Page 7 of Sold to the Dark Vampire Prince

“You can’t.” Reaching out, Evan grabbed her hand, turning her wrist over. “Don’t even think about it. We’ll find another way.”

But there wasn’t another way, and deep down, they both knew it.

Dani thought of the unhoused aberrant woman she’d given the silver to in the street, the one who’d said she would have to make a terrible choice.

She’d already lost both her parents. She couldn’t lose Ava, too.

CHAPTER 2

THE NEXT TWO DAYS saw their sector blanketed in snowfall. Rolling power outages swept across the city in waves. In between the extra shifts she’d been able to pick up at the factory, Dani huddled with her sisters in front of the fire, reading from her father’s books and watching Evan sketch funny cartoon drawings of Cinder peering imperiously down her nose at them, demanding more chicken broth.

Ava was in good spirits, dancing around the apartment on socked feet and talking about the news of the royal ball that was all over the media feeds. And although everyone held their breath every time they tested her blood, her blood sugar levels remained stable.

But Dani knew they were on borrowed time. The single vial of insulin they had would last them until the end of the month. No longer. With the citywide shortages, who knew how long it would be until they managed to find another one? That was how Ava had gotten so desperately sick before, after being forced to ration her insulin, skipping doses for weeks while Evan and Dani scoured the city in search of more.

The following day, Dani pushed open the door to the legal aid office, signed in on the clipboard at the front desk, and took a seat in the hard plastic chairs out in the waiting area. The social services building was a drab cinderblock structure, forced to house so many different agencies that she’d lost count.

There was always a long line at the window for food and housing assistance. This time of year, there typically wasn’t much in the way of extra food to be found, but in the summer and fall, there were sometimes boxes distributed out back at the loading docks if you got there in time before it was all given away, typically excess crops produced in the fae lands.

The first time Evan had brought a box home, they’d been terrified to eat anything from inside, worried consuming the strange faerie fruit would cause one of them to fall into a trance and start dancing in their sleep, or grow roots and turn into one of the fae that were rumored to take on tree forms. But other than a bit of indigestion from eating too much of the sickly-sweet fruit in one sitting (it had been quite good and they so rarely got fresh produce), nothing happened.

A girl about her age or perhaps a few years older slid into the seat beside her, snow still clinging to her coat. She pulled off her hat, revealing dark curly hair. “It’s been a day.”

“You can say that again.” Dani stared out at the window where snow continued to swirl down. “I love watching the snow fall at night with a warm cup of tea, but trudging two miles out to my worksite through a foot of it gets old fast.”

“Where do you work?”

“The shipping distribution center east of town.”

“I’m Giselle. I wash dishes at a restaurant in the Old City.”

“Dani Girard.”

Together, they watched the muted television screen in the corner of the room, where the king and an unsmiling Crown Prince Alexander swept through the opulent ballroom at the imperial palace. According to the ticker tape scrolling across the bottom of the screen, rumors were swirling that the prince was close to announcing his engagement to Lara Cavalieri, heiress to a billion-dollar pharmaceutical fortune.

Dani sighed. “How many times do you think they’re going to replay that clip of the royal ball announcement? If I have to see Cruel Prince Alexander glare out at his gilded ballroom one more time while ordering us to eat expensive cheese and buy smoked salmon for our cats, I think I might smack his spoiled royal face.”

Giselle snorted. “If I had smoked salmon, believe me, I wouldn’t be feeding it to the cat.”

“Ours considers it a fine day when she finds rats.”

The sole bright spot, of course, was that with talk of the prince’s impending royal engagement flooding the news cycles, the picture the surveillance cameras had managed to capture of her was getting completely buried.

Giselle snorted. “I heard the rumored engagement to Lara Cavalieri is a sham. Supposedly, they can’t stand each other, but their fathers are trying to force them to wed in order to cement a political alliance. They say she’s as awful as he is.”

“Sounds like a perfect match,” Dani began just as the replay on the television was interrupted to cut to new programming.

Crown Prince Alexander appeared before the cameras once again. This time he was alone, without the king present. The gathered reporters began shouting questions as soon as he came out, but quieted when the prince held up a hand to silence them.

“I know with the holidays approaching, you all share the same concerns I do about the recent increase in crime we’ve been seeing in certain parts of the city. My father has been working hard, along with local business leaders, to foster economic development, improve working conditions, and bring more good jobs into this sector. Organized crime rings hurt that economic mission. If your family is struggling, reach out to our aid centers. From our family to yours, we wish you a continued safe holidays as we prepare for a joyous celebration at the end of the month.”

“That’s the only thing that makes me like him more than the rest of them,” Giselle said under her breath.

“Sorry?” Dani was pretty sure she was going to be sick.

“With most vampires, I don’t trust a word out of their mouths. Everything from their appearance to the way they try to convince us that this year, this time, things will get better if we’ll just trust them… it’s always lies. With Alexander, what you see is what you get. Have you ever seen him smile, even once?”

“No,” Dani said darkly. “He looks absolutely miserable. Which certainly didn’t stop him from drafting the king’s policies last year restricting the working class to only one registered work permit per household.”