Page 124 of Your Coffin or Mine
“Thank you.”
“And you haven’t spoken to him at all?” My grandmother asks, pushing my hair off my forehead affectionately.
A heavy weight settles in my chest, and I swallow. “No.”
I’m not ready to let him go, even if Frank Stein wants me to. I’mreallynot. A voice in my head reminds me I only knew him a week. My heart says something altogether different, and the fact that he’s a vampire doesn’t even play into it. Never once did he make me feel like I should be afraid. He made me feel cherished and like I was important to him.
Grams suddenly frowns. “Your mother called worried about you yesterday.”
“Yeah,” I say, my face screwing up into a grimace. “She messaged me this morning on Insta to remind me about Erica’s wedding, since my phone wasn’t working.” She shouldn’t have bothered.Ericahas been blowing me up on Insta asking me to come.
“I will tell everyone you have the plague,” Burnie says. “You just say the word and we can play hooky.”
My lips curve at the thought. “No. I’ll go.” I sigh. “Erica would for real never forgive me.”
“Fine. I guess I will come too.” Burnie moans like a wedding is straight torture.
I grin, thankful I will at least have her as my plus one. Besides, there’s no point in wallowing over Vlad anymore, so I might as well go.
It’s been a week, and he hasn’t reached out. I hate myself for even wanting him to, scared that Frank Stein will somehow find out. Vlad said, “Where you go, I go.” So, why? Why has he not messaged?
I slump in my chair, feeling Bernadette move behind me to hug me over the backrest, squeezing me tightly. I can’t keep doing this to myself.
I take a couple deep breaths and squeeze her arms back. “Why are men such assholes?”
She stares at me sadly, then rattles her car keys at me and points her thumb toward the door. “Ready to go to my place for our sleepover?”
Nodding, I push her away and swipe at my tears with my pajama top.
Grimacing, I look down at myself. I haven’t been dressed the entire time I’ve been here, and for what?This has to stop.
I stupidly fell that hard, that fast, deeper than anything I had ever felt for Chad. And yet, here I am again. Waiting for a man to tell me where to be. Not a man, avampire. Whatever.
Chapter 38
VLAD
“You are seriouslythe most incapable bat in existence,” Doyle says with a teasing sneer.
The cage I sit in sways beneath me after having finally been rescued from my imprisonment by an unknown veterinary clinic in America. A holding cell that has been almost unbearable these last few days. I stare outside the tiny bars of my cell as Doyle walks, unable to see much except for the stone walls in a place with little to recommend about it given the constant animal squawking and stench so foul it will take several baths to rid me of the scent.
There’s a big list as to why I’m so weak right now. All the work for the event, Aubrey being the last time I had a meal, all the morphing and coercion I needed to perform just to get to the Americas. I’ve also been injured terribly, and healing myself took what little I had left. A week has passed, and these wretched humans kept trying to force feed me disgusting bugs like a normal mouse-eared bat when they should have been giving me blood. I am well and truly depleted in my smallest and fluffiest form.
And Doyle is having the time of his life because of it.
“How in the hell did you manage to get hit by a truck?” he asks, snorting. “Forget to turn on your sonar?” Doyle begins to laugh at his own joke, and I’m tossed head over heels as the metal enclosure slams against an unmovable object. “Oops. That doorframe popped out of nowhere.”
He did that on purpose.
Dogs bark and bird wings flap around inside the building.
“Poor things. If I’m already breaking you out of this sad place, I might as well let the other vermin loose, eh?”
Vermin? The fucking bastard. My nostrils flare uncontrollably. I yell, my voice a squeak, and hardly audible. I’m jostled a moment later as the fucker shakes my confines, a squeaky door sounding from disuse as it opens.
I will murder him.This is beyond humiliating.
I sit inside the same infernal cage I woke up in days ago as he whistles jauntily. I have never, in my recollection, wanted to punch anyone more.
