Page 50 of Hot Vampire Next Door: Season Four

I look past him to the dress, to the dark crimson stain down the front, the tear of fabric at the chest.

Stabbed in the heart.

Someone who shared my blood.

“What would you do?” I ask him.

He rises so he can sit next to me on the cushion. He puts his elbows on his knees and folds his hands in front of him while he thinks. I give him all the time he needs because I want his honest answer, I want him to work his strategic magic.

“If it were me,” he says, and looks over at me, a lock of his dark hair falling over his forehead. “I would go and I would wear the dress.”

“Why?”

My heart rate slows and I can finally take a full breath.

“Arion wants to intimidate you,” Bran says. “The dress symbolizes the carnage that’s already been wrought. If you wear it, you tell him you are not afraid of more spilled blood. If he can’t intimidate you, he can’t control you.”

I link my arm through his and lean my head against his shoulder. His scent soothes me, that amber and musk. Even the coolness of his body helps ground me.

“And if Arion asks me to help him unseal the gate?”

Bran looks over at me. He takes my hand in his. “Better he ask than coerce.”

“True. But I’d rather not do it at all.”

He sighs and closes his eyes. “I wish that was our best option, but Damien…”

“I know.” I unlink our arms and cross the room to stand in front of the dress. It really is gorgeous. Like starlight trapped in a dress form. And in some macabre way, the blood adds to its beauty. Violence with beauty, trapped in time.

“I’ll wear it,” I say.

Bran is suddenly behind me. “If at any moment, you feel uncomfortable, we’ll take it off.”

“You’d like that, wouldn’t you?” I glance at him over my shoulder.

“I was being serious. But yes.” He smirks.

“Devil.”

His arms wind around my waist, and he pulls me into him. His nose nuzzles at the crook of my neck, drinking in my scent and the pulsing heat of my veins. “When this is all over, little mouse, I will take you to some faraway castle and chain you to my bed and delight in your body again and again. And I will show you just how devilish I can be.”

It takes Bran no time at all to assemble an entire team to get me and him ready. Ramona selects a fae-made suit jacket for him. It’s black, with silver embroidery along the collar and down the lapel, and buttons shaped like orbs that when they catch the light, they almost seem to churn like an ocean.

Once Ramona is finished with him, she returns to me with blue metallic thread and needle and sews delicate knot-work around the stab wound in the chest of my dress, closing up the tear.

Next, my hair is curled, braided, and then pinned into a crown. While my vampire hair stylist finishes up, a tall, lanky woman who introduces herself as Charlie swipes bright red lipstick on my lips, finishing off my makeup.

When Bran and I finally come back together in front of a gilded floor-to-ceiling mirror, we match so well, it’s hard not to think it was planned weeks ago.

“You are gorgeous,” he says with hungry eyes.

“And you are ridiculously handsome,” I say back.

“How do you feel?”

I turn to my left, then my right, checking the dress on all its angles. If a person didn’t know the story of the dress, it would almost look like a fairytale avant-garde dress with a giant paint splatter.

But no, just dripping with blood.

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