He didn’t need for Anne to tell him so to know of her disapproval. Malachi could read her cold expression perfectly. The people who didn’t understand Anne were under the impression that she always carried an expressionless look on her face. That she was frigid and detached. But Malachi was able to read her perfectly. The slight frown, a subtle smirk, the way her eyes glassed over him, how she tilted her head each time she was being condescending, the way she used her hands to speak when she was worried about something. Anne was not someone who carried her emotions on her sleeve but that did not make her devoid of them. There was some disappointment, concern, annoyance and a little bit of surprise that her sire was still around after all his run-ins with danger. “You should’ve known. You know I like the attention.” He mocked, wetting his lips with the drink he nursed in his hand. “Lukas Grey revealed himself in a violent - almost gruesome way. And he decided to throw Iris under the bus. It made people restless. Desperate to learn the truth. They wanted to know if we were just as horrible as he was, or painted us to be. Iris spent her time hiding in our home for days. She eventually gave a speech about how we are all not the same. How we are not all monsters. All I did was show them she was right. Actions matter more than just words, Anne. They have Lukas Grey, a werewolf, turning on camera after being accused of murder. And then they have me, a vampire, saving a woman’s life. Arthur, he has it all wrong with this Syndicate business. It not a war between gangs. It’s a war between species.”
Malachi and Henryk shared a common belief that vampires were the superior species and now with this revelation, he saw an opportunity to enforce that belief. “Henryk stands by me. That’s all that matters. He has his concerns, just as you do. Mainly for my safety.” He reached for the bottle, topping off his glass. “I only keep you in the dark when it’s safer for you to stay there.” Malachi knew there were secrets she kept to herself. Things she hid and never spoke about. Malachi didn’t question her because he trusted her. “I can’t tell you everything unless you are willing to join us and like you said - you prefer your obscurity.” He sighed, looking at her with a soft smile on his face before taking yet another drink. “Do you know why I released you?” There was a short pause. Malachi had learned to enjoy the silence between them. “Because I wanted you to have a choice and a life separate from my own. And you’ve done that, yet - even without the sire bond you keep coming back to me. Why is that?”
“You made us look like a sideshow.” She muttered rather unpleasantly, even if she could mold his projected good nature of their kind to her own will. Given the circumstance, if anyone were to find out she were sired from the man they’d all found curiosity and celebrity in, she’d have rather torn the throats from all those that even considered shoving a camera in her face. Though, Malachi still held greater qualities than she ever had. “Nevertheless, what’s done is done. If anything, at least we all know you’ll utilize the publicity,” though the possibility of him overdoing it was always on the horizon -- go big or kill them all. “You save a woman, and become the future Martyr of the Syndicate and then what?” There would always be question of his sire line in his most reckless moments, and though Anne all too frequently held little regard for it, his new limelight left her wholly uncertain. There was little doubt that the fluctuating attention garnered by the differing species would shift the city beyond the tectonic plates of a gang war, “You’d better know what you’re doing.” She said, rather more exasperated than she might have allowed anyone else to see from her.
The mention of Henryk’s loyalty didn’t shock her in the least, “how kind of him to finally seem to give a shit.” A bitterness that had not yet seeped from her blackened veins after a time period that she’d found her lackluster sense of trust in the third counterpart of vampires within the pit. A moment where she could have further pressed the topic of the man’s sire reaching out on occasion in the months since she’d left New York; though, safer for Malachi to stay in the dark on that one too. “My safety is much less a thing of importance, my self preservation has long since trumped your own.” The mocking smile that pulled glossed lips to the imprint of a signature smirk didn’t fall short this time. Thee truth was; her obscurity didn’t help her decision in not joining them so surely, the vulnerability however, latched to the two lost souls that had without a doubt found attachment to one another beyond her own comprehension left her unsteady in spending such long periods of time with them.
The quirk of her brow spurred him onward at the silence which she might have much preferred than the sentimentality attached to the turn of conversation, but once again, Malachi was privy to a side of her all too many believed non-existent. “You’re asking me this after so long?” Pursed lips left the burning desire for drink to linger a little longer, traversing an explanation for her sporadic, yet unyielding loyalty to a man who’d never truly asked it of her. “This life is no different from my last, I take what I want; I conquer who I see fit and I do so without apology.” Statement, nobody need dare to question it. “But I was little more than something to possess myself, human...-- brittle, always living under the rule of another, even with my fingers dug into the flesh of those that tried. It was..--- exhausting.” The sigh that left her wholly unnatural for the blonde. “You could have found anyone else, chosen any single living being that’d struck resonance, but you found me.” After the war, after she’d laid oceanic and dulled hues on the boy in the cattle car, trampled by the woes of being a prisoner; Anne, fighting the shackles of society in every move she’d ever made, had never quite found the release she’d needed in her manipulative ways, no matter how satisfying they’d been.
“You’ve never asked anything of me that would dare warp my own perception of who I am.” Stand straight, do not speak, mind your manners, allow them to use you to their own benefit, live as a reflection of preservation for all but yourself. Their daughter. His betrothed. Their possession. A plethora of standpoints that had morphed the sociopathic tendencies to blossom so sweetly beneath poison lips. “You offered me something that I could never have taken for myself. Over all others, you looked for and found me..-- and so I will find you. Over and over, for everything I can’t offer you in return, I have at least that to give.” It settled like obligation, though she knew far better.
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