by Susan Harris
Chaos Theory
The Sanguine Crown Series, book 1
Susan Harris
Also by Susan Harris
The Ever Chase Chronicles
Skin & Bones, book 1
Collateral Damage, book 2
Smoke & Mirrors, book 3
Night of the Hunter, book 4
Never Back Down, book 5
Shortcut to the Grave, book 6
Arsonist’s Lullaby, book 7
Defy The Stars
A Tale of Two Houses, book 1
Until Death Do Us Part, book 2
In Defiance of the Stars, book 3
Shattered Memories
The Sanguine Crown
Chaos Theory, book 1
Butterfly Effect, book 2
Wicked Game, book 3
Contents
Content Disclosure
Prologue
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Epilogue
Butterfly Effect
Also by Susan Harris
Playlist
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Afterword
CTP Email List
For more information about our content disclosure,
please click on the picture above or visit us at
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Anita Blake, Rose Hathaway, Cat Crawfield, Merit, Elena Deveraux, Darian, Celaena Sardothien, Charley Davidson, Mercy Thompson, Faythe Saunders and Kate Daniels.
This book is a labour of love for me and is dedicated to the fierce females of fiction who came before Ryan and the authors who created them.
Because, without them, I would never have found such amazing inspiration for Ryan Callan.
Chaos Theory pays homage to the books that came before me.
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events or locales is entirely coincidental.
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No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or electronic form without permission. Please do not participate in or encourage piracy of copyrighted materials in violation of the author’s rights. Purchase only authorized editions.
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Choas Theory
Copyright ©2020 Susan Harris
All rights reserved.
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Summary: The vampire race is on the brink of extinction, and their fate now rests on the shoulders of an unlikely pair. When Ryan Callan is sent to the human world to protect her former best friend— the Crown Prince Nickolai—she has to put her differences with him aside when a rogue vampire threatens to reveal the existence of vampires to the world.
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ISBN: 978-1-63422-389-8 (paperback)
ISBN: 978-1-63422-388-1 (e-book)
Cover Design by: Marya Heidel
Typography by: Courtney Knight
Editing by: Chelsea Brimmer
Prologue
Screams rang out from below stairs, stopping me mid-pounce as I lunged toward Prince Nickolai, who was prepared to parry with his own wooden bokken, ready to block my advancement. Even at seven years old, I knew how to wield a sword, all too aware I would wield one for my future king someday, the princeling who now glared at me with fear in his eyes.
Dropping the bokken, I raced over to the door of the prince’s playroom and, finding it slightly ajar, peered into the hall. It was chaos. Vampires raced about, pulling axes and swords—whatever they could find—from the walls of the royal quarters before rushing off.
The scent of blood permeated the air, forcing my fangs to slip free of my gums and a hiss to whistle through my lips. Nickolai came up behind me, just as eager to see what had sent the older vampires into such a state. My eyes darted over to where Prince Kristoph lay, fast asleep and oblivious to what was occurring right under his nose.
“Let me out, Ryan. I want to see what is going on!”
I ignored the prince’s order; even though he was older than me, I was the better fighter. Everyone was afraid of hurting the heir to the sanguine throne, but not me. I had no issue punching him square in the jaw if the circumstances called for it.
I growled in response, turning and shoving him back into the room. “Someday, your nose will get you in trouble,” I said, glaring with my hands on my hips.
Nickolai made to retort, no doubt ready to lord his elder two years over me as he tended to do, but my mother slipped into the room, her beautiful cheeks streaked with blood. Dropping to her knees, she cradled my face in her hands and pressed her lips to my forehead.
“What is it, Momma? Where is Father?”
Brushing back the errant strands of my long blonde hair, Mother held my gaze for a moment before answering. In her eyes, I saw such sorrow, as if a sadness had been ingrained in her soul.
“Your father is exactly where he is meant to be, protecting the king.”
“What is happening?” Prince Nickolai asked in a small voice. “Are my parents okay?”
My mother smiled over at the worried prince as if to reassure him. “We are doing all we can, Nickolai. Some very bad vampires want to hurt your parents, but I will not allow it.”
My mother was a warrior, yet I had never seen her more afraid than she was in that moment. She ordered Nickolai to wake his brother and take him to one of the hiding places built into the walls—the ones to which, should the worst happen, we were trained to run. It seemed that time was now.
Even as she placed a finger on my chin and lifted my gaze to hers, tears began to cascade down her cheeks.
