Crimson Kisses: A Reverse Harem Paranormal Romance (Marked Souls Book 1)

  Crimson Kisses

  Marked Souls Book One

  Sabrina Shelley

  Copyright © 2018 by Sabrina Shelley

  All rights reserved. This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, locations, and events in this book are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to persons or places is purely coincidental. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form without the express consent of the author.

  Contents

  About the Book

  1. Rory

  2. Rory

  3. Rory

  4. Rory

  5. Rory

  6. Xander

  7. Rory

  8. Rory

  9. Rory

  10. Rory

  11. Rory

  12. Rory

  13. Rory

  14. Drew

  15. Rory

  16. Rory

  17. Rory

  18. Rory

  Epilogue

  Sapphire Promises

  Free Book!

  Join Sabrina’s VIP Readers!

  Also by Sabrina Shelley

  About the Author

  About the Book

  One witch. Five guardians. A world of danger and intrigue with secrets that will change their lives forever…

  Rory Bright’s world has been turned on its head. Gone are the simple days of living her life under the strict watch of the Regime. Fateful events have plunged her into a a secret world of witches and magic.

  But all is not as it seems.

  There are hidden forces guiding Rory’s path—and she doesn’t want any part of it. All she wants is to live her life, make her own choices.

  But fate has other plans.

  As Rory learns more about the secret world of the Regime, she uncovers dark secrets that set off a chain of events that rock her very foundation to the core.

  With the help of an arrogant shapeshifter, a compelling vampire, a mysterious vargr, and her lifelong best friend friend, she discovers powers beyond her wildest dreams.

  But danger lurks in the dark, and Rory must decide if she’ll give in to her fate…or create her own destiny.

  Crimson Kisses, the first novel in the Marked Souls series, is a full-length reverse harem paranormal romance full of adventure, intrigue and passion. Get ready to discover a captivating new world.

  1

  Rory

  Three times a day I spit at my guard, and three times a day he slams my cell door in my face.

  “Breakfast, witch!” The door creaks open and a tray of food clatters to the ground, slopping a thin gruel onto the ground as it slides my way.

  Other than a hard slice of rye bread and a government ration packet of jam, that’s breakfast.

  I want to tell him that my name isn’t witch. That my name is Rory Bright and I’m only twenty-one years old. That I have people—or at least, one person—who’s probably worried about me and wondering where I am. That before Officer North of the Regime’s Night Watch arrested me, I wasn’t some insane freedom fighter trying to take the Regime by storm—just a confused fucking librarian looking for answers to questions I still don’t even understand.

  “I’m not hungry,” I tell him instead. “And I’m not a witch.”

  “So you say. But witch or no—you’ll have to eat eventually. Witch.”

  I roll off of my cot and pad across the cold cement floor until I’m nearly toe-to-toe with the guard. The name tag over the Regime badge on his uniform reads Porter, but if he’s not going to call me by my name, I’m not going to call him by his.

  “Why don’t you tell me where I am,” I counter. “And what I’m being held for.”

  “You’re in holding, witch,” is all he says back to me. “And you know damn well what you’re in for.”

  Then, just like every other day for the last three days, I gather up all of the saliva in my mouth and spit it onto his Regime badge in defiance.

  And like every other day for the last three days, he takes a step back, sneers, and slams the heavy cell door shut with a nasty metallic clang.

  To an extent, he’s right. I do know what I’m in here for.

  Unregulated use of magic. That’s what the charge on my arrest papers read. That’s what the Regime wants me to plead guilty to.

  But how am I supposed to plead guilty to something I don’t even believe in?

  Your guess is as good as mine.

  After the guard leaves, I’m alone with my breakfast, my cell and my thoughts. The breakfast is cold by the time I get to it—if it was ever even warm to begin with.

  The porridge I don’t even bother touching. It’s unsalted, unseasoned government gruel, thin and gray and made from who-the-fuck knows what.

  The bread and jam I slip into the breast pocket of my dress. This shapeless black linen shift was the only item of clothing issued to me after processing; they let me keep my bra and panties but took my socks and shoes. Stitched into the pocket of the dress is a number instead of my name: 126.

  No one calls me that here, though.

  Here, they only call me witch.

  Instead of eating breakfast, I pace my cell. I wonder how the hell I’m going to get out of this place.

  I count my steps and I think about Drew.

  Three days ago, before my untimely and deeply confusing arrest, Drew was all I had in this world. For twenty-one long years, he was kind of my best friend, kind of a helicopter adoptive brother.

  Then three days ago, we kissed and all hell broke loose.

  I’m not saying that weird shit wasn’t happening to me before I kissed Drew. Actually, weird shit has been happening to me for my entire life.

  I was always thankful for the Regime’s curfew laws because any time I’ve ever been out after dark, it’s felt like the shadows were watching me. And I was always a little grateful for not having anyone else other than Drew to answer to, because having to explain my blackouts, my headaches and the weird twisting feeling in my gut when I watched a kissing scene in a movie to anyone else would have been awkward as fuck.

