Page 85 of Fall into Place

Where is your valentine taking you for your big date?

A private candlelit dinner with a table strewn with rose petals where you’ll drink expensive wine and be serenaded by violinists—you like it romantic!

The hottest club in downtown Manhattan, where you’ll have bottle service at a center table and be the envy of all who see you—you like attention!

Why go out at all when you could stay home, lock the door, have sex all night, and not have to interact with anyone besides your hottie? You like it dirty (and a little bit misanthropic)!

Surprise! They have a private jet all fueled up. Where are you heading?

Paris, mais bien sur! The city of love!

Tokyo for fashion week and twenty-course omakases

A ruggedly gorgeous castle in Scotland

When you arrive, there’s a wrapped present waiting for you. What’s inside?

A book of poems they wrote about you

Insanely expensive lingerie

A very large box of condoms

Your valentine is drinking blood, obvi—but what are YOU drinking?

Vintage champagne

A mezcal cocktail

Whiskey, neat

You’re both exhausted from all your V-Day ~activities~; time to curl up and watch some TV. What are you watching?

It’s Valentine’s Day—a freaking rom-com, duh!

A sexy thriller, to get you in the mood to start kissing again.

You’re finished having sexy times, and now you’re “exhausted” and “want to watch TV”? Bad news, sweetie, you’re about to get drained by a vampire.

If you got mostly A’s: Your valentine is Felix Hawthorn! You’re the most romantic person in your friend group (or possibly in anyone’s friend group), so of COURSE you’re spending the most romantic day of the year with the most romantic vamp on the planet: Felix will whisk you off your feet and shower you with flowers, poetry, gems, champagne, and all the romance you crave and deserve.

If you got mostly B’s: Your valentine is Octavia Yoo! You’re incredibly chic and not afraid of a little danger, so you’re going to love being in Octavia’s orbit, jet-setting the globe in search of power and pleasure, seeing the most beautiful art and tasting the most delicious food the world has to offer while gazing into her hypnotic eyes.

If you got mostly C’s: Your valentine is Callum Yoo! There’s a reason so many readers are gaga about Callum—he’s gruff, he’s powerful, he’s mysterious, he’s so good in bed that his partners regularly lose consciousness. And so what if he usually kills his paramours when he’s finished with them? At least you’ll know your last Valentine’s Day on earth was also your very best.

Tess tore through the compound, her pulse pounding in her ears. She needed her copy of Blood Feud—shit, she’d loaned it to Callum. It was probably still in his room.

Everything felt blurry, like it was all happening too fast, like she wasn’t really here. She was picking up her clothes off Rick’s bedroom floor, careful not to wake him. She was crying on the subway, she was having a panic attack in the bathroom on the first floor of the CompLit building, she wasn’t asleep, she wasn’t awake, she was some unholy something in between.

Callum made it seem like it was no big deal, like she could just drink his blood, be altered by some chemical fucking compound, when she couldn’t even drink a cup of punch at a party. He acted so altruistic, so heroic and protective, but she knew men were all the fucking same.

She felt like the air was pressing in against her temples as she stepped through the door of his rooms, but she had to stay focused. Her copy of Blood Feud was still on the table next to Callum’s bed, the same bed where she’d slept beside him just last night. Stupid, she admonished herself as she flipped through the novel, a physical red flag, right there in her hands. When would Tess learn that she couldn’t trust anyone—and that if she did, she deserved whatever she got?

It was a passage about Konstantin, she was almost sure—she just couldn’t remember the exact language. She flipped through pages, desperately scanning paragraphs until she found the one she was looking for, wedged in an exposition dump in chapter seven:

During his millennia on earth, Konstantin enjoyed enormous influence: Some say Konstantin fed his blood to the Holy Father during the Crusades, controlling him in a perpetual blood thrall…

There it was, in black and white. If Callum thought Tess was going to drink some unknown substance and turn into his puppet, he was out of his fucking mind.