Two quick raps on the metal door, then he stepped back, gun raised. At first, nothing happened. He felt like an idiot. Of course nothing happened. There was no one there. It was an equipment trailer, not a?—
Bang! Bang!
His shoulders tensed. Blood drained from his face as the knocking continued, the rhythm growing faster. It sounded like someone was trying to beat their way out.
There’s a person in there.
His first instinct was to lunge for the door and release whoever was locked inside, but he’d long ago learned that acting on impulse often led to mistakes. A good killer used their head and their gut in concert, not one or the other all on its own.
Keeping his gun high, he barked, “Who’s in there? Give me a name.”
There was no response, just more pounding. The beat was erratic, like the person inside was desperate but could only maintain it for so long before their arm got tired or their hand hurt too much. He knew from experience that pounding on a locked door for long periods of time could hurt like a bitch.
“Stop knocking and answer me,” he demanded. But there was no significant breakup in the beat, so he guessed that whoever it was inside, they probably couldn’t hear him.
Fucking fuck.Atticus hissed and lowered his gun just enough to start fiddling with the lock. He wasn’t super great with technology, so it took him a second to figure out all the steps it required to unlock it.
There was a series of flashing lights, some beeps, and then the smooth grinding sound of heavy bolts sliding across metal. The knocking stopped.
Raising his gun again, Atticus grasped the large metal latch on the door and yanked. He stepped back quickly, allowing it to swing open, and leveled the barrel of his gun at opening.
A waft of scent rushed out. Clean skin. Something a little waxy. A heady, sweet, earthy sort of scent he couldn’t place but immediately made his mouth water.
And inside the darkness of the trailer, untouched by moonlight, were a pair of reflective eyes.
He almost forgot about where he was, that he had a gun in his hands, when a face, pale as a porcelain doll’s, came into view around those eyes. A sloping forehead ran into a pert nose anddark eyebrows. Proud cheekbones made an already round face a little bit rounder. A soft, small mouth crowned a narrow chin.
Her skin was unnaturally pale and looked even more so in comparison to the red circles painted onto her chin and forehead. Her lips were painted, too.
She was huddled on the floor of the trailer, most of her body obscured by a long white dress and — he did a doubletake — a mind-boggling fall of raven black hair. Small hands, also painted white with red circles on the backs and tipped with red polish, curled defensively around her knees.
Her shoulders moved with her rapid breaths, and when he looked back at her face, he found her expression rigid and her eyes so wide, he could make out white all around.
Her gaze flicked to the gun. Before he could figure out how to unglue his tongue from the roof of his mouth, she asked, “Are you my groom?”
Atticus dropped his arms immediately, pointing the gun at the ground rather than the— His stomach rebelled so hard, he worried he might actually get sick right there in the dirt.
A blood bride. I was hired to bring Junger a blood bride.
Looking back, the job being about a weird sex thing would have been vastly preferable tothis.He didn’t fuck around with blood brides, not when the very concept was a threat to his sister. In another world, she would have ended up exactly like this woman: dolled up to look like an acolyte of the goddess Grim, tossed into the back of a fucking trailer, and dragged to the other side of the continent to become some sleazy businessman’s broodmare.
He’d always found the idea of people wanting a pure vampiric bloodline deeply gross. Even if Adriana hadn’t been born with the gene that allowed her to produce offspring with another vampire, he still would have found it disgusting.
But there he was, complicit in the very practice he’d worked all his life to save his sister from.
His throat had closed up. He couldn’t speak or even make a noise. All he could do was stare at the woman in horror, his gun aimed at the dirt and his shoulders so stiff, it felt like the muscles had turned to stone.
But the longer he remained silent, the more unsettled she became. He could see it happening, but he was helpless to stop it. Her eyes bounced between his and the gun, then to the wide expanse of the desert behind him.
Shock hadn’t just robbed him of his ability to speak. It also made him painfully slow.
That was the only explanation for why he lunged for her a second too late.
The bride sprang out of the back of the trailer. Swathed in all that fabric, barefoot, and dragging nearly her full height in hair, one wouldn’t think that she’d be so quick, but damn if she didn’t smoke his ass.
Instinct revved to life. The drive to hunt prey was, when provoked, one of the most intense in vampires. The only urge that came second to it was the craving to find an anchor, a mate to sip from and breed.
Atticus holstered his gun. His mind shut down as he followed the streak of white across the rocky desert ground. His vision tunneled. Nothing else mattered but the shape of her back, the whip of her hair over her shoulder, and that lush scent he drew into his lungs with great, heaving breaths.
