My Life is Horrific Chapter 18 — Castle Dimitrescu (Rewritten again) (Patreon)

(So… yeah I got flagged again, I think know why and it’s stupid. The Protagonist of this story and everyone involved is 18+ and an adult. Removed the explicit scene all together, sorry guys I’ll see about posting to my a03, it’s under the same name.)

I was dragged out of a dreamless sleep by the sound of shouting. My eyes cracked open slowly, adjusting to the dim candlelight that flickered from the iron sconces along the walls. 

The shouting grew louder, accompanied by the unmistakable sound of someone being dragged across stone. The chamber door swung open and the three Dimitrescu sisters swept inside, between them they hauled a man, mid-thirties by the look of him, dirty blonde hair matted with sweat and blood. 

He fought them hard, twisting and jerking his arms against their grip, planting his boots against the floor and trying to dig in, but the three of them handled him like he was made of paper. 

They hauled him across the chamber to a set of heavy iron hooks that hung from chains bolted into the ceiling, they then looped his wrists through the hooks and hoisted him up. 

Please don't be Ethan Winters. Please let this be some random guy. Some unlucky traveler who took a wrong turn. A door-to-door salesman. A lost mailman.

Lady Dimitrescu who was sat down at her desk turned and stood up to her full height. "Ethan Winters," she said, rolling the name across her tongue like she was tasting it.

Fuck.

She turned her eyes toward me on the bed and her painted lips curved into that familiar smile. "It seems you have a new companion, my pet. Though I doubt very much he will prove as... durable as you have been. Such a shame. Ordinary men break so quickly."

She crossed the chamber toward Ethan, her heels clicking on the marble, and began circling him slowly while she spoke about Mother Miranda and gifts and how honored he should feel to be part of something so much greater than himself. Ethan, to his credit, was not taking any of it lying down, snarling back at her through bloodied teeth about his daughter and demanding to know where she was and threatening to kill every last one of them if they didn't let her go, the usual heroic protagonist stuff that I had to admit sounded a lot braver than anything I had managed during my own introduction to this family.

"Come now, girls," Lady Dimitrescu said eventually, turning away from Ethan with a dismissive wave of her hand. "We must inform Mother Miranda of our new guest. She will want to know."

The daughters peeled away from me with varying degrees of reluctance. The door swung shut behind them with a resonant boom, and the lock engaged with a click that echoed through the stone.

Silence settled over the room, broken only by Ethan's ragged breathing and the faint creak of chains as he swayed slightly from the hooks.

Well. Damn. I guess I better help him.

I looked at the thick iron shackles still clamped around both my wrists, the same ones that had held me to the bed for however many days I had been enjoying the hospitality of the Dimitrescu family, and I focused on the metal, the iron responded immediately, flowing up into my skin like water being absorbed by a sponge, the dark metal crawling along my forearms. I then tore my arms out of them, easily breaking them apart. 

I swung my legs over the side of the bed, planted my bare feet on the floor, and stood up for the first time in what felt like an eternity. Every joint in my body popped and cracked in rapid succession as I straightened my spine, and I arched my back into a long stretch that pulled the stiffness out of muscles that had been horizontal for far too long. My shoulders clicked, my neck cracked loudly when I rolled it from side to side, and my knees made a sound like someone stepping on a bag of chips when I bent them a few times to get the blood flowing.

"God damn, that feels good," I muttered to myself while I twisted my torso left and then right, feeling the vertebrae in my lower back realign with a deeply satisfying series of pops.

I walked across the chamber toward Ethan,

"So," I said, looking up at him hanging there by his wrists. "You need a little help there, buddy?"

Ethan Winters stared down at me.

"What the fuck is going on?" he said, his voice hoarse and strained from the position of his arms. "Who are you? Why are you naked? Were you on that bed the whole time? Were those women, were they, what were they doing to you?"

"Okay, okay, slow down." I held up both hands in a calming gesture that probably would have been more effective if I had been wearing literally any article of clothing. "One thing at a time. My name is James. I'm a prisoner here just like you. Well. Sort of like you. Similar-ish."

Ethan's eyes narrowed as they involuntarily dipped below my chin again before he wrenched them back up with visible effort. "You don't seem very captured."

"Yeah, well," I said, scratching the back of my neck. "Let's just say I was waiting for the right moment to make my move."

I grabbed a wooden chair from where it sat against the wall and dragged it across the floor, until it was positioned directly beneath him. I climbed up onto it, which put me at roughly the right height to reach the iron hooks holding his wrists, and I began working the loops free from the metal. "Sorry, sorry," I muttered while I worked the last loop free. "These things are, yeah, they're really wedged in there, just, hold on, one more—"

The final loop came free and Ethan dropped the remaining foot and a half to the floor, landing on his feet but immediately staggering sideways as his numb arms fell limp at his sides and the blood rushed back into his hands with what I could only imagine was an extremely unpleasant tingling sensation. He caught himself against the wall and stood there for a moment flexing his fingers and grimacing while the feeling returned. "Thanks," he managed through gritted teeth.

"Don't mention it." I hopped down from the chair. "So what's your deal? What brings you to a place like this?"

Ethan rolled his shoulders painfully and took a breath before he looked at me.  "My daughter. Rose. She was taken by, by a woman, this, this woman called Mother Miranda. She took Rose and she, she did something to her, i think she's in this castle. I need to find her, I need to get my daughter back, and if anyone tries to stop me I am going to kill them. That's why I'm here."

I stood there for a moment processing all of that while the cold air of the chamber raised goosebumps across my very exposed skin. "Shit," I said eventually. "That's, yeah, that's pretty heavy. Okay. Well, I can't say I know the layout of this place since they've kept me in this room the entire time, but I've got some skills that might come in handy and I'm more than happy to help you look. Two heads are better than one and all that."

Ethan looked genuinely grateful for a moment, the hard edge in his expression softening just slightly. "I appreciate that. Really. Any help at all would be—"

He stopped mid-sentence. His eyes had drifted down again despite what I could only assume was his very best effort to prevent it. "Can we maybe find you some pants first?"

I looked down at myself as though I had genuinely forgotten, which to be honest I almost had after days of enforced nudity in the company of women who actively preferred me that way. "Yeah," I said. "Yeah, that's probably a good idea."

(AN: And so the unlikely duo of James Mitchell and Ethan Winters begins. One is a determined father who will stop at nothing to rescue his daughter. The other is a naked 18 year old who has been voluntarily held prisoner by vampire women for days because the sex was too good to leave. Together they're going to navigate Castle Dimitrescu, avoid the daughters, find the flask, and try not to get killed. Or in James's case, try not to get dragged back to bed. Hope you enjoyed.)