“Yes, please.” Iro hung up and slipped the phone into her suit jacket. “I’ll have someone on my staff drive your car, if that’s okay. He’s trained in evasive maneuvers and is a member of my security team. He’s very trustworthy. He’ll follow us home so that you don’t have to pick it up tomorrow.”
“What? You have security? Whoareyou?”
“It’s a small team. Sometimes, my investments make me enemies, so it’s precautionary more than anything.”
“Um… Okay,” Arwen said.
“I’ve already paid for our drinks, so we can go whenever you’re ready. The car will be outside in three minutes.”
“That’s… efficient,” Arwen said and grabbed her purse. “But I’m ready.”
Iro stood and held out her hand. Arwen slid her hand into hers, and Iro entwined their fingers moments later. Then, she stared down at the new connection, never wanting it to break. She felt like a schoolgirl with a crush, even though she had never been a schoolgirl, and this strange feeling was more than a crush. Once outside, she helped Arwen get into the back seat of the SUV and climbed in next to her, reaching for Arwen’s hand again and setting their joined hands in her lap. Arwen gave the driver directions on where to take them, and after Iro handed the keys to her security man through the open window and told him what kind of car it was, he took off to drive Arwen’s car home for them.
“I’d like to walk you up,” Iro said. “It can get dangerous at night.”
“I’ll be fine. The door’s right there, and it’s the second floor. You can walk me to my door when we go on our date. Deal?”
Iro nodded, reluctantly accepting this compromise, and then leaned over and kissed Arwen on her warm cheek, wanting to connect their lips instead.
“Good night, beautiful Arwen.”
“Good night,” Arwen said as her door was opened for her.
Arwen let go of her hand, and Iro watched her walk to the door of the building.
“Don’t go until she’s safely inside,” she told her driver, who still held the door open. “And wait until she gets her car keys. He’s walking toward her now.”
“Of course,” he replied.
Iro watched her security man give Arwen her car keys before Arwen pushed open the door to the building, which seemed to have no key entry required and no way to buzz up.
“Well, this isn’t secure,” she said to herself.
“Ma’am?” her driver asked.
“Nothing. We can go,” she replied.
When Iro got home to her brownstone, she pulled out her laptop, sat down on her leather sofa, and looked down at it and over at the matching chair, realizing she would need to make a change if she were going to invite Arwen over. She pulled up the furniture site she had used to buy practically everything in this place and searched for non-leather living room furniture instead. Quickly finding a set that would work well enough, she paid for expedited delivery and messaged the support email address, telling them she’d pay even more if they could get it here within the week instead of having to wait two to four weeks.
Returning to the browser homepage, Iro read through a little news, seeing an article about a few deaths in New York City. Then, she got distracted with thoughts of Arwen, so she pulled up Arwen’s LinkedIn page, which was public for work, while her other social media pages seemed to be private. Iro would not send a friend request or follow her, though. She didn’t want to be a friend or a follower. She wanted more.
She rose and went to her kitchen, where she opened her walk-in pantry. The back wall had a button that anyone would miss if they didn’t know it was there, but she pressed it, and the wall slid open, revealing her blood refrigerator. Iro pulled out a bag of pig’s blood and closed the door. As she poured all the liquid into a mug and set it in the microwave, for the first time that night, her excitement about meeting someone new dwindled to nothing. When the timer ran out and beeped at her, she pulled out the now-warm blood and stared down at it, picturing what it would look like to Arwen to see her drink this.
CHAPTER 6
Cassia
Cassia hadn’t planned on going out on her first night in DC, but Gigi and Miranda hadn’t been of interest to her, and she could tell they were focused on the newest member of their group, whom they had just turned. The woman had been in shock, as everyone was when they suddenly awoke craving human blood, but once Gigi and Miranda had shown her the joys of sucking straight from the vein from a willing human, she had been less in shock and had been more in the mood for something else after being temporarily sated in that way. That was also normal, waking and craving sex as well as blood. For vampires, those two things were linked in a way humans wouldn’t ever be able to comprehend.
Cassia had watched the three of them. She always enjoyed watching beautiful women give one another pleasure, but she had grown bored with it after an hour or so and had told them to carry on in her absence. She was going out. She had looked up a few contacts whom she knew floated between cities in the Northeast, and after finding that one of them had opened a bar in the city not that long ago, she had decided to head over and see if he had any willing humans who were either ready to be sucked or turned. There was always a human somewhere, done with their life, who was interested in becoming immortal, andif Cassia thought she could stand them for more than a minute, she considered turning them.
The bar looked tailor-made for that kind of crowd, with dark colors, soft but pounding music, and almost something like fog in the air. When she arrived, she entered through the back to meet the owner, who told her about a woman she might be interested in. She’d just arrived, and he could get her for Cassia. If for nothing more than a nice meal, Cassia waited in the back and peered out into the bar, seeing him approach a beautiful woman whose eyes got big when he whispered in her ear. Cassia watched the woman nod rapidly, which meant she would be too annoying to keep around. She wouldn’t turn this one, but she could at least enjoy herself.
“Hi,” the woman said in an airy voice the instant she was in the back storage room alone with Cassia. “My name is–”
“It doesn’t matter,” Cassia interjected.
She didn’t plan on killing this human, but she also didn’t need to get to know her. Cassia had one need – well, maybe two right now – and while this woman might be able to help her with that, that didn’t mean Cassia planned on delivering her immortality in return.
