Dark Deception: A Vampire Romance (Vampire Royals of New York Book 1)

by Sarah Piper

  “You are so busted!” Sasha swiped the phone from Charley’s hand, her eyes lit with mischief as she scanned the screen. “Is this Mr. Already Forgotten?”

  Charley reached for the phone, but Sasha wouldn’t relent.

  “I can’t believe I’m watching this movie while you’re sexting some guy like it’s no big deal.” Sasha glanced down at the phone, her expression souring. “You’re not wearing underwear?”

  An older couple on a blanket in front of them turned around to give Charley the evil eye.

  “Sasha!” Charley whispered. Her cheeks burned, but Sasha only giggled.

  “He thinks you’re romantic,” she whispered. “Obviously he doesn’t know you very well. Oh, he sent a new one!” Sasha glanced again at the phone, eyes narrowing as she read the latest message. “Wait. Now he sounds like a psycho.”

  “Give me that.” Charley swiped the phone back and checked the screen.

  I need you here ASAP, Charlotte. Nonnegotiable. Find a cab—my driver is unavailable.

  It wasn’t her man. It was Rudy.

  “It’s the boss,” Charley said, unable to keep the disappointment from her voice.

  “Good ol’ Uncle Rudy.” Sasha rolled her eyes. “We already know he’s a psycho.”

  Everything okay? Charley texted back.

  Be here in 30 minutes. Time to talk about your future.

  Charley’s stomach bubbled, threatening to revolt against the milkshake. She was already on Rudy’s shit list, and she’d completely forgotten to report in on her museum findings. There was no telling what he wanted now.

  “You need to ditch that gig,” Sasha said. “I know he’s your uncle, but still. You’re super smart, talented, driven. Why stay in a crappy job when you can find something awesome?”

  “It pays really well, Sasha. I can’t just walk away.”

  The movie credits were rolling, but the sisters were still drawing nasty looks from everyone around them.

  “So that’s the most important thing?” Sasha asked. “Money?”

  “It is when you don’t have any. And that’s not something I want either of us to worry about—not ever. Okay?”

  It wasn’t the first time they’d had this argument, and Charley knew it wouldn’t be the last. But for now Sasha dropped it, gathering up their trash and helping Charley fold the blanket.

  “Guess I need to grab a cab,” Charley said. Rudy lived in a massive steel-and-glass tower in the no-man’s land between Chinatown and the Financial District, arguably the most inconvenient location in Manhattan. Getting there in thirty minutes was about as likely as finding that awesome new job Sasha thought she deserved, but she had to try. “You heading home?”

  “Nah, I’ll see if Darcy wants to meet up.” Sasha linked her arm with Charley’s. “Come on, I’ll wait with you. Forty-Second Street?”

  “Let’s try Fifth,” Charley said. On Fifth, she could at least wait in front of the library, one of her favorite buildings in the city.

  They packed up the rest of their things and threaded their way through the post-movie crowd. Traffic on Fifth Avenue was a nightmare; every cab that passed was already occupied.

  “Figures.” Charley sat on the library steps, gazing up at the stately marble lions that’d guarded the entrance for more than a hundred years. In their familiar company, she relaxed.

  So many people thought living in New York was exactly like a movie, where everyone was fabulous and rich, spending their evenings at A-list restaurants with dollhouse-sized meal portions and rude waiters, or hopping from club to exclusive club, or—at the other end of the spectrum—getting drunk on cheap beer and stumbling through Times Square.

  But for Charley—more than the restaurants, the clubs, the music scene, the tourist traps—the best places in New York were the ones that had survived the centuries. Libraries, museums, universities—the places that showcased and archived humanity’s great achievements, the things that would continue to inspire awe, even when people themselves no longer could.

  Charley blew out a breath. Even as her own life descended into chaos, at least she could count on her beloved lions, always here to remind her that no matter what mistakes she made, some things endured.

  Maybe she would, too.

  “What are you thinking about?” Sasha asked.

  “Patience and Fortitude,” Charley said.

  “What?”

  “The lions. Those are their names—Patience and Fortitude.”

