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When I first started there over a year ago, I took the job because I needed to make enough money to pay my own way. As grateful as I was that the vamp stranger who saved me from being dinner my first night in town had offered me a room of my own in his apartment, my suspicious nature didn’t trust that he had completely honorable intentions.
Aleks tried to convince me otherwise—one of the first things he did was snap off both fangs so that I felt like I had nothing to fear from him—but I held firm regardless. I wouldn’t accept his charity and if he really wanted me to stay with him, I’d pay. Rent. Food. Utilities. We’d be strictly roommates, that was all.
Of course, I discovered a couple of months down the line that his intentions weren’t anywhere close to being “honorable”. From the moment he first laid eyes on me, he decided that I was destined to be his mate for some reason. And, yeah, I probably should’ve realized that when he made a big deal of saying “mine” to fend off the Nightmare Trio who had been sizing me up for chow.
I didn’t, though. Not even a little.
I blame Aleks for that. At first, he tried to explain it as just his claiming me because I was a shifter who would be, well, destroyed by the vampires in the city if I didn’t accept his help. Naive Gem totally fell for that shit. I blame Aleks, but I guess I also have to blame how much I rely on my ability to know when someone’s lying to me since I foolishly accepted that Aleks was telling the truth when I couldn’t sense any deception coming from him.
And he was—for the most part. Without him interceding on my behalf, first with the three female vamps, then with his boss, Roman, they would’ve put me down just for being a shifter.
But while Ryker is a soft touch with an obvious “white knight” complex, he didn’t save me out of the kindness of his heart.
Nope. He did it because his heart said I was meant to be his, and even if the Luna made me the fated mate to Ryker Wolfson, Aleks held out hope that, one day, I’d return his feelings and choose him to be my bonded mate instead.
Then, after a year of hiding out from the fated mate I was convinced rejected me, Ryker showed up in Muncie and Aleks’s plans for the two of us came out. A jealous Ryker threw in my face that the fang Aleks gave me within days of our meeting was the vamp way of marking me as his.
Then, when I confronted him, Aleks didn’t even try to deny it. That worked against him and his intentions. Knowing that my roommate lied to me for so long had me turning to Ryker to make sense of my feelings while effectively wedging a gap in the friendship I had with Aleks.
Eventually, I made him take his fang back. Aleks blamed Ryker for that as well as the way I turned against him, while Ryker hated Aleks’s guts for daring to try to claimhismate.
And then there’s the little matter of their fight…
Two months later, and I’m still having to deal with the consequences ofthatincident.
It happened at Charlie’s. Through a perfect storm of Gem fuck-up’s, all of the precautions Aleks put into place to keep me hidden from my fated mate fell through at the same time, leading to Ryker tracking me down one evening when I was behind the bar.
As if it couldn’t have gotten any worse, Aleks was also visiting Charlie’s that night. He walked in on Ryker trying to explain to me that he hadn’t stayed away from me so long on purpose, that I’d basically been M.I.A. for the whole last year.
Tensions were already high; at the time, seeing Ryker again was the last thing I had ever wanted. Aleks knew that—and my overprotective vamp goaded Ryker into a fight that he then threw on purpose.
Of course, I didn’t know that back then. I just watched in horror as Ryker attacked Aleks viciously, tearing his chest wide open with his claws while Aleks was unable to fight back. He didn’t kill the vampire, mainly because I finally managed to put a stop to the slaughter, though his loss of complete control—a rarity for Ryker—meant that he had a supe battle in front of plenty of stunned human witnesses.
Talk about a disaster. Not only did I have to give Aleks six bags of blood to patch him up, but I had to deal with the fall-out of unaware humans discovering that a male can have his chest be turned into ground beef and still be up and walking around a half an hour later.
In Muncie, not everyone knows that supernaturals exist. A good chunk of the population does—and Charlie’s was a majority supe bar even before the fight—but it took a lot of explaining and a shit ton of lying to cover up the brawl from those who had no idea.
Unfortunately, the end result of Ryker coming down to Charlie’s to claim me in the first place was my secret getting out; not that I’m an alpha, but that I was a lone shifter hiding out among the vampires. Basically, the supe population in the Fang City has finally figured out that Gem behind the bar wasn’t as human as she appeared to be, and now they like to come down and gawk.
On the plus side, unlike the vamp who confronted me last night, most of Charlie’s patrons don’t really care that I’m a shifter so long as I keep their glasses topped off. Sure, I get my fair share of dog jokes—one downside of living amongst bloodsuckers, I figure—but they’re harmless for the most part, just like my customers.
But that’s for the most part. Halfway through my next shift, later on the same day as when I left Ryker’s townhouse and fought that pervy vamp, the door to Charlie’s opens, and in walk two vampires who are definitelynotharmless.
The strikingly handsome male with the styled blond hair and pale skin is Dominic Le Croix, almost as high up in the Cadre as Aleks is.
In a way, I’m not surprised to see him walking into Charlie’s. After what happened this morning, I was expecting some kind of reprimand from the Cadre sooner or later. Sue me for hoping it would be later, though.
But the redhead walking in beside him? I know who she is, too. That’s Tamera, and seeing her makes me wonder if I’m getting more than a reprimand.
Wonderful.
I look past the pair, double-checking that I’m not missing something. This, uh, isn’t a duo I expected to see walking into Charlie’s together, and the serious expressions on their supernaturally stunning faces—not to mention the wide berth the other patrons give them—confirms that this isn’t some kind of social call. Especially since that’s Tamera who’s with Dominic.
It’s just… Dominic, I know a little bit better. He’s a member of the Cadre, one of the sunset spotters. He patrols the perimeter of the city toward the end of the daylight, he’s a close friend of Aleks’s, and while he works directly for Roman, I’ve met him before—for a drink at that apartment with Aleks, or during one of our visits to Mea Culpa, the vamp night club—when it had nothing to do with his ranking as a powerful Muncie vamp.
But Tamera? While I’ve run into Gretchen from time to time on her own, any time I’ve seen Tamera, she’s with Leigh. The three of them make up the fangy clique I named the Nightmare Trio, but from some of the gossip I picked up from a few of my vamp customers when they indulge too much, Tamera and Leigh are more than Gretchen’s followers. They’re a bonded pair who hang out with Gretchen in the hopes that the blonde vampire will become their third.
I had no idea that Tamera was a part of the Cadre ‘cause no way is she here on a date with Dominic.
