The Beauty in Pain | Book One of In Pain Trilogy *EDITING*

30. The Proposal

If she could guess a dozen things that Reginald expected her to say, that was definitely not one of them.

His eyes bulged. "No?"

She nodded. "That's right. Instead, I have a proposal."

Now he was intrigued. She could tell by the glint that came into his eyes as he leaned back in his chair. She took it as a good sign and came closer, sitting in the chair beside him. It made her a little fearful but his eyebrows raised when she did so, exactly what she wanted him to do. He was probably thinking that she must be trusting him a bit more to come so close, which just might get him to trust her in return. And to trust what she was about to say.

"You have a proposal?" he repeated. "For me?"

"Yes, I do." Then she dove in. "You're aware of the fact that a usurper now sits on the throne, correct?"

"Correct."

"And you're also aware of the fact that I'm on the run from this usurper, right?"

"That's right."

"And what you probably don't know right now but I feel a little inclined to trust to you, is that I'm not the only one on the run."

This sparked his interest even more and he leaned over on the table, folding his hands before his face. This brought them much closer than they were before, and she was weirdly shocked by the brightest of his red eyes against his dark skin.

Don't forget he's a vampire, Mynera. He may seem civil but say the wrong thing and you might have your throat out in a second.

"Is that so?" he asked, lacking all the sarcasm she normally pushed into that sentence and replacing it with genuine curiousity. "There are more with you?"

"Yes. Saenar Baronius, Hale Naiger, Queen Madeline and a mercenary that recently switched sides, Barron."

By the time she had reached the end of her sentence, his head had shifted, looking away into the distant as if feeding on that tidbit of juicy information. "I had thought that the queen and the prince were killed during the attack. No one has seen them since."

Mynera shook her head. "We escaped the castle together and Saenar has been leading us since then."

"Truly? Leading you where?"

She was running her finger over her thumbnail, she noticed. She was nervous, anxious. Well, who wouldn't be in front of a century old vampire?

"We're heading to a ... safe haven."

"You don't want to tell me?"

"Surely I cannot disclose everything to you when we've only just met. There has to be ... conditions."

She was doing a very good job at keeping his attention. "What conditions would that be, my lady?"

Okay, here it was. She hoped that he would be at least half way open to it, to make her job easier.

Mynera took a deep breath. "Under the conditions that you and your people join us to retake the capital."

A short pause.

"You must be crazy," he muttered. He sounded honestly serious when he said it too, his mouth opened slightly. She understood why he would react that way; it was crazy. But, as they say, the crazy ideas are the ones that just might work.

"There is a slim chance that I am."

He ran his hand over his face, looking at her. "So you're asking me that we leave the refuge that has kept us safe for years to join you, a human whose ancestors tried to exterminate us, to retake the capital?"