by Leia Stone
Sterling sighed, leaning back in his chair. “If you want to know how deep this goes, you’ll need someone on the inside. I’ll bring Vasquez in on it, and we’ll stay and get more information. Build a case to show the others.”
Emotion clogged my throat. Sterling was a good guy. He may have been a shitty boyfriend but he was a decent human. I rushed forward and pulled him into a hug.
“What will Maz think when we’re gone?” I asked him.
He shrugged. “I dunno … I’ll tell her you ran off to be with a vampire.”
I froze, chills running up my arms as I looked for any indication that he was kidding. He wasn’t.
“Ster … it’s not like that.”
He waved me off. “Just go. Get a burner phone, call me every day, and we’ll meet at Riverfront Park to exchange any information I find in two days’ time.”
Liv stepped forward and we pulled her into a group hug, holding each other tightly. The entire world that we belonged to had just cracked at its foundation, but we still had each other.
When we pulled back, I glanced at Sterling’s face to see the shock starting to settle into him as well.
“There are some really bad vampires in this world. I’ve seen them destroy people, suck them dry. We … we are still doing good by taking them out,” Sterling said almost to himself.
Liv and I exchanged a look. He didn’t see the app, didn’t see how other vampires chose us to kill their enemies.
“There are bad humans in this world too, Sterling.” I gave him a side hug. “I’ll see you in two days. We will lay low until then.”
Liv and I shoved everything we could into our hunting duffle bags, but left our smartphones and laptops on the table. Sterling wiped them of all information with a few keystrokes and then left to go back to the gym. With our katanas on our backs and the keys to my Volkswagen Beetle in hand, Liv and I walked the halls of the House of Rose for the last time.
If anyone saw us, it would look like we were going hunting. I just prayed we didn’t run into Maz on our way out, because if we did I was going to rip her head off.
We passed Kenz and my heart pinched. Was he in on it? He was old, he’d been here forever. He was dusting the entryway table as we passed and looked up, giving us a warm smile.
“Happy Hunting,” he said, and my stomach filled with bile.
That sentence no longer carried any weight.
We were murderers; we’d become the very things we despised. With a curt nod, I didn’t trust myself to speak, we exited the entryway doors, waved to Finn, and then left the society the same way we entered it—two orphans lost and alone in this world.
Chapter Fourteen
I knocked on Luka’s door, clutching my duffle bag as Liv stood next to me, tears silently sliding down her face. When he pulled it open, he took one look at the both of us and ushered us inside.
“I… we…” My voice cracked. “…need a place to stay for a bit.”
He nodded. “You can stay as long as you like. Bennet and Izzy can bunk together and you can have Izzy’s room,” Luka said.
“The hell they can,” Izzy growled from behind me.
Luka shot his cousin a glare and she grumbled. “Fine. For a few days. Then they need to figure something else out.”
I nodded. Everything felt so… dark and heavy. The realization that we’d been lied to our entire life pressed in on me until I felt like I couldn’t breathe. Luka crossed the hall and opened the door to Izzy’s room. Isabelle slipped inside and grabbed a few things. “New sheets are in the hall closet,” she said with what little excitement was possible as she left the room.
Liv tore the old sheets from the bed as I stared awkwardly at Luka, who stood in the doorway.
“I… need to talk to you about something, but it can wait.” He rubbed the back of his neck and I nodded as Liv slipped between us and came back with a stack of clean sheets from the hall closet.
“Thanks for letting us stay. It’s just until we can figure out…”
Our lives? Our jobs? Our entire reality? Did we seriously just leave the society? My chest felt tight suddenly as I forced myself to try to take deep breaths. I was on the verge of a panic attack.
Was I living with a vampire now? How the hell had this happened?
Luka swallowed hard. ‘Are you okay?’ His mental voice caressed my thoughts and I settled a little.
‘No, everything I was taught was a lie,’ I answered truthfully.
Luka frowned, nodding. “Goodnight, Aspen.”