  But when I got my very own kissing scene—with my best friend, no less—well, I can’t pretend like that twisting feeling couldn’t have been some kind of omen.

  The second my lips touched Drew’s, every light in the city went out.

  And the next night? The next night, I was in handcuffs and at the mercy of the Night Watch, courtesy of Officer Xander North.

  It’s not that I didn’t enjoy the kissing, either.

  But to Drew, it must have looked like I made out with him one night, then fell off the face of the earth the next.

  And as far as icing on the cake goes…Drew isn’t exactly the only man I’ve kissed in the last three days.

  But we’ll get to that later.

  For now, I’m only really concerned about two things: getting the fuck out of this prison and making sure that Drew knows I’m at least pretty much alive.

  Under the long arm of the Regime’s law…well, let’s just say that both of those things are easier said than done.

  The cell is four paces deep and four paces wide. If I don’t mind the fact that my path doesn’t have a scenic route, I can do a hundred laps of it before my guard shows up again for lunch.

  Lunch isn’t much. Just an apple eaten in the courtyard of the prison grounds, and the guard is always the same every day.

  If this was a Regime sitcom, the guard and I would have become great buddies with epic banter by now; I would have taught him some cheeky street-
smart wisdom and he would have taught me the glory and honor of obeying the rules and regulations of our most lenient and fair democratic government.

  Only this isn’t a Regime sitcom, the Regime is the furthest thing from a democracy you can get, and I’ve been spitting on poor ol’ Porter thrice daily since we were first introduced.

  We’re not exactly on banter terms.

  Instead, the guard tells me, “Lunch, witch,” and I scowl at him as I take my first step out of my cell for the day.

  I follow his polished black boots down a dark, cold hallway, up a set of stairs and to the left. At the top of the stairs, the prison opens up to a humid open courtyard where the sun beats down on my skin like a Regime governor’s fist.

  The difference in temperatures between my cell and the courtyard are surreal. In the cell, it’s cold enough at night that I shiver myself to sleep. Out here in the courtyard, I have to shield my eyes from the sun as I immediately begin to break a sweat.

  “How about some sunscreen?” I ask, squinting up at my guard.

  “If you witches hadn’t gone and fucked up the weather, you wouldn’t need it,” he spits back at me, handing me my lunch. “Have an apple.”

  I watch the deeply etched line between the guard’s growing unibrow and wonder who taught him such bullshit. I want to tell him that he’s a dumbfuck for believing in witches. That magical oogie-boogie forces didn’t fuck up the ozone layer, the Regime’s factories did. That the apples this prison is offering its tenants are mostly core anyway and therefore not exactly appetizing, and that—most importantly—even if witches do exist, I sure as hell ain’t one.

  Instead, I take the damn apple and keep my stupid mouth shut.

  I just wish I could tell the girl with the white hair to do the same.

  “Stop!” she gasps from across the courtyard as her guard drags her along by the elbow. “Please—I just need to rest for a—”

  “Don’t care.” The guard’s voice is callous and hollow as he shoves her forward, letting go at just the last second so she can’t catch herself.

  Instead, the white-haired girl hisses in pain and falls to her knees at the courtyard gate. Once she’s down, she stays there.

  It hurts to see someone treated like that. To see her kneeling there with her head bowed in defeat. She doesn’t look much older than me. For all I know, she could be the same age. The difference is, I’m just lanky—she’s so thin and pale that as she kneels there on the cobblestone floor each day when lunch is over, I’m amazed that her body even has enough muscle on it to pick itself back up.

  “Quit your gawking, witch,” my own guard says as we begin our walk around the courtyard’s inner perimeter. “Nothing to see here.”

  But even as he says it, I cast a sidelong glance and see a morsel of pity in his eyes too.

  Does my guard have a wife, I wonder? A daughter? It’s hard to believe that he can just let this happen every day without doing anything about it—but then again, every day for the last three days it’s happened anyway, and not once has he intervened.

  I have to give him some credit, though. Because when we walk past and I slip the bread and jam from my pocket into the girl’s hands, my guard pretends to turn a blind eye.

  And while the other guard crunches down on the white-haired girl’s apple, my guard pretends not to hear my own apple rolling against the cobblestones until it lands in the white-haired girl’s lap.

  It’s stupid, maybe, refusing or giving away the only food I’m given here. But it doesn’t feel right to eat it, either.

  When I was a little girl, before my mother died, she would tell me stories about the Fair Folk—fairies who stole humans, whisked them away to their lands. Never eat of their food or drink of their wine, the stories went. Else you’ll be trapped in their world forever.

  Maybe that’s why I’m not hungry here. I know the more I take from them, the more I’ll owe.

