I’m still glaring daggers at the three strangers in my living room as I sip a soda in my kitchenette. Louis and Vuitton still guard the window, barking their asses off anytime someone so much as spits gum on the sidewalk. Prey naps… do vampires nap? Anyway, Prey lounges with his dark lashes fanned over his sharp cheekbones on the couch, his feet hanging off the edge as he rests.
The last few rays of the warm sunlight halo the two shifters in a golden god-like framing of perfection. Louis’ dark brown hair sits high at the back of his partially shaved head. The bun is so loose I have no idea how it’s made it through all of his many outbursts this evening.
Vuitton and him are in sync. But they don’t seem to be brothers. At least their polar opposite appearances wouldn’t suggest they’re even vaguely related. But they do share something. It’s more than comradery, it’s a bond of some kind. When one spots something amiss down below, the other immediately picks up on a silent, unseen cue.
I watch their every move from over my drink and that’s how I know what they zero in on this time isn’t a jogger running at “too suspicious of a pace”, or a stray cat looking “too stray for this neighborhood”.
I know it’s something real when they both hone in on whatever it is down below.
Neither of them make a noise.
They simply look to one another with that bond of theirs communicating so much more than meets the eye.
What is it?
“Royale’s here,” Vuitton announces calmly.
Prey snaps up in a blur of movements. In the time it takes me to swallow my drink and lower it to the counter, Prey finds his shirt, smooths it down, slides into his boots and is already swinging open the door before anyone even has the chance to knock.
“Royale,” Prey says with a bow of his head. An odd welcoming passes between the arrogant vampire and the man named Royale. Prey never looks up. He doesn’t meet the man’s pale gray eyes. Prey steps backward for Royale to enter and it’s then that I note that Louis and Vuitton also refuse to meet the stranger’s sweeping gaze.
Royale appears as intimidating as these deadly men are treating him, if I’m being honest. His height alone is a fearsome stance of total dominance. He strides into my home wearing a tailored blackout suit that hugs the wide span of his chest. His silk ebony tie gleams, even in the dim lighting of the living room. The stubble along his jaw is the only unkempt part of him. If you could call that perfectly etched five o’clock shadow unkempt…
He’s a prowling monster.
Who happens to look entirely like a sex god.
His scanning attention falls on me and I’m suddenly all too aware of myself. Even while I refuse to shift beneath his slicing gaze.
“Kyra…” he whispers suspiciously.
“Kira,” I correct, my arms folding across my stained high school jersey as he appraises me.
The man glances to Prey, but the vampire doesn’t lift his bowed head.
“Prey wasright: youareidentical.” His tone caresses syllables here and there and grates against them at other points.
It’s an alluring accent that I can’t quite pinpoint.
“Except I’m human,” I say those words hard and enunciate them for his little critter brain to fully understand.
“Yes...” He nods while a line forms between his eyebrows, as if me being human is really ruining his precious evening. “Prey will take care of that.”
My head tilts at the stranger.
“You have three days. I’ve told Zavia that Kyra is out of the country for the rest of the week. That gives us three days to prepare.” Royale strides back toward the door and out into the hall as if that’s all settled.
But it’s fucking not.
“Excuse me!” I rush after him and only when I pass does Prey lift his head slightly. I storm out barefoot onto the worn floorboards of the building’s hallway. “What if I don’t want to? I have a great job, you know? I have an enthralling life. Friends. And family.”
Kind of.
Sort of.
I mean, maybe my mother’s phone call once a week is the only time my phone rings, and maybe Robert’s dick pic is the only one I’ve seen for eight months, but that’s irrelevant. This is my life.
And I have a choice.