  Sasha finally smiled. “You’re a nut. Hey, an empty cab! Come on.”

  In a flash Sasha bolted to the street, hailing the cab as Charley ran to catch up.

  “Have fun with Uncle Boss,” Sasha said, opening the door for her. “Later, we’re working on your résumé.”

  Charley climbed into the cab and blew a kiss goodbye, telling herself for the millionth time that she’d find a way out of this life eventually.

  It just wasn’t going to be tonight.

  “Fulton and Water Street,” she told the driver. “Fast as you can.”

  Chapter Nineteen

  A vampire, upon the rare occurrence of his death, swiftly turned to ash. As such, he required neither a coffin nor a crypt; the four winds would simply scatter him where he fell.

  Yet Ravenswood was an exact replica of the West Sussex estate, with no detail left to chance. Not the stately manor itself. Not the lush, verdant gardens. And not the crypts that stretched out beneath the property in an endless network of stone arteries. In England, when the original home was occupied by humans, such crypts held the bones of generations of Redthornes, an honorable resting place for members of the bloodline whose prominence was rivaled only by its longevity.

  Until it wasn’t.

  Here at Ravenswood, the crypts held no bones, no honorable men, for none were left in the Redthorne line. Instead, they housed only the ashes of Augustus Redthorne, still lying where he’d fallen, no winds to scatter him.

  Across from the vampire king’s eternal resting place was a hollow tomb, a cavernous chamber for which he had—in the final months of a life that should’ve been immortal—found another use.

  “It was his research laboratory,” Dorian said now, watching his youngest brother flip through one of their father’s journals.

  Dorian had come down to the crypts to do the same, though he wasn’t expecting company. He suspected he and his brother had very different motives.

  “He never stopped.” Gabriel set the book on the stone slab at the center of the tomb, then picked up another, running his fingers along the cracked spine. “So many bloody experiments, so many theories.”

  And no time for his children, Dorian thought. It was an old refrain; one they’d stopped speaking aloud in adolescence, but one that still rang in Dorian’s ears whenever he thought of his father. Though the man had been born a noble who wouldn’t have had to work a day in his life, curiosity drove him to medicine, and he’d spent the majority of his human years bent over such work.

  When he wasn’t treating patients in London, he was writing about them in West Sussex, candle burning low on the desk, quill scratching across the page, each illness a puzzle to be solved.

  But here at Ravenswood, hundreds of years and thousands of miles away from his old life as a human doctor, he became those patients. An ailment with no cure. A mystery. A complex puzzle only he could solve.

  And maybe he would have, if he’d had more time.

  “It wasn’t a demon attack, was it?” Gabriel asked.

  “Father had many enemies.”

  “As do you. Answer the question.”

  Answer the question. Dorian wished he could. It was a simple word—no. But that one simple word would unleash much more complicated questions—questions Dorian had neither the knowledge nor the heart to field tonight.

  He closed his eyes and leaned back against the stone wall, letting the cold seep into his bones, wondering—yet again—how the fuck it had come to this.

  Dorian had been estranged f
rom his brothers for five decades, but there was one thread that would always bind them: a mutual, all-encompassing hatred of the man who’d turned them into vampires.

  Augustus Redthorne.

  He’d been a difficult father as a man, a brutal bastard as an immortal, and for Dorian and his brothers, the only good thing about his royal ascendency was that he spent so much time overseas on diplomatic missions, they hardly crossed paths. Even after his brothers had relocated to other states, leaving Dorian to clean up his own messes in New York, their father rarely set foot on American soil. When he did, he was easy enough to avoid; he spent most of his time in Manhattan, meeting with the other supernatural leaders and the heads of the greater vampire houses.

  Several months ago, however, Augustus turned up at Ravenswood after cutting short a trip to France. Normally Dorian would’ve retreated to his penthouse in Tribeca, but something held him back.

  His father seemed unwell—not a word Dorian had come to associate with any vampire, let alone the king.

  The two barely exchanged words, and it took his father a full month to finally admit what Dorian had already suspected: he’d fallen ill, and he needed time to diagnose the problem. To find the cure.

