PROLOGUE
Something infiltrated her dreams,an annoying buzzing.
Echo grunted into her pillow, squeezing it around her face to drown out the noise. Even with the silk pillowcase smothering her nose, the dark, coppery tang of blood and peaty whisky filled her nostrils.
She stiffened.
I don’t own silk pillowcases.
The hair rising on the back of her neck, Echo lifted her head slowly and opened her eyes to the dimly lit room. When she was still human, she and the girls from her boarding school snuck out one night and got drunk in the woods. The next day, her mouth felt filled with cotton wool, her body weighted with rocks, her stomach weak, and an invisible person had taken up residence in her head with a large drum they wouldn’t stop beating.
Fragile.
She’d felt fragile.
Echo hadn’t experienced fragility since the ritual that turned her into a vampire when she was twenty years old.
Until now.
Which could only mean one thing.
There was blood on the cream silk pillowcase that didn’t belong to her. The blood or the silk. Glancing to the side, she saw her phone on a nightstand next to a half-empty glass of whisky.
A little moan at her back filled her with dread.
Pushing herself onto her knees, horror filled her to see blood splattered all over the sheets. And lying beside her was the worst bed partner imaginable.
Roark Bakker.
Born with a silver spoon in his mouth seventy years ago, he was entitled, spoiled, and ambitious. Echo genuinely hated the son of a bitch. To get closer to William, he’d been hounding Echo for six years to become his mate.
Revulsion filled her as she looked at the sleeping vampire. He was handsome in slumber. Or he might have been if she didn’t loathe him so much. Plus, he was covered in blood, dried around his mouth and chin.
The owners of the blood that decorated Roark and the bedding were curled up on his other side. Twin humans. Barely legal from the look of them.
Echo suddenly remembered the events of the last few nights.
Her investigations had only confirmed the files Niamh Farren had given her three weeks ago. Destroyed by the realization her father was truly a monster, Echo was feeling particularly destructive when Roark came to visit. She’d let him take her to his favorite club.
Their nights together since had been filled with nothing but getting drunk on human blood, chasing it with whisky, and fucking until dawn. She looked down at her naked body and saw the dried blood splattered across her breasts and in her hair.
Her stomach turned.
“Cream silk sheets? Really?”
“I like to see the blood. I buy new sheets every week.”
She remembered sneering at Roark even in her drunken state as they stumbled into his bedroom with the redheaded twins they’d met at the club … and two young men.
Echo’s eyes darted around the room. Naked, blood on their necks where their now-healed puncture wounds would have been, were the two men she’d picked up. They were wrapped around each other in sleep. Last night, she’d let them devour her before she’d literally devoured them.
Seeing the steady rise and fall of their chests, Echo could only be glad she’d had enough control to not cause them any permanent damage.
Self-recrimination filled her. Automatically, her first thought was what would her father think of her reckless behavior? Then she remembered what had led her to her bender in the first place. What did it matter? Nothing mattered now. Everything she’d been raised to believe was a fucking lie.
The annoying noise that had woken her earlier chirped again.
It was her cell phone ringing.
