The vampire beside me raised his hand toward my face, and I froze. I wasn’t supposed to be here—a werewolf pretending to be human at a vampire ball, surrounded by predators who’d tear me apart if they knew what I really was. My phone vibrated in my purse. Nate.
He always called at the worst moments. “Where’s your master, human? ” the vampire asked, his voice dripping with false courtesy. I bit my lip, forcing myself not to draw blood.
“Somewhere around here, I’m sure. ”
I tried to move away, but his command slammed into me like a physical weight. Compulsion. Of course.
I was seconds from blowing my cover—the worst double agent in existence at her first undercover event. “She’s not particularly pretty,” one of them observed. “Probably not important,” the other agreed. “I doubt anyone will miss her.
”
A hand reached toward me, and I was about to fight back when a bored, drawling voice cut through the tension. “What do you think you’re doing? ”
Damen. The vampire prince, heir to the Cromwell family, the man I’d been hired to protect.
He looked at my attackers like they were nothing—less than nothing. And then he said the words that would bind me to this masquerade:
“She’s my bride to be. ”
I sagged with relief before I remembered I was supposed to be frozen in compulsion. Damen shot me a warning glance, took my hand, and led me into the ballroom as if nothing had happened.
But as we crossed the threshold, he leaned close, his lips brushing my ear. “Did one of them touch you? ” His fingers clenched around mine, a flash of barely hidden anger. “No,” I said, confused.
Why did he even care? We weren’t really together. I was just a pawn in his grandfather’s game—a werewolf hiding from a future I couldn’t escape, pretending to be the bride of a vampire who couldn’t know what I was. “Try not to trip again,” he whispered as we descended a staircase.
“That happened once. ”
He pulled me onto his lap in front of the entire vampire court, his cold fingers tracing up my thigh beneath the slit in my gown. They were all watching, their gazes burning with disdain and mockery. I was nothing to them but a living blood bag, a trophy for their prince.
“For crying out loud, Chloe,” Damen hissed in my ear. “This is supposed to be sexy. Can you at least pretend you’re a little into it? ”
“How do you even know how I look?
You’re sitting behind me. ”
“You’re as rigid as a statue. I’m beginning to think you don’t find me attractive. ”
He was right to suspect.
I hardly knew him. I was here because of a wish I should never have made—and because of the vision that wish had shown me. Two weeks ago, I’d been patrolling the streets of Grimswood with Vivien, my pack’s beta. We’d stopped a vampire from attacking a human woman, but I’d frozen mid-fight when Eve’s face flashed before my eyes—my friend, her head covered in blood.
The vampire had pinned me down, and I’d let him, the memory paralyzing me. We’d saved the woman, who turned out to be a witch named Iris. She offered us each a wish—free, no strings attached. Vivien had dragged me away, but that night, I’d gone back alone.
“I wish to see my future with Nate,” I’d said. “From now until the day we part. ”
Nate was my fated mate, the wolf I’d been bonded to since we were sixteen. We were supposed to be soulmates, but Nate had been banished from our pack after he’d attacked our Alpha and threatened his mate.
I’d pretended to break our bond to stay with my pack, but I’d reconnected with him in secret. I couldn’t let him go, even though I knew he was dangerous. Iris had shown me my future. Twenty times—twenty different ways—I rejected Nate’s bond, and every single time, he killed me.
He was going to kill Emma, my best friend, who was pregnant. He was going to choke the life out of me. Stab me. Crash the car.
It didn’t matter when or how. It was unavoidable. I had one year left to live, at most. And that was why I was here, pretending to be Damen’s bride.
Because working for the vampires gave me a reason to stay away from Nate. Because hiding among the very creatures my people feared was the only escape I had left. “Who’s trying to kill you? ” I’d asked Damen during one of our forced dinners, hoping to find answers that might make sense of my own despair.
“Boring,” he’d replied, examining a book. “I’d hate for you to become even gloomier. ”
But that night, in the woods, when I was in wolf form, Damen had come out with a bottle of liquor and sat on a fallen trunk. He hadn’t run when he saw me.
He’d just watched, his eyes widening slightly. “Where do you come from? ” he’d asked. “Must be nice being a wolf.
”
A wolf. He didn’t know I was a woman. I couldn’t tell him. His grandfather had compelled me to keep my identity a secret.
“Have you ever killed? ” Damen had asked, his eyes lost in space. I’d done worse. I’d let it happen.
Eve. My friend. The accident that had left her bleeding, caused by my own weakness. And the memory of that day was the reason Jake, the wolf who’d once been everything I admired, now looked at me like I was a failure.
“You were there that day,” I told Jake at the diner, when he found me meeting with Ian Cromwell. “I did what I did for you. Now let me do this for me. ”
He couldn’t argue.
But he also couldn’t convince me to come home. “How did Damen become a vampire? ” I asked Cromwell, trying to find a lead on who was hunting him. “He drove his car off a cliff,” the vampire king said, as if it were a fond memory.
“Drunk, probably high. A silly incident. But no one was surprised. ”
That didn’t help.
Nothing did. The first attack had been six months ago—a vampire tried to drag Damen away using compulsion, but when he was caught, he convulsed and died. A month ago, Damen was poisoned the same way, barely saved by fresh blood. The poison could be the clue, but I couldn’t smell it unless they caught another attacker.
As I left the diner, I spotted a figure across the street. Nate. He was standing behind a newsstand, watching me, his face twisted in fury. I froze.
This was it. He was going to kill me here, in front of everyone. Jake was still inside. Emma was at home, pregnant.
My pack would never know. But then Damen forgot his wallet, and when I went back to retrieve it, Nate was gone. “Never mind,” I said when Damen asked if I’d seen something. I didn’t tell him.
I couldn’t tell anyone. My fate was sealed—I would die at Nate’s hands within a year. There was no way out. The next time we were alone, I told Damen I’d been offered the job of protecting him, and he laughed.
“That little thing? Sounds like a bulletproof plan. ”
He didn’t trust me. He treated me like a joke.
But that morning, when he sneaked into my bedroom and offered to help me escape my problems, something in his gaze had been almost kind. In the woods, in wolf form, I’d seen a different side of him—quiet, melancholic, considerate. He’d given me a book to read, too, The Time Traveler’s Wife, and told me, “I do with the right novel. ” When he looked at me, I felt a pull that frightened me more than Nate ever had.
Because I wasn’t supposed to feel anything for a vampire. I was a werewolf, and he was a predator—and I was supposed to be his bodyguard, not his anything else. But tonight, as he drove us up a remote coastal road to a mansion in the middle of nowhere, I couldn’t stop thinking about the girl he was hiding inside. In the window, I saw him holding her, tenderness in his arms—and I felt a painful twist in my chest.
I was being stupid. He wasn’t mine. I wasn’t anyone’s. When he finally came out, two men emerged from the trees.
Before I could react, they grabbed Damen, injected him with something, and threw him into a waiting car. I watched, helpless, from the driver’s seat of his own vehicle as they drove away. And I knew, with a sick certainty, that by the time I caught up with them, it would already be too late.
I climbed out of the car and ran.
