up at me with wicked devotion, was that I was tired of being alone. He bucked his hips, driving himself deeper as I cried out. My skin tingled, and my body clung to him as the building weight swelled within my core toward completion. I planted my hands against his chest for leverage, as I tried to suppress my vampiric nature from clawing open a vein. My teeth ached, and my mouth watered. His smell flooded my senses, and my flesh darkened with the mark of my otherworldliness. Rhys’ soft blue eyes rolled back into his head as I rolled my hips against him. My breathing sped up and my hips lost their smooth thrusting roll as desperation drove me forward. I was so close. The edge of oblivion was almost within reach. I moved faster, my eagerness spurring me to the pinnacle of an orgasm that could melt away some of the stress. My teeth were throbbing as I leaned toward him. His palms caressed the length of my spine and tangled themselves in the thick black hair at the base of my scalp and tightened. “I love you, Merrick. Stay with me and I promise you I will spend the rest of my life proving it to you.” The sad part was that I knew in my heart that I could never love Rhys—at least, not in the same way he claimed to love me. I pressed my lips to his and met his adoration with as much enthusiasm as I could muster, anything to avoid saying the words I knew were a lie. Sympathisers like Rhys were just about as tolerated as the preternatural, and his association with me was an automatic death sentence. For that reason alone, I was ending it. My truck was already packed for a hasty retreat, and all that was left to do was say goodbye. I tore my lips from his and slowly pressed sweet, delicate kisses down his jaw, taking a moment to linger at the wild pulse beating in his neck before planting my lips against his chest. I opened my mouth wide to bite down, when the bedroom door flew open behind me and fire jetted into the room and consumed us. I screeched as the fire licked at my flesh and set my hair alight around me. Rhys thrashed beneath me, his legs kicking out to escape the flames. I jumped from the bed, Rhys’ screams echoing in my ears like a high-pitched wail. The flamethrower peppered the room with relentless accuracy as I launched myself through the window. Glass bit into my burning flesh as I toppled three stories through the rain and hit the ground in a charred heap. Pain thudded through every inch of my body as I hit the wet tarmac and something cracked, my leg twisting. In a manic influx of energy as adrenaline coursed through my system, I rolled around in the puddles to dampen the flames as they ate at my flesh. My body thrashed and flailed until the flames were at last extinguished. I huddled in a shrivelled ball of scorched tissue as I gasped loudly, trying desperately to drag in one painful lungful of air at a time. Smoke rose from my flesh, and every drop of rain hit my sensitised flesh like pellets. Blisters peppered every inch of my body and the pain had subsided to a dull ache. I knew that the lack of pain should have bothered me, but in that moment, I needed to escape more than I needed to self-reflect. Planting my hands against the ground, I cried out as charred flesh began slipping from my back. A great, piercing shriek flooded my head and ears, making me flinch. I buried my head under my arm as the call blared through my system like a relentless whine. The sharp pull to go to him was like a deep longing, accepting no defiance. The crude tattoo of five towers over my ribs pulsed, and a faint glow emitted from each tower like a beacon. Well, Drake, it looks like you get your wish. I placed a shaky hand over the tattoo to hide its glow in the darkness and stumbled to my feet as echoing footfalls filled the alley. With gritted teeth, I made a desperate, limping rush toward my truck. My flesh tightened, the sores hardening with the exposed air as smoke reached into the sky and a fire engine wailed in the distance. I closed my eyes and clamped my lips shut at the thought of leaving Rhys behind. I knew, as my stomach clenched with regret, that he was already dead, and that if I didn’t get away from here soon, I would join him. If I had been a pure vampire, I would have gone up like a tiki torch in less than a minute and there would have been nothing left of me but ash. I threw open the door of my truck and climbed behind the wheel with a muffled cry as the jarring movements pulled and stretched at the wounds. Blistered skin stuck to the seats and pulled from my flesh in large, bloody strips of dead meat. A fine tremor flooded