Page 79 of Flock This

“I sure didn’t expect you to walk into my trap,” came a whispered voice from just beside my ear.

I didn’t have to turn to know it was the vampire I’d thought had gotten into his car.

I really wish he were masturbating right now…

Pain exploded through my head, starting at the base of my skull before I could do anything about it. It bled out like darkness racing through my vision, so fast that I couldn’t brace before everything went black around me.

* * * *

I clutched my head, the throbbing enough to make me groan. It wasn’t a hangover pain, far more localized than that.

And what did it say about me that I knew the difference between a hangover headache and a ‘someone hit me in the head’ one?

Nothing good, that was for sure.

I forced my eyes to open, the blurry world around me suggesting the hit had been no joke. If I were human, I probably wouldn’t have woken up at all.

And right about then, I sort of wished I hadn’t, especially as I made sense of the darkness around me.

I pressed my hands against a cold tile floor and pushed myself up to sitting. The room I found myself in was dark, but light spilled in from beneath the one door. The light was solid, bright and a hue that suggested it was artificial as opposed to sunlight.

Which sucked because lately, the worst things in my life existed in the darkness. It had made me truly appreciate the sun.

No furniture sat in the room, and it lacked windows. Shelving on the walls suggested it was a closet of some sort. The bastards hadn’t even bothered to give me a filthy mattress or a blanket. Talk about a one-star experience.

I forced my legs to cooperate as I worked myself upright, leaning against the wall for balance. Each minute cleared my head more and more, evidence of my body healing itself. Within an hour or two, only the most superficial of marks would remain.

The wall was rough beneath my palm, so even without much light, I could tell the walls were textured. I’d expected that if a vampire caught me, I’d find myself in some dungeon—a real one, with iron chains dangling from the walls and drains in the floor.

Instead of that, this reminded me far more of just an empty room, like a house that a realtor would show to prospective buyers.

I went to the door and twisted the handle, finding it locked. I could have popped that lock, but I’d only get one chance at that.

My skills weren’t widely known, so I had no idea if they knew I could escape. If I only got one shot, I didn’t want to waste it.

The wood of the door cooled my ear when I pressed against it, listening for signs of a guard. Distant rumbles came through, but I couldn’t identify them.

Voices, perhaps, but too far away to hear anything specific?

Whatever it was, it wasn’t just outside the door. In fact, enough tiny snippets of noise suggested quite a few people around.

Where was I?

The rhythmic strike of footsteps had me rushing back from the door. I tripped, my feet still not behaving themselves, and landed hard on my ass.

Metal scraped outside the door, four different times, each sound slightly different, just before the handle turned and the door opened.

Four locks? Lotta fear for one little birdy. Paranoid cowards.

Light poured into the dark room, turning the figure into a silhouette. I blinked rapidly, my vision taking a long moment before I could tell that the man standing there was the same one from the desert, the one who had spoken to Ursula then struck me.

“You’re awake sooner than I expected.” He stepped into the room, then closed the door and knocked once on the wood. That same metallic scraping told me a guard stood outside to relock it. “I wasn’t sure you’d wake up at all, really. You might have been better off if you hadn’t.”

“Well, looking at the accommodations, you’re probably right.” I rose again and rubbed my ass where I’d hit the floor. I had plenty of cushion there, but that didn’t stop it from hurting. “I was just taking a nice midnight stroll and I end up here?”

He crossed his arms, his lips tipped up into a subtly mocking smile. “Come on now, let’s not play that game. We both know exactly who you are and why you were there. There’s no reason to waste our time by pretending, is there, Grey?”

My name on his lips made my chest tight. There probably wasn’t much chance to convince him otherwise, not given the way he stared at me.

---