“Good morning actually,” I said, knowing this was his awake time. Sunset was when vampires had the most energy.
He grinned, and holy hell my knees nearly gave way. I wished he wasn’t so good looking, I wished right then that I’d been bound to a big ugly fat vampire. One I hadn’t almost kissed.
He stepped away and I closed the door, turning around to find Liv curled up into a ball in the corner of the bed. The second I flipped off the lights, she broke into sobs and my heart shattered into a hundred pieces. Kicking off my shoes, I padded across the room and slipped into bed with her, wrapping my arms around her.
“We’re going to get through this.” I wished my voice was as strong as my reassurances, but it betrayed me.
Liv whimpered, grasping on to my arms. “Will God forgive us?”
I thought about her question long and hard. We’d done all of this in God’s name, only to find out it was really in Maz’s name…
But if there was one thing I knew about God, it was that He was forgiving.
“Yes. We just have to navigate things from here on out the right way. We can’t go back to senseless killing. There are plenty of humans that need to be protected from bad vampires. We will focus on those and no longer blindly take orders.”
She nodded, her tears drying up as some of the heaviness left my chest.
Yes. That’s what we would do.
An idea formed in my mind then. A wild idea, a huge idea.
What if Liv, Sterling, Vasquez, and I started our own hunter house? One that only killed in self-defense, and one that protected. A bodyguard service for humans and supernaturals. Because Luka was right. God made everything under the sun, and that meant supes too. If they had souls, which I believed they did, then I would protect them with my sword.
My mind spun for an hour thinking of all the details, calculating the money that it would take and how much I had, plus what Liv had in savings. We could totally make it happen. I was thinking of hunter house names as I finally fell asleep, feeling at peace with my place in the world and my moral duty to right my wrongs.
The next morning I awoke with a headache and remembered that I should have let Luka feed last night, but of course in my disturbed state I’d forgotten and he was kind enough not to ask. I shook Livvie awake. Her eyes were puffy, and she looked like she could use hours more sleep.
“No,” she groaned, and rolled back over.
I grinned. “I want to open our own hunter house. One that only kills in self-defense and protects humans and supernaturals alike. With Sterling and Vaz too.”
She shot up from her pillow so fast she almost cracked into my forehead. “You want to play bodyguard to supes?”
I shrugged. “Only the good ones. Like Luka, Sage, the other werewolves I met who saved my life. They were good people.”
I saw the moment the idea clicked with Liv. She grinned. “This would make amends for all the … bad … we’d been doing.” She winced, unable to say mindless murdering rampaging.
I nodded. “What do you say?”
She grinned. “Only if Vasquez is the janitor. Then you have a deal.”
I tipped my head back and laughed, finally feeling good about this situation. We were going to turn some lemons into lemonade!
She rolled over to go back to sleep and I slipped out of the room and brushed my teeth, tying my hair into a topknot and changing into jean shorts and a tank top. Some deodorant and dry shampoo and I was ready to be fed on by a
stupidly hot vampire who I now apparently believed had a soul…
I was pretty sure I’d lost my mind and was now living in some delusion. Stepping out into the hallway, I padded across the kitchen and then went up to Luka’s door, poising my hand over it to knock.
That’s when I thought of our almost kiss in the helicopter. I was going to know this guy for the rest of my life. Kissing was a horrible idea. Right?
“Come in. I hear your heartbeat,” Luka said, and I groaned.
Stupid human heartbeat.
Pulling the door open, I saw him sitting up in bed reading with his side lamp on. He had a green apple sucker, the ones they dip in caramel. “Good morning, Aspen.” His voice was husky; I hated when he was so formal.
I curtsied. “Prince Luka,” I said in a mock English accent.
He grinned, pulling the sucker slowly from his mouth, and my gaze fell to his chest and the tattoo that peeked out of his powder blue cotton tee.
“What’s Five Crew?” I asked, shutting the door and crossing the room to sit at the foot of his bed. He watched me walk over, eyes running shamelessly down my bare legs as my cheeks heated.
