CHAPTER 128
Isabella let the heavy, yellowed pages fall open, the ancient parchment feeling brittle, dry, and almost electric against her sensitive fingertips.
She had been flipping through the thick, leather-bound volume for the better part of an hour, her patience wearing thin as she sat curled deeply into the velvet depths of Lucian's massive wingback chair.
Most of the entries she had encountered thus far were endless, sprawling passages detailing the cold superiority of the unholy race over every other living creature.
Each chapter she passed felt like a redundant repetition of the last: meticulous, heartless instructions on the most "efficient" ways to drain a human dry without wasting a single, precious drop of life; grisly anatomical diagrams illustrating exactly where the pulse beat strongest; and arrogant, blood-soaked manifestos on their divine right to hunt.
