Page 12 of Rejected Mate

“You don’t know my father.” She gave a humorless laugh. “The Mating Games are all he’s talked about since I was a child. ‘Make a good impression, Violet. Get a strong match.’ He literally hasn’t talked to me about anything else.”

I wondered what I would be like if my parents hadn’t let me run with the boys, train to fight and hunt and take care of myself. This situation would be utterly terrifying.

“I’m still working on a way out,” I told her. “Don’t lose hope. I’ll figure something out.”

Violet opened her mouth to say something, but the vampire servant reentered the room, holding a pair of gold kitten heels that matched the dress they’d shoved me into.

“Will you wear these?” the vampire servant asked, looking miffed. Maybe I’d been a bit of a pain in her ass, but I hated all the fussing. They weren’t fooling me with all the glitz and glamor. We were still in jail.

But maybe I could win her over to my good side.

“What’s your name?” I asked the pale vampire.

“Maurica.” Her dark eyes, made darker by gray eyeshadow and liner, evaluated me as if scanning for threats. She could clearly take care of herself out there. I wondered what had brought her here to act as a servant to people she clearly despised. I wondered if they’d forced her.

I put on my sweetest smile. “Maurica, I’m Wren and this is Violet.”

Her lips folded into a thin line, clearly unaffected by my charms, or lack thereof. “I know.”

“I’m sorry if I’ve made your job here hard. We were not exactly prepared for how this all went down, if you know what I mean.”

She blinked, still holding the heels in front of her like a shield. “Yeah…”

“Well, I’m wondering if you know anything about why we’re here.” I tried another warm smile.

But she frowned back at me. Her eyes drifted to the door behind her where the other maid might appear at any minute. “We’re not supposed to say anything to you.”

“I know,” I said, leaning forward. “But, from one girl to another, we don’t always have to do what the men tell us, right?”

Maurica’s eyes flicked from mine to the door and back. “But I’ll get fired.”

So maybe they hadn’t forced her but offered a sum she couldn’t resist, whether she wanted to be here or not.

“Not if they don’t know.” I leaned closer to her conspiratorially.

Maurica seemed to consider my words, which I took as a good sign.

Violet nodded, her curls bobbing like coils. “We won’t say anything. Pinky promise.”

Good girl.My friend was catching on nicely.

Maurica hesitated, then seemed to make up her mind.

“The vampire covens are worried,” she whispered, leaning close and clutching the shoes to her chest. “Elders seem to have a strange illness and are growing weak. Even trying to create new vampires is failing more than usual. Something bad is happening.”

I sat back in my chair as I took this all in. Her words sounded so familiar. Wasn’t that exactly what our pack had been going through? Loss of fertility. Dwindling populations. Were the other shifter packs seeing the same thing? If they were, they’d been keeping the information close to the vest like we were.

“How long has this been happening?” I asked, but Maurica was already backing out of the room. She set the shoes on the floor by the door.

“I’ve said too much. Dinner is at seven.”

Before I could stop her, Maurica slipped out of the room and shut the door behind her. We heard her footsteps down the hallway and out of the suite’s main doors, and then she was gone.

“Well, that was weird.” Violet twirled a chocolate brown ringlet around one finger as her face screwed up in thought.

“It might be the info we need to get out of here,” I said, my brain alight with ideas. If the vampires were weak, it would mean getting out of here might be easier than I thought.

But Ares didn’t appear sick. In fact, he seemed like the poster child of vampire health. Did this sickness only affect old vampires? How old was old for vampires, anyway? Was William affected? He didn’t seem sick either, though we’d barely seen him except lurking in the background. Of course, a weak vampire was still stronger than a human or a shifter stuck in their human form, which was likely the reason they’d blocked our inability to morph into our wolf forms.

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