  Or maybe I’m just being a defiant little shit, and refusing their food is one of the few forms of rebellion I have left.

  “Keep it moving,” my guard grunts, placing his hand between my shoulder blades and pressing me forward.

  The only other prisoner being held here right now, as far as I can tell, is standing at the other corner of the courtyard. I can’t help but think that if any of us really are witches, it’s her. The black shift that falls shapelessly around me and hangs limply off of the white-haired girl clings to her curves like it was made for them. Thick, luscious waves of shocking pink hair roll down over her shoulders, and beneath a set of heavy bangs, her amber eyes sparkle as they meet mine.

  I offer her a small smile, just like I do every day, and she smiles back at me.

  But we don’t exchange words. Even if I thought my guard would let me, the pink-haired girl is usually otherwise occupied.

  Where the white-haired girl’s guard is callous and cruel, the pink-haired girl’s guard is obviously in love with her—and it shows. When he approaches her, he draws in just a step too close. I watch the way his lips move as they exchange words, his fingertips lingering for just a moment too long as he passes an apple from his hand into hers.

  “I could come visit tonight, if you want,” the pink-haired girl’s guard offers. “I’ve got guard duty on the gate.”

  “Then shouldn’t you watch the gate?” she teases.

  “I might,” he counters, “unless there’s an offer on the table for a different kind of entertainment…”

  She laughs like he’s just said something hilariously funny, but as the sound fades from her throat, her eyes aren’t on the guard.

  They’re on me.

  “There might be,” she tells him, fluttering her eyelashes prettily.

  “Then it’s a date.”

  “Then it’s a date,” she repeats.

  Whether she’s in love with him back, it’s hard to say. If I had that kind of charm, I like to think I’d play that prettyboy like a deck of cards.

  More likely than not, though, I’d say something idiotic and he’d never look at me like that ever again.

  There have only been two men who’ve ever looked at me the way the pink-haired girl’s guard looks at her.

  The first is my best friend.

  The second is the man who arrested me.

  And judging by the opaque thickness of the metal gates that control every entry to and exit from this prison I’m being held in, neither of them are about to help me now.

  When the gates part, just like they do every morning, the white-haired girl’s guard has to plug in a code on the keypad first. I bet if she paid attention, she could even see what numbers he inputs—but no matter how hard I try to mentally will her to look up and sneak a peek, she doesn’t dare raise her gaze. Even if she did know the code, I guess there’s no way she could tell me anyhow.

  When the guard inputs the correct code, the gates spread with the dull scraping sound of heavy metal against heavy metal. They only open long enough to admit a single person: a leggy, red-lipped blonde woman in a lab coat and a pair of leather gloves.

  “Morning, Dr. Belmont,” my guard greets her as her black heels click our way.

  “Good morning, Porter.” She nods in his direction, then turns her gaze on me. “Miss Bright. Ready for our session this afternoon?”

  “Gee,” I monotone. “Aren’t I always?”

  Dr. Belmont narrows her icy blue eyes at me as a playful little smile plays on her lips. “I suppose we’ll see,” she tells me before disappearing down the hall to her office.

  She leaves the scent of expensive jasmine and vanilla in her wake.

  I don’t know why Dr. Belmont is always in such a chipper mood. If I had her job, I’d want to put my head through a fucking wall.

  Every afternoon, I have the same session with her.

  And every afternoon, it goes the exact same way.

  “Miss Bright, do you confess to the use of magic in a manner that is unapproved and unregulated by the Regime?”

  “Dr. B
elmont, I don’t know what the fuck you’re talking about, so if you want to play make-believe, you’re going to have to do it on your own.”

  I have to give her credit, though, I guess.

  She’s persistent.

  Luckily, so am I.

  My guard takes me for another round of the courtyard before returning me to my cell. As he stands there in the doorway, it feels like we’re two wild west cowboys facing off at high noon in the center of town.

  “I’ll see you in an hour, witch,” he tells me.

  “See you in an hour,” I repeat.

  Then, just like every day, I spit on his badge.

  And just like every day, just hard enough to work the screws a little bit looser in their hinges…he slams the door.

  2

  Rory

  There’s only one window in my cell, high up enough on the wall that I can’t even reach it with my fingertips if I stand on my tiptoes on my cot. The only thing to see when I look out of it is a patch of dirt and the prison wall.

  No sunshine comes through the window, and the bars on it look depressingly solid. Sometimes late at night, I swear I can hear a cat meowing outside, but during the day, there’s not even the sound of birds or wind.

  After lunch and my walk around the yard, I lay on my cot and close my eyes, remembering everything I can about the prison and its layout.

  Up the stairs to the courtyard. The unknown keycode for the guarded gate.

  My cell door, a guard and a simple code are the only things standing between me and freedom.

  Freedom. It’s so close, I can practically sink my teeth into it like a glossy red apple…and so far away that even if I tried, I know it would taste like wax fruit.