I read it back. It sounds like a job posting. Somehow that helps. I’m not drunk-ordering a fake boyfriend at 2 AM. Nope, I’m solving a problem.
I add:
I need someone who can help me get through this with my dignity intact.
Delete it. Too honest.
Discretion essential. Professional demeanor required.
Final question: Budget?
I think about my savings, and the brand deal money I’d set aside for a new camera. But then I consider the 16,000 followers I lost in the past two months. The sponsorships are slowing down. The math of building a life on the internet wasn’t adding up to spending this type of money on a fake boyfriend.
Then I think about four days of performing for my family alone.
I type a number that makes me wince and hit submit.
CHAPTER 2
JULIAN
Three AM is my favorite hour. The city sleeps below my penthouse windows—forty-five floors of steel and glass between me and the humans dreaming their brief dreams. The quarterly reports glow on my screen, numbers that would make most people weep with joy or despair. I feel neither.
My phone buzzes. A delivery notification from LifeSource Medical:
Your monthly supply has been delivered to the secure refrigeration unit. Thank you for your continued partnership.
I invested in the blood bank thirty years ago, back when it was a struggling nonprofit hemorrhaging money. Now it’s one of the most respected medical supply companies on the West Coast. Ethical sourcing. Rigorous standards. And a standing order that arrives like clockwork to a private entrance my household staff never questions. The arrangement works for everyone—they getan investor who never asks for returns, and I get sustenance without the complications that come from hunting.
I haven’t taken from a living human in over a century. Some of my kind consider it weakness. I call it strategy. Dead bodies attract attention. Missing persons generate investigations. Shell companies and medical supply chains generate tax documents.
Wealth compounds when you have two hundred years of interest and the patience to let legitimate businesses grow. The building I’m sitting in cost me forty-three million, and I own six others like it across three continents. All of it traceable. Legal. Boring. The kind of empire that accountants admire and forensic investigators find unremarkable.
I’ve been reviewing acquisition targets for six hours. My coffee went cold around midnight. I haven’t touched it since it’s only there for keeping up appearances. I should probably dump it and pour another cup I won’t drink.
A second notification appears on my secure tablet. This one requires a biometric scan to open.
Monthly status report received. Exposure risk: minimal. Continue current protocols. —V.C.
The Vampire Council. Always watching. Always measuring. They’ve been monitoring me since Prague, though they’d never admit that’s the reason.Routine surveillance, they call it.Standard procedure for all assets in high-visibility positions.
I know better. After what happened in ’74, I became a person of interest. The kind of vampire who makes choices they don’t understand.
I send back my standard response—a single checkmark showing compliance—and close the message.
The alert chimes from my secondary monitor. The one running Spellbound’s backend systems.
I built the app four years ago on a whim. A puzzle. Could an algorithm predict human compatibility better than chance and pheromones? Could I map the chaos of attraction into clean data points?
The answer, I discovered, is partially. Humans are predictable in the aggregate, fascinating in specific cases, and disappointing in practice.
I should ignore the notification. I have seventeen companies to run, eight board meetings this week, and a merger in Tokyo that requires my attention. The app was supposed to be academic. Observational. A way to study human connection from the safe distance of code and data.
I open the alert anyway.
“New request flagged for manual review.”
The system flags unusual requests. This one pinged every anomaly detector I built into the code. I pull up the profile.