Reaching up, he touched the tattoo at his collarbone. “Sawyer, Walsh, Bennett, myself, and someone you haven’t met yet, Talon.”
“You all have the tattoo? Were you like a little gang?” I laughed.
He didn’t return my cheeriness. “Something like that.”
My stomach dropped, and I was reminded of his time in prison. “From … your time in Magic City Prison?”
He seemed to consider. “Aspen, just ask me what you really want to ask me,” he said flatly.
I swallowed hard, running my fingers along his clean cotton sheets. “What did you do to get in there?”
He looked me right in the eyes, vulnerability passing over his features. “Are you going to believe me?”
A pang of guilt sliced into my chest and I nodded. “Of course.”
Two days ago, I was trying to kill him. I didn’t blame him for not trusting me with his secrets.
“I did nothing to be put in prison. I pissed off my aunt, the queen at the time, and she threw me in there because the law states she couldn’t kill me without losing her leadership position.”
My mouth popped open. He did nothing? That was anticlimactic.
“What did you do to piss her off?” I mean, from what I’d heard it wasn’t that hard to accomplish. The queen was a complete psycho.
His eyes darkened. “I was born.”
Okay, this was clearly a touchy subject. “I’m sorry, I—”
He held up a hand. “No. It’s fine. It’s just a deep wound.”
I swallowed hard and nodded. “I came to…” I waved my wrist in front of him, and he gave me a halfcocked grin.
Luka was a blur of movement. One second he was on the bed and the next he was kneeling on the floor before me, taking my wrist gingerly into his hands.
Holy hell on wheels. My belly warmed.
“Aspen?” He looked up at me seductively and my throat went dry.
“Hmm?”
His gaze fell to my bare legs and my giant rose tattoo, and then slowly trailed their way back up my body. “If you want me to behave, then please stop wearing those tiny shorts around me.”
My mouth popped open in surprise, and then he pressed his lips to my wrist. His teeth slid into my vein and ecstasy exploded inside of me. My heart pumped frantically in my chest as pleasure coursed through my entire body. It hit me then … it didn’t always feel euphoric like this, especially not when I was mad at him for two weeks after the gala. My feeding pleasure was linked to my feelings for him at the time—that blew my mind.
Because I was feeding him daily now, the feedings were shorter. He pulled away from my wrist quickly and licked the last drop of blood, all while holding my gaze.
Lord help me.
“Maybe I don’t want you to behave.” The words had barely left my lips before he sprang from his knees and placed a hand behind my back, pushing me gently onto the bed and lowering himself over me.
Breath hitched in my throat, and I swear my heart leapt into my stomach. I couldn’t take my eyes off of his red-tinged lips. What would it be like to kiss him? Cold? Stiff? Salty?
“Say it,” he growled, in the most dominating, sexiest voice I could imagine.
“Kiss me,” I commanded, knowing that’s what he wanted to hear, finally realizing that I didn’t care anymore that he was a vampire. I just didn’t care. I could feel his soul, sense his goodness.
A halfcocked grin pulled at the edge of his mouth, then he lowered his lips to mine. I inhaled in anticipation, and the scent of the caramel apple pop hit my nose a second before his mouth pressed to mine. A slight moan escaped me as Luka tenderly pressed his lips to mine. It was a soft kiss at first. Eager but innocent. Then I parted my lips and the innocence evaporated like rain after a storm. Hungry pleasure burst between us as our tongues crashed together in a kiss that said so much more than words ever could. I could taste the sweetness of the apple sucker mixed with a salty brine that I realized was my own blood.
This kiss was otherworldly. I’d never been kissed like this in my entire life, not even by Sterling, and he was the best kisser I’d ever had. When you were a virgin, you got pretty good at making out. Kissing was my jam, I had perfected it, I was a connoisseur of kisses. Slow, sweet, fast, hot, I liked them all, but this…
This kiss broke me and put me back together in the same moment.
