Total pages in book: 148
Estimated words: 139178 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 696(@200wpm)___ 557(@250wpm)___ 464(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 139178 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 696(@200wpm)___ 557(@250wpm)___ 464(@300wpm)
And the repo man is here to collect.
Kane Slater is a blue-collar vampire with a killer smile, easy wit, and just enough charm to make you forget how dangerous he can be. But charm doesn’t buy entry into the elite’s masked gala— in fact, they think he’s better off dead.
But with his brothers’ lives on the line, he sneaks inside anyway—and finds his fated mate on display.
Her blood, valuable. Her future, sold.
Unfortunately for him, Blair Windsor’s been raised to believe that the vampire elite’s auction is a glittering fairy tale.
Kane knows better.
If Blair goes to auction, the life she’s dreamed of will be replaced by a nightmare.
So he does what he does best.
He reclaims what was never rightfully theirs.
Starting with her
*************FULL BOOK START HERE*************
1
…I have no plans to kill you. Not today.
—Archangel Raphael to Guild Hunter Elena Deveraux (Once, on a Tower roof)
A thousand years old.
Elena’s brain struggled to comprehend the enormity of that truth, a truth writ large in the city that sprawled in front of her. Her vantage point on the railingless balcony outside her and Raphael’s Tower suite gave her a bird’s-eye view of a Manhattan that had altered dramatically since the day she’d first walked into a meeting with an archangel…and into her destiny.
The waters of the Atlantic had surged quietly into the landscape in the three centuries since Illium’s ascension, nibbling away the coastal border until part of the city was now waterborne, buildings and parks floating gently on oceanic waves.
Unlike the airborne habitats, which anchored to the earth only in emergencies, the water habitats were permanently anchored and connected to solid ground, bridge after bridge arcing over blue-green water and into Manhattan proper.
That had always felt right to Elena—her home had, from the beginning, been a land of bridges and water, though the Hudson and the East River slumbered sleepily these days after having settled into their new pathways four hundred years earlier. Their waters ran clearer than they had in her mortal years, and today, the sun turned the Hudson into a sheet of sparks that almost hurt the eye.
The metal and glass and soaring skyscrapers so iconic of New York during her mortal lifespan still existed, but where roads had once cut the city into neat grids, there were now thick corridors of living green that served that function.
That green heart hadn’t impacted only the roads—the biotech born partially of the Legion’s enduring legacy had speared outward until New York’s skyscrapers rose half-organic from the earth. Even the Tower was part organic, its external walls a gleam of midnight blue-black.
Anytime she placed a palm on that living “metal,” the area around her hand turned a searing blue so distinctive, it needed no name to identify it. Hbeebti, it seemed to say. Hunter-mine.
The Tower reacted that way to no one else…but then, it was Raphael’s blood that had provided the blueprint for the Tower’s organic skin. In battle, the Tower was now an extension of its archangel, a repository of violent power that sang with his name.
Glimpses of yellow through the canopies of the massive trees that lined Manhattan’s streets and avenues.
Elena smiled, the ache in her heart a fraction less painful. Because the yellow cabs had soldiered on through war and change and multiple transformations of the world and of technology.
Like all vehicles in New York these days, they didn’t need roads except as designated pathways along which to quietly purr. Their passage was so gentle that they did no damage to the greenery over which they hummed—but the drivers continued to honk and shake their fists at others they thought were dawdling.
Because the drivers had also come through time and change and the failure of pure self-driving tech. The latter had never totally recovered from the incidents where vehicles had stopped for frothing-at-the-mouth vampire “pedestrians”—thus serving up their passengers as a gruesome smorgasbord.
To the left of the last cab, a private vehicle pulled to a stop on the “third deck” of the street, the final level assigned for air-parking. Elena’s eyesight had become increasingly sharper with each new century of immortality, edging ever closer to the vision of a raptor, so she had no trouble seeing details even from this distance.
The black-clad woman who stepped out of the car and onto a small gravity float that carried her to the ground before the float retreated to the vehicle had hair a familiar sheet of glossy ebony—in which fluttered a colorful array of the tiny mechanical birds that were in style this decade.
Holly, off to look in on the design studio she’d founded three centuries earlier—the same studio that had set the trend for mechanical hair accessories. Each piece was designed according to the aesthetics of the early twentieth century in a seamless melding of the past and present. Holly had not only come up with the initial concept, she’d also taken it into immortal clubs and ballrooms.