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The sleepy-eyed vampire shifted his body enough to allow me space on the seat beside him. “Camila.”
I growled.
“I am Stefan,” he said. He had an accent, too, but his was Central European—Russian, or some other Slavic country. “And that is Martin.” He looked at the blond, who’d taken the seat on my other side, a hand to his ribs. “What happened?”
“Bitch stabbed me with a silver blade. Hurts like a motherfucker.”
Stefan chuckled. “You will live.”
Martin sent me a dark look. “No thanks to her. Lucky it didn’t go deep.”
The limo pulled out, leaving me sandwiched between the two lean, inhumanly beautiful males. The forest scent filled the limo’s interior. A vampire’s way of enticing us poor, stupid humans to come closer.
I crossed my arms over my stomach, fighting down panic. I was weaponless, my only clothes my hoodie, T-shirt and cargo shorts. On the other hand, I was still alive. Maybe these weren’t the same vampires who’d been trying to kill me for three years?
“What do you want?” I demanded as we pulled onto the highway.
“The crown prince has never forgotten you,” said Stefan.
The crown prince?I went stock-still. It wasGabrielwho’d sent them, not his father?
“Yeah?” My heart skipped a beat. Longing twisted through me. I scowled to hide it. “Then why scare the crap out of me by sending you two to snatch me? Why not just ask politely—you know, in the usual way—a phone call? A text?”
“Would you have come?” asked Stefan.
“No,” I said flatly.
Silence. You just didn’t say no to a vampire syndicate prince. Especially the crown prince.
“Besides,” Martin said, “you’re using a burner phone.”
“Like you don’t know the number.” The fact that they even knew I had a burner phone proved my point. “So. What does he want?”
“Our orders were to pick you up,” Martin said.
“And take me where?”
“New York.”
I swallowed. The Kral Vampire Syndicate headquarters were in Manhattan.
“What if I don’t want to go?”
Martin’s smile was white. “What makes you think you have a choice?”
“Fuck you, too,” I said, but fell silent as the limo took the exit for the airport.
There was no use arguing. They wouldn’t let me go. I might as well save my energy for the coming confrontation with Gabriel.
Because I couldn’t stay with him, no matter how much I might want it.
I stared out the window as night fell over the flat Ohio countryside. In the past few years, I’d lived in four different states, always in small, out-of-the way towns with none of the money and glitz that attracts a vampire. Three months ago I landed in this ageing suburb near Cleveland, and taken yet another dead-end, low-income job.
I’d barely saved enough to move into a basement apartment—a room, really, with a tiny kitchen at one end and a single pint-size closet—when the store manager called me into his windowless beige office and ordered me to shut and lock the door. He’d moved closer, licked his thin lips.
I’d known what was coming, and God help me, I’d almost said yes. This job had taken me almost a month to find and I was down to my last fifty dollars.
But I’d refused and stood by the open door as I told him to go to hell, saying it loud enough that the ladies out front would hear me. Two days later, he fired me for being five minutes late to work.
