“She’s gonna be queen. She can pick whoever the hell she wants as a mate.”

“No, she isn’t, and no, she can’t.”

“You gonna look me in the eye and tell me you’d say no to a female like her asking for your mark?”

Vincent’s gaze flashed red, his glower red hot and terrifying. All the while, he refused to meet my stare in the car’s rearview mirror. “She didn’t know what she was asking for.”

“Whatever, bro. You’re just jealous. Maybe try not being such a raging dickhead, and she’d be begging for your bite too.”

“Hold up,” I interjected. “First of all, I didn’t beg. Second, it would begreatif you two shitheads stopped talking about me like I’m not here. I don’t want either of you. This circus is getting too creepy for my tastes, so can we just get going already so I can tell your Elders that I don’t want any part of this?”

I wish there had been enough time to pull out the phone Corry bought me to snap a picture of Vincent’s face. His jaw was practically in his lap.

Maybe he hadn’t expected me to give in that easily. But the thing that happened in the bathroom between the three of us wasn’t some basic bad-boy drama.

These were predators. They were dangerous.

Vincent was right. I didn’t have any business even pretending for a second that I had any right to the vampire throne. Shit, I didn’t have a right to anything. I was homeless.

I had nothing, nothing except my freedom and my beating heart.

But something told me if I hung out with this crew for much longer, I wouldn’t even have those.

“Good,” Vincent ground out, recovering from his surprise by my announcement a second later.

“What? No!” Corry snarled. “That’s bullshit. She has nowhere else to go.”

“She can figure it out. You don’t get to keep the human just because you have a hard-on for her.”

“She’s only half-human. And stop pretending like you don’t want her as much as I do. It’s really starting to piss me off, Feral.”

A tendon in Vincent’s jaw ticked. His fists clenched tight around the steering wheel to the point I thought it might disintegrate. “I don’t want her. I don’t give a fuck about her.”

It was no secret we weren’t exactly hitting it off, but hearing his blatant opinion of me and how little he cared what happened to me was like salt in a very fresh wound. The stark reality was, no one gave a shit about me. Corry just wanted my blood, my virginity, or both.

And all Vincent cared about was getting the throne.

Treacherous flames lapped at my core as I dwelled on what he’d said in the restroom.

He’d claim me if it meant securing the throne. What did that mean exactly? Was it anything like how it worked in the romance novels? My whole body grew hot and the juncture between my thighs wet, thinking about the way he’d manhandled me in my room. Jeez, I was one fucked up girl. I’d spent my entire life thinking I was some weakling, and in one single night, I discovered that I was half-vampire and the daughter of the vampire king. I also had some infuriating attraction to my…

Shit, what even were Corry and Vincent to me? Stepbrothers? No, that was weird. Whatever they were, my traitorous vagina was all for this whole kidnapping and whisking me off to whatever creepy castle they lived in plan.

And that’s exactly why I had to get away from these men.

No matter how much my body burned to let them bite and fuck me into oblivion, I knew they would be the death of me.

Before, I hadn’t been afraid of death. But that was before when I’d thought death to be an escape, a definite end to pink walls and barred windows.

But tonight, I’d learned death wasn’t some skeleton decked out in robes with a scythe. He was a gorgeous monster with pale skin, red eyes, and raven tattoos all over his body.

With him, death wouldn’t be an escape.

It would be a life sentence.

Chapter thirteen

An Unhealthy Obsession