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Even the sheets were red. It was like a sick joke.
He couldn't escape that awful color.
Mikaela had slept on a bare mattress for some time now, having crumpled the crimson bedding into pile on the floor each night.
Just the naked mattress alone was still leagues more comfortable than the couch he had slept on in his parents’ place, or the creaky little bed at the orphanage. The vampires spared nothing when it came to comfort.
However, at both the orphanage and the little dorm allotted to the livestock, Mika had never felt lonely, surrounded by people he loved, his family, brothers and sister, though they shared no blood.
Here, in the vampire queen’s private apartments, he shared blood. Her blood, inside of him, filling his stomach, his veins, his heart, twisting him to be one of them, to be like her.
Everything inside her chambers was red: the throne, the carpet, everything in the room she had set up for him, even her own living area, the times she had brought him through there. It was a horrific reminder of the only thing keeping him alive.
Each day, however, when he returned to his room after being out for lessons, lessons to help make him into one of them, he would find that someone had remade the bed for him, smothering it in those blood-red blankets.
He was beginning to feel weak again. It must be nearly feeding time again, he thought, sinking feeling in his stomach colliding with hunger in a sickening crash.
Just then, Krul entered his room. She never knocked, and why should she? She owned the room, she owned him.
He didn’t hate her, of course. It was painfully obvious to Mika that he, himself, was the one that deserved his hatred, he thought, sucking nourishment from the queen’s thin wrist. He had been too weak to protect his family, too foolish in thinking that the escape plan would succeed.
He wiped the red from his lips with the back of hand. He wanted to imagine that it tasted horrible, like the expired, moldy food his parents had forced him to eat, but he couldn’t; every drop was nectar.
Once he had finished his meal, Krul surveyed the damage he had done to the room once again.
“Even after I make up your bed every day, this is how you thank me? What I rebellious pet I’ve acquired,” she purred.
Mika remained silent.
“Say, what if I let you sleep in my room, since you hate this one so much? At the foot of my bed, of course, like a good puppy.”
And so, Mika slept at the foot of her bed at that night, no blankets provided. It was just as well.
The night after that, he awoke in the morning with a red blanket over himself, carefully tucked in around him.
Four years later…
“Mikaela, help me dress,” his queen commanded, shortly after waking up, as she glided out of bed.
Mika awoke to a view of her slim frame, the pale skin of her nude back turned toward him.
He sat up on his side of the bed, stealing just a moment to take her in as the red, her red, pounded through his veins, reaching his head.
Lately, he was finding that, despite all of the red, maybe he did prefer this bed to this original one she had provided him those years ago, after all.
The end