Total pages in book: 65
Estimated words: 61523 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 308(@200wpm)___ 246(@250wpm)___ 205(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 61523 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 308(@200wpm)___ 246(@250wpm)___ 205(@300wpm)
Moving the trash can carefully back into place, I pull open the door and step outside to find the man blissfully gone. He’s down the hall now, wrestling a final rack of lingerie with another dude, and it takes everything inside me not to take off in the opposite direction of the big, fancy, and now risqué-bra-and-panty-filled ballroom at a dead run.
Short-term, it sounds amazing.
Surely there’d be a door to the outside and a patch of woods I could navigate to a road where I can hitchhike.
But I’m too smart to pigeonhole myself into a scary movie outcome where the woman blindly runs right at danger while the whole audience is chanting for her to stop. These are vampires, Romy. Compared to theirs, your run is the equivalent of a legless crawl.
With one last huff, I adjust my dress and take a step back toward the ballroom. But a door across the hallway opens and pulls me up short.
It’s a man—dressed in formal attire and a far sight more important-looking than the ogres working security—and the door swinging closed behind him is the male bathroom mirror of my own.
Adjusting his jacket and buttoning it with one hand, he looks up from the carpet and straight into my eyes, and I’m transported to a simpler time in the blink of an eye.
To playgrounds and colored pencils and plaid-skirt uniforms. To fantasies of noble princes and castles in the country and a fairy tale of my own.
I’m not in Dracula’s scary lair anymore—I’m back in my adolescent days at the Boston Preparatory Academy in Massachusetts.
To the days when I was a little girl with a big crush on an older boy, and the stars in her eyes to prove it.
He’s all grown up now, but he’s the same boy I fawned over back then. I’d bet on it.
“Cal?” I ask, my whole being incredulous beyond belief. “Calloway Slater? Is that you?”
His eyes snap up into a scrutinous scan of my face and then body, widening noticeably as he takes me in. It’s the weirdest feeling—it’s as if he saw me before, but seeing me now that I’ve said his name, he’s seeing me for the first time all over again.
“No fucking way,” he murmurs in answer, which, completely despite myself, makes me laugh and nod at the same time.
“Yep.”
“Romy Spencer?” he asks then, seemingly still needing the confirmation.
“That’s me,” I reply dumbly, raising my hands out to the sides. As the nostalgia wears off, the reality of seeing the boy I once fantasized about all grown up and here, of all places, sends me to the pits of despair. “What…what are you doing here?”
His jaw is tight, and his voice is painfully quiet. “You know why.”
He’s here…with the other male vampires…to select…
I swallow hard, taking an involuntary step back.
He notices, but I’m not surprised. Calloway Slater always noticed everything.
Cal
Romy Spencer is the woman in the yellow dress.
Romy Spencer is my fated mate.
The three-years-younger-than-me adorable girl who used to chase me around the playground begging to hang out with me instead of the mean-girl clique her teacher wanted her to be a part of. The girl who treated me and my brothers as her equals in a sea of people who looked down on us. The girl whom I often wondered about when we left our first foster family and were moved out of Boston Prep and into the public school across town.
It’s the worst news of my life to finally come face-to-face with her here. And it’s the most anything has ever made sense to find out she’s the one the universe picked for me.
Everything in me locks on her, like there’s no world where she isn’t mine.
And even though it’s been years since I’ve seen her, I feel as if I know her more than I know myself. As if my entire being is attuned to everything that is her.
Every breath she takes feels like it echoes through me and her visible fear hits me like a blade to the ribs.
Right now, she’s scared of me. I can see it in the light blue of her eyes and the slight shake of her legs.
I don’t blame her—seeing me like this, here, can only paint one picture about the kind of man I’ve grown into.
“I’m sorry to see you here,” I say quietly, rubbing the back of my neck and begging the burn inside me to gentle. I don’t want to frighten her any more than I already have—intrinsically, it kills me to scare her at all. “But I am glad to see you.”
Because even now—even like this—being near her feels like finding something I didn’t know I’d been missing my entire life.
“You’re a…”
Vampire.
I nod, leaving the word silent between us. It’s not even a question what she’s thinking. I can read it as though it’s my own thought. There may be a few adjectives in front of it—evil, greedy, sadistic, morally bankrupt—but the noun is the same. I am a vampire. And by being here, I am the scariest version of one.