The King's Queen | ✔

Chapter 40

"Ha ha ha!" He doubled over laughing, his eyes crinkling at the edges. "Of course not. You're my guest here. Don't worry, I'll treat you good. You don't need to leave-you won't want to leave."

*°*

Blue shuffled the papers in front of him and then met my eyes. "Okay, it's time for the first question. If you lie to me, I'll know, and Red won't be happy about that. Since when did you know that you were an Origin?"

That question seemed easy enough to answer, and the answer was pretty obvious. "A few days ago," I responded.

"Nice." He smiled. "Your first reward will be..." He stroked his chin as he thought about it. "I'll allow you to go five minutes without NightShade being pumped into the room. Let's see how much you recover your strength in these five minutes."

I arched a brow at him. If I did manage to recover even half of my strength, did he really think he would be able to stop me? Was he underestimating me? No... it was more likely that I was underestimating him. He must have some measure in place to contain me in the event that the recovery of my strength proved too much for him to handle.

"On to the next question." He clapped. "At this point, the only logical explanation for how you came to be what you are is that your unknown father was an Origin. Who is he, and what family does he belong to?"

That question, I refused to answer. The Angeles family was already down to me and Luca. Luca had already been imprisoned by the OA before. I couldn't compromise his identity by giving away such valuable information.

"You won't tell me?" Blue put on an expression of sadness. "Come on, Elizabeth, I plan to make our interactions so much fun. If Red comes out, he'll spoil all our fun."

"Are your glasses working right? I'm being held here against my will. Does it look like I'm having fun to you?" I hissed at him. "Let's reverse the roles and see if you still find this sorry excuse of an interrogation fun."

A flash of emotion raced through his eyes, but it disappeared before I could place it. He met my gaze and plastered on another manufactured smile before removing an envelope from the pocket of his lab coat. He placed it on the table and slid it over to me.

"I'm really sorry you feel that way, Elizabeth, but our roles can never be reversed. You're my very important guest, you see. A guest with a past that Prinarch Cole has been very interested in."

I didn't take my gaze off him while I reached for the envelope and removed the seal. My fingers found a paper folded in two. Blue offered a small nod towards it, prodding me to examine the content.

My eyes swept over the words, and I could feel my face going paler by the second. My eyes snapped to Blue, who looked unfazed.

"The Prinarch suspected that you were more than human, and now that your Origin senses have awakened, he took the opportunity to run your blood sample through our system. You see, all the information collected from each Origen Association is shared to the same system. Your sample had a 99% match to an Origin who had been held captive here almost two decades ago-a man called Luca."

"If you already had this information, then why...?"

"We still don't know which Origin family he was from. He showed up to the Association with a few other Origins to seek peace. Instead of peace, he was betrayed by the Origins he trusted and they handed him over to the Association in order to save themselves. Of course, they didn't escape from us, either. Luca was a mystery. He had the eyes of an Angeles, but his strength didn't match up to the data collected from the Angeles who'd been taken in before. He refused to say anything about his family name, even after years of torture. I wonder if you, his daughter, have inherited that tight-lipped trait of his. Shall we find out?"