I laughed, finished the knot I was tying, and placed Marie Antoinette in her corner. I stood back to admire my work. The Shinju looked clean. Professional.
Then my brain betrayed me as I envisioned Violet’s body in the ropes, her hazel eyes staring back at me.
Nope. Fuck no.
I walked into my room and changed out of my sweats and into dark jeans with a pressed white T-shirt. My phone vibrated with an alert. I glanced at it. My heart stopped when I saw the headline.
Student killed last night at Shademore University. Investigation still underway.
I clicked it open and there it was: Violet’s school. The headline had a picture of the same courtyard I had been in last night.
Flashbacks hit. The vampyre I had run into, all casual menace and barely concealed hunger. Violet dancing on that stage, bleeding into her sandals, every supernatural in the room cataloging her scent. And now a body. A fucking body, hours after we left.
That fucking brat is trying to hide this from me?
I threw my phone onto the bed and finished getting ready, my mind already made up.
Violet had never seen the hunter in me. She had never seen what I was capable of when something I protected was threatened. She thought her jiu jitsu and archery gave her claws, made her a predator.
She had no idea.
But she was about to learn. Because I was done playing the patient guardian, the concerned friend who kept his distance. If she wanted to dance at Oubliette, if she wanted to play with monsters, then she was going to do it undermyrules and within my sight.
She was going to regret igniting this. Regret making me care. Regret turning me from an observer into a participant.
Because the thing about hunters? We don’t stop until the threat is eliminated and we sink our teeth into our prey.
Chapter 13
Violet
“Shit.” I slammed my phone down on the nightstand, the plastic case clattering against cheap laminate. I rubbed my eyes, pressing hard enough to see stars burst behind my eyelids. Things were getting complicated. Rowan had somehow become my inadvertent savioragain, and I hated the growing list of favors I owed him. He might not keep score, but I did. A running tally in my head that never stopped climbing, each debt carved into my pride like notches on a blade.
This isn’t good.
Alice had stumbled in during the early morning hours, her key scratching against the lock before the door swung open. She’d given me a sheepish look when she found me awake, curled in my desk chair with cold coffee and burning eyes.
“Hey. . .” She mumbled the word through