“Ryan, my beautiful, smart, headstrong daughter, know we love you, your father and I.” Reaching down to her waist, she handed me one of her sai, keeping the other one close to her. “Take this and protect the princes. You do not hesitate, my girl. This is what you were born to do. You are destined to protect them.”
My mother placed the sai into my palm and curled my fingers around the hilt. I wanted to say something, I wanted to beg her to stay, to protect us and not the king but I would never voice the words; my parents were born to protect the royal family from those who meant them harm. One day I would do the same.
My heart raced faster as a bloodcurdling scream came from just outside the door and my mother shooed us into the small cupboard hidden within the walls. She ordered me to not come out until someone came for us, someone we knew. And to kill any who tried to harm the princes. With a final glance, she told me she loved me one more time and then slid the door back into place. Darkness flooded the cramped space.
I wasn’t sure how much time passed as Nickolai muttered comforting words to his brother while the screams and the scent of blood intensified even in our hiding place. We stayed there for what felt like an eternity, with me crouched in front of the princes, my lone sai a comforting weight in my palm, my fangs extended as I snarled and waited for my parents to come back, take me in their arms, and tell me everything was okay.
Some hours later, Queen Katerina came to let us out of the darkness, nodding as I finally lowered my sai, the muscles in my young arms b
urning, adrenaline suddenly wearing off.
As we stepped out into the playroom once again, my eyes darted around in search of my parents. When I looked back at the queen, my mother’s best friend, I knew. I knew no one was coming back for me.
I ran from the room, searching for their bodies, ignoring the sound of Nickolai calling my name.
1
“Bitch, please. Was that supposed to hurt?”
It had indeed hurt.
The pain from Zayn’s punch rattled the common sense in my head and knocked me to my knees. Shockwaves of fiery agony travelled down the underside of my jaw and along the nerves in my face until my ears rang and my vision blurred. Spitting blood onto the mat, I marked movement in the corner of my vision, an animalistic snarl snapping me back to attention as I dropped and rolled out of his grasp and crouched before him, beckoning him forward with the flick of my fingers.
The rumble in his chest gave away his irritation, but I was used to being considered an irritation by most of the Royal Guard. I was the only female in the training group, and the only one who would not bend to the social restrictions my species put upon me. The human world may have evolved and changed to treat women as equal to their men, but that could not be said of the vampires.
Zayn and I were almost the same age, him recently turning eighteen and me having just had my seventeenth. He had a good foot in height over me, his shoulders were strong and broad, and his fists felt like shovels hitting me; yet I had made it through most of my life faced with people who underestimated me because I, according to some, looked like a Nordic princess: petite and pretty, with ice-blonde hair and eyes of lavender. Of course, most usually followed it with a comment about keeping my mouth shut.
In all my years of working my ass off to be within a sliver of a chance of becoming one of the Royal Guard—the soldiers who guarded the royal family—and fulfil my life’s mission, I’d learned one thing that gave me an advantage: During their later teen years, all males’ tempers were frayed easily. And frayed tempers led to costly mistakes.
With eyes narrowed and fangs in full view as Zayn’s lips curled into a snarl, he launched forward, his hand reaching for me. Ducking under his arm, I elbowed him in the gut and used his momentum against him, tucking my leg around his and taking us both to the ground. Zayn hit the ground face-first as I landed with my knee pressed into the small of his back, his arm twisted back, using my vampiric strength to keep rotating his arm until he slapped the mat in defeat.
I let go of his arm, rose, and held out my hand to help Zayn off the ground as he rolled onto his back. With a sneer, he knocked away my hand and clambered to his feet unaided as I sighed and rolled my eyes. A giggle sounded behind me, and it took all my willpower not to turn and glare at the area from which the sound had come. The female vampires always came by on Fridays to watch the men train and spar, hoping to see me get my ass kicked.
Swallowing down the bite of loneliness threatening to wash over me, I walked off the mat, flicking my tongue out and tasting the blood on my lips. My jaw would no doubt swell, but at least I’d managed to hold onto my teeth this time. We may heal from most wounds by drinking blood, but growing back a tooth still hurt almost as much as healing a broken bone.
I pulled a bottle of water from the cooler and gulped it down, stealing a glance over at my class as they huddled together, clapping each other on the back while laughing and joking. I’d felt separated from them since my entire world shattered when I was seven years old and my parents were murdered.
My breath caught in my chest as I remembered the aftermath of the coup that had stolen both my parents from me, leaving me alone in the world, an orphan to be pitied. Even now, people still speak of the image of me, lying between my parents, covered in their blood and refusing to move for hours, snarling at anyone who tried to pry my little hands from theirs.