This kiss was epic.
I’m kissing a vampire, I thought wildly as he pulled my bottom lip into his mouth and sucked it.
A sudden knock at the door had us both going still. With a groan, Luka pushed himself off of me and looked down at me with a satisfied gaze as I scrambled to sit up, wipe my lips, and smooth my hair.
Holy crap, I just kissed Luka Drake!
He opened the door and Isabelle was standing before us, glossy black hair braided over one shoulder. There was a folded letter in her hands with a red wax seal to clasp it. It was like one of those old-time letters you would see in a movie.
“It’s arrived.” Her voice held fear and trembling, and I sat up straighter.
Luka took the letter from his cousin, peered over his shoulder casually at me, and then tore it open. His face scanned the page and I tried to interpret his features in order to glean any information from him.
“I’ve been chosen,” Luka said, his voice devoid of any emotion.
Izzy nodded, looking partly relieved and partly horrified. After a moment of them standing there staring at each other awkwardly, she rushed forward and pulled him into a hug.
I lowered my gaze, feeling weird for intruding on their obviously serious moment. When she pulled back, she looked at me. “Is she on board? You’ll need a constant feeder if you have any hope to survive.”
Survive? Constant feeder?
Luka looked over at me. “I haven’t asked her yet. I’ve been meaning to.”
“Ask me what?” I stood.
Izzy gave him a nod and then left the room and closed the door. Luka pinched the bridge of his nose as if he had a headache.
“Remember how I said I needed to talk to you about something last night? I’ve been summoned to Vampire City by the elders to compete for my rightful place as king.”
“Oh. I mean, that’s what you wanted, right?” Demi had said that she needed him to become king to stop the werewolves and vampires from going to war again.
He nodded, then thought better of it and shook his head. “I mean yes, I want things to change, but I don’t relish the idea of spending the rest of my life tied up in meetings and bureaucracy.”
“You said compete,” I reminded him, wondering what kind of competition this would be.
He dipped his chin. “I knew this letter would be coming, I wanted to talk to you about this sooner, but you had your own problems to worry about.”
Yeah, like my entire life being a lie.
“
What’s the competition, Luka? Why would you need a constant feeder?” I stepped closer and his body reacted, tightening and coiling as if luring me in.
“The ten strongest heirs have been chosen to battle to the death for the crown. If I’m the last one standing, I get it.”
I involuntarily leaned my ear forward as if I didn’t hear him right. “Luka … a battle to the death with nine other vampires?”
A slow and devastatingly sexy grin pulled at his lips. “Yes. It’s a good thing I’m a wicked fighter who just spent a lot of time in prison literally kicking asses every day.”
I rolled my eyes. “Well, if you could win by the size of your ego, I think they would crown you right now.”
He chuckled. “So you’ll help me? I mean normally … I’d have a handful of feeders there, but since I can only feed from you…” He chewed his lip nervously and I swallowed.
“This will be in Vampire City? For how long?” Because I had plans to start my own hunter society…
He nodded. “The whole process can take up to a month.”
“A month!” I shouted.
He winced. “But after that, when I’m king, you can … go back to your life here if you want, and I can come to you daily. It’s only an hour drive.”
The future king of the vampires was going to drive into the human world every day to feed from me?
That meant…
“So if you’re king, you’ll live there? In Vampire City? Forever?”
He inclined his head, vulnerability crossing his features. “I mean, you could live there too if you wanted … but I figured with your distaste for my kind—”
“Yeah, I probably wouldn’t be able to sleep at night,” I told him honestly.
He chuckled. “Fair enough. Just for the month, then? Liv can come too. You will have my full protection and be there as guests of a prince. Nothing bad will happen to you.”
Now it was my turn to chuckle. “We’re vampire killers. I’m not worried about it.”
He inclined his head. “Is that a yes? I can’t tell.”
I opened my mouth to speak when my burner phone went off in my pocket.