Page 19 of Bride

“Shouldn’t?”

“Ask questions about the pack. Or strike up conversation with us. Or walk around unsupervised.”

“That’s a lot of rules.” To give to an adult. Forone year.

“Rules will keep you safe.” Her chin lifts. “And keep others safe from you.”

“That’s a very honorable sentiment. But it might reassure you to know that I lived among the Humans for nearly two decades, and murdered...” I pretend to check a note on my palm. “A whole zero. Wow.”

“It will be different here.” Her eyes move from mine and trace the contours of the room, still a mess of moving boxes and piles of clothes. Her gaze hiccups on the bare mattress, now stripped of the sheets and blankets that I dragged inside the closet, then stops on the only thing I put up on the wall: a Polaroid of me and Serena looking away from the camera during that sunset lake tour we did two years ago. Some guy took it without asking, while we were dangling our feet in the water. Then he showed it to us and said he’d only return it if one of us gave him our number. We did the only logical thing: caught him in a headlock and forcibly took the photo.

All that self-defense we learned, as it turns out, works for offense, too.

“I know what you’re trying to do,” Juno says, and for a moment I’m afraid that she read my mind. That she knows I’m here to search for Serena. But she continues, “You can try to paint yourself as a pawn, say that you only agreed to this in the name of peace, but... I don’t believe it. And I don’t like you.”

No shit. “And I don’t know you enough to make a judgment.Your jeans are cool, though.” Riveting conversation, but I’m about to pass out. Thankfully, with one last withering look, Juno leaves.

The corner of my eye catches a hint of movement. I turn, half expecting Ana to make a comeback, but it’s just Serena’s goddamned fucking cat, stretching his way out from under the bed.

“Nowyou show up.”

He hisses at me.

During our fifteen-year friendship, I amassed half a million small, big, and midsize reasons to love Serena Paris with the intensity of the brightest stars. Then, a few weeks ago, one came to obliterate all of them, driving me to loathe her with the strength of a thousand full moons.

Her damn fucking cat.

As a rule, Vampyres don’t do pets. Or pets don’t do Vampyres? I’m not sure who started it. Maybe they think we smell yucky because we’re obligate hemovores. Maybe we rejected them because they get along so well with Weres and Humans. Either way, when I began living among the Humans, the concept of a domestic animal felt supremely foreign to me.

My first caregiver had a little dog that she sometimes carried around in her purse, and honestly, I’d have been less shocked if she’d combed her hair with a toilet brush. I eyed him suspiciously for a few days. Showed him my fangs when he showed his. Finally, I found the courage to ask the caregiver when she was going to eat him.

She quit that night.

Animals and I went on to do absolutely great ever since, giving each other wide berths on sidewalks and exchanging the occasional dirty look. It was pure bliss—until Serena’s damn fuckingcat came into the picture. I tried my best to dissuade her from adopting it. She tried her best to pretend she didn’t hear me. Then, about three days after taking home thirteen pounds of asshole from the shelter, she vanished into the ether.

Poof.

Growing up collecting attempted murders like milk teeth tempered me and taught me to be calm under pressure. And yet I still remember it, that first churning twist in my stomach when Serena didn’t turn up to my place for laundry night. Didn’t reply to my texts. Didn’t pick up the phone. Didn’t call in sick to work, and simply stopped showing up. It felt a lot like fear.

Maybe it wouldn’t have happened if we’d still been living together. And honestly, I’d have been okay sharing an apartment. But after spending her first few years in an orphanage and her second few years as the companion of the best-monitored Vampyre child in the world, she’d only wanted one thing: privacy. She’d given me a set of spare keys, though, and it had felt like such a precious, beautiful honor bestowed upon me; I’d carefully hidden them in a secret place. That by the time she disappeared, I’d long forgotten.

So that day I broke into her apartment using a hairpin. Just the way she taught me when we were twelve, and the TV room was off-limits, and one movie per day wasn’t quite enough. Reassuringly, her rotten corpse was not folded in the chest freezer, or anywhere else. I fed her damn fucking cat as he meowed like he was approaching starvationandhissed at me at the same time; checked that my brown contacts were in place and my fangs still properly dulled; then went to the authorities to report a missing person.

And was told: “She’s probably hanging out with her boyfriend somewhere.”

I made myself blink, to look extra Human. “Can’t believe shetoldyouabout her love life and notme, her closest friend of fifteen years.”

“Listen, young lady.” The officer sighed. He was a lanky, middle-aged man with more heart rate turbulence than most. “If I had a nickel for every time someone ‘disappears,’ and by that I mean, they leave and neglect to tell someone in their social circle where they’re going—”

“You’d have how much?” I lifted an eyebrow.

He seemed flustered, though not enough for my taste. “I bet she’s on vacation. Does she ever take trips on her own?”

“Yes, often, but she always warns me. Plus, she’s an investigative reporter forThe Herald, and did not take days off.” According to their system. Which I hacked.

“Maybe she was out of vacation days and still wanted to, I dunno, drive to Las Vegas to see her aunt. Just a misunderstanding.”

“We had plans to meet, and she’s an orphan with no family or friends who doesn’t own a car. According to her banking portal, to which she gave me access”—kind of—“no cash withdrawals or online payments were processed. But maybe you’re correct, and she’s bouncing to Las Vegas on her pogo stick?”

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