My parents had sacrificed their lives protecting the king and queen as was their solemn vow, a vow that had both brought them together and torn them from me. Everyone had loved my parents. My father, Tristan, was the king’s right-hand man; my mother, Imogen, was lifelong friends with the queen. Neither had a bad word to say about another person; they smiled easily and laughed even more so. I remembered the way my father looked at my mother with complete devotion, and my mother obviously felt the same.
Shoving down my melancholy, I tensed as my classmates strode past me, Zayn Nasir muttering under his breath as Kingsley Day sneered and knocked into my shoulder, calling me “Frosty” as he did. The gaggle of admirers laughed as they followed the boys out, and I hissed, flashing my fangs as I started forward, ready to retaliate.
“Ryan, enough.”
I spun to glare at Idris Nasir, the vampire who had replaced my father as head of the Royal Guard. His brow arched as he held my gaze and I tried to reign in my temper. I opened my mouth to argue but quickly snapped it shut when I realized whining to Zayn’s father was useless. I’d be the one left polishing their weapons because I had dared to stomp all over the boys’ club.
My fists clenched and unclenched by my sides, and I sank my teeth into my tongue to stop from unleashing a scathing comment. I stood there, seething with rage as the training room cleared out, leaving me alone—a place where I was entirely at home. The moment the door swung shut, I flung the empty water bottle across the room and growled, the sound rumbling in my chest as I closed my eyes and tried to calm myself.
It took a little bit of time, calming myself, the dawn a long time away. But it was always around the time of my parents’ anniversary that I fought hardest against the tide of my emotions. Every year was another stab in the chest, reopening the never fully healed wound. Every year I had to stand beside the royal family, in front of people who despised me, and acknowledge how my fierce warrior parents had died so they could live. Every year it broke me even more.
Pulling out my phone, I untangled my headphones, popping them into my ears as I lay down on the ground, needing the peace and tranquility to drown out the overwhelming silence of my life. I set my legs on the bench in front of me, my back flat against the ground, heavy bass in my ear as I began to lift my upper body in time with the beat, the burn in my muscles my only friend.
The human world had changed over the years—advances in technology, medicine, human rights, climate—however, us vampires had yet to emerge from the shadows, rebelling against changes in the human world that set us on a path toward the eventual extinction of our species.
Everything you thought you knew about vampires is wrong. The movies and TV shows – Vampires are born not created, carried within their mothers just like humans. So yes, before you ask, technically it is possible to have a child with a human, creating a dhampir, but those children are often quite sickly, their physiology unable to cope with the vampire gene. Some clans, like ours under the reign of the Royal House of Romanov, believe that for survival of true vampires, one must only breed with one’s own kind, and I guess it kind of makes sense.
Anyway, back to the truth about vampires. Yes, we drank blood to survive; yes, we could compel someone to forget if we needed to; and yes, sunlight burned like a mother; but no, we weren’t soulless creatures who crept from graves after death to suck life from the living. The changing times made it harder and harder for us to feed. Humans were less easily compelled, less likely to believe a falsehood these days, and therefore not good for us to snack on. And while we had some human families who worked for the crown, and had done so since the Romanov line came into power, they weren’t enough to sustain us all.
We used to live among the humans before the attempt to overthrow the monarchs, leaving the royal families of the sanguine crown now confined to the royal compound, shutting out the human world as much as possible. We still had to hunt—that was a given—but with humans being so much more clued in with their technology implants and skeptical natures, the murmurs around the compound hinted that if we could not find a solution, vampires could be extinct within twenty years. After all, t
here were only so many blood bags a girl could drink before she started to lose her strength.
The Romanovs had been in power since the time of the Grand Duchess Anastasia Romanov, the famed Russian princess who disappeared. In fact, Anastasia was a vampire, though how she became one was the stuff of myths and legends. Our current queen, Katerina Romanov, was a direct descendant of hers and sat on the throne alongside her husband, King Anatoly, ruling over the eight families of the Sanguine Sovereignty Council. The court of Romanov was the responsible for the governance of the European vampires, and while we weren’t the only court in the world, we held the most territory.
Seven… There were only seven now. House Callan did not have enough members to form a family. I was not enough by myself. Unless I conceded and stepped away from the Royal Guard to procreate, House Callan would remain forever dormant.
Another arcane rule brought in after the deaths of my parents.
So now the council was made up of seven families—think high society but with fangs—Nasir, Day, Reeser, Johnson, Hamilton, St. Clair, and Smyrnoi. Vampire families from around the world. Every half-century, the court was moved to a different country because if we stayed in one place for too long, people became suspicious.