  It wasn’t possible for an immortal vampire to get sick, yet he was. Clearly. Dorian wouldn’t have believed it if the evidence wasn’t staring him right in the face, night after night.

  Dorian hated his father with a passion that rivaled the burning sun over the Sahara, but that didn’t mean he wanted him to die. He tried to help, but Augustus refused the intervention of a freelance witch, refused any spells and enchantments Dorian procured. Eventually, he stopped feeding, turning away human blood donors and blood bags alike. Even demons.

  Dorian had felt like a child again, peering through the gap of the door into his father’s study, watching him pore over his books while his dinner turned cold and the candles burned to nubs. Augustus spent all his time in the makeshift laboratory, examining his hair and blood under the microscope, taking notes, making sketches, performing experiments. Dorian was instructed to inform the other leaders and houses that Augustus was attending to important, groundbreaking research and could not be disturbed.

  If there were breakthroughs, he never shared them with Dorian.

  If there were regrets, he never shared those either.

  He was, in his final months, as he’d always been—completely unreachable.

  Gabriel was right.

  In the end, it wasn’t an enemy attack that had taken Augustus.

  It was an illness. A violent, human illness that had ravaged his body, thoroughly and ceaselessly, until his final labored breaths. And with those breaths, Augustus asked his eldest son for the simple courtesy of a fast end.

  For centuries, Dorian had wanted his father to suffer. To live in agony for betraying his family, killing his wife and youngest sons while condemning the other four to an eternity of misery.

  But for that brief moment, there wasn’t two and a half centuries of anger and resentment. There was only the last wish of a dying man, and Dorian obliged, for both their sakes.

  Dorian opened his eyes now, the sulfuric smell of the match lingering in his memories. Suddenly he wanted to tell Gabriel everything, to relieve himself of the great burden of these secrets. He wanted his father’s death to draw them close, as his life had driven them apart. He wanted them all to know how much he loved them, how he’d never stop searching for the answers his father couldn’t seem to find.

  But when he looked at Gabriel now, the tension in his muscles, the fist clenched at his side, he knew he couldn’t burden him with this. He couldn’t burden any of them.

  Not until they were safe.

  “He died by fire,” Dorian finally said. That, at least, was true.

  “By his own hand?”

  “By mine.” Dorian scrubbed a hand over his mouth. “He asked me to do it, Gabriel. To end his suffering.”

  “Suffering from what?”

  “He wouldn’t say.”

  “You think it really was an attack?”

  “Frankly, I don’t know what to think.”

  Gabriel tossed the journal onto the pile, then put his hands behind his head, tipping back to look at the rough stone ceiling. The tombs were fitted with overhead lights, and in the soft orange-yellow glow of the bulb, his skin looked eerily pale.

  “Any last words?” he asked.

  For a moment, Dorian wished he could ease his youngest brother’s ache with a pleasant end to the otherwise gruesome tale of their father’s demise.

  But the man’s last words were much too terrifying to share.

  Stark in their utter simplicity, as cold and cutting as the scalpel he’d wielded against his own flesh, night after night as he desperately chased his cure.

  Your brothers… you must find… genetic…

  Then, he went up in smoke.

  There were answers to the riddles, Dorian suspected, encoded in those journals. But so far, Dorian hadn’t made head nor tail of them. All he knew was that his father, the most powerful immortal vampire in an age, had suffered and died of a human illness, and that illness—that weakness—allegedly ran through the blood of the four remaining Redthorne royals. Even a whisper of that knowledge would be a deadly weapon in enemy hands, and down here in the crypts of Ravenswood was an entire tomb filled with such secrets.

  Just because Dorian hadn’t deciphered them yet didn’t mean they were undecipherable.

  “Nothing, right?” Gabriel asked, head still tipped back, arms spread wide as if he were looking to the heavens for answers from their dead father.

  Wrong direction, brother.

  Testing the iron gate around his heart, Dorian said, “If you’re looking for deathbed confessions and an unburdening of regrets about what a terrible father he was, I’m sorry to disappoint you. He said nothing, Gabriel. He died empty, but for the secrets he carried with him to hell.”

  A bitter laugh escaped Gabriel’s mouth. “You’d think I’d be used to it by now, but it never gets easier, does it?”

  “Hearing of Father’s abject failings?”

  “No.” Gabriel lowered his arms and turned to face him, his eyes as cold and black as the crypts themselves, a darkness that echoed for eternity. “Being disappointed by you.”

  Chapter Twenty

  There was a snake in Rudy’s living room. A snake with dull gray eyes and spiky, over-gelled hair who leered at Charley with a mix of lust and pure hatred.

  Mental note: order a new Beyoncé later.

  “Charley, Charley, Charley,” the snake said, running his tongue along his top teeth in a move he probably thought was sexy. “You’re looking fine as fuck.”

  “Travis.” It was all she could give him—his name. It’d been more than a year since their last night together, but the sight of her ex still made her skin crawl. It probably always would.

  “So glad you could finally join us.” Uncle Rudy stepped out from the kitchen and handed Charley a gin and tonic, gesturing for her to take the seat next to Travis on the couch, probably as punishment for being late. “Care to tell me about your evening?”

  Charley sipped her drink—cheap gin for the guests, of course—buying herself a minute to think. Rudy was definitely angling for something. He hadn’t asked about the JHS, and none of the other crew members were here to talk shop. Only Travis, a freelancer they’d met the year after her father’s death. The others didn’t think much of him—in fact, Bones had never quite forgiven Charley for getting involved with such a lowlife—but Rudy still used him sometimes for fake passports and customs forms.

  So what the fuck was he doing there now?

  “Charlotte?” Rudy pressed. “I asked you a question.”

  Charley shrugged her shoulders, downing another gulp. “I was about to call you when I got your text—I went to the JHS earlier to snoop around. The Whitfield was donated, like you said. The details are confidential, but everything seemed on the up-and-up.”


  “Why would a man like Dorian Redthorne pay that much for a painting just to donate it?” Rudy asked, downing the last of his drink.

  Charley hid the smile behind her glass, remembering what Dorian had said. “Maybe he’s just a nice chap.”

  Rudy laughed, a machine-gun cackle that hurt her ears. “Oh, kiddo. Didn’t the old man ever teach you there’s no such thing?”

  “Guess we didn’t get around to that lesson.”

  “No, I suppose not.” Rudy turned back toward the kitchen. “I need another drink. Why don’t you two catch up?”

  The moment he left the room, Travis was practically on top of her, stroking her arm with his cold fingers, sniffing her hair. “It’s good to see you, baby.”

  She curled in on herself, shrugging him off.

  “Aw, don’t be like that.” Travis trailed a finger along her cheek, tongue darting out between his lips like a damn reptile. “I haven’t stopped thinking about you. All those nasty things you used to say. You remember, don’t you?”

  “Not really.” She slid as far as she could to the other end of the couch, feigning indifference. “Guess I’ve moved on.”

  “Guess you’re still a stuck-up cunt.”

  She glared at him, new fire crackling in her belly. “Never doubt it, snake.”

  God, how the fuck had she ever fallen for this guy? The memory of his hands on her body, his crunchy hair, his sloppy tongue in her ear as he grunted over her body like an ape… She nearly gagged.

  “Come on, baby. I’m just playing.” Travis’ gaze traveled down her body, stopping to rest at her crotch. “You still want it. I can tell by those tight jeans you wore for me.”

  “Don’t touch me, Travis. I mean it.”

  “Nah, I don’t think you do.” He shoved his hand between her thighs, pinching her crotch through the jeans. “That’s a good little slut. Just like—what the fuck, bitch?”

  Travis recoiled, his clothes soaked in Charley’s gin and tonic.

  “I told you not to touch me, asshole. Do it again, and I’ll do something more… permanent.” This time, she glared at his crotch, making sure he got the message loud and clear. Then, calling out to Rudy, “I need another drink, Uncle Rudy. And Travis needs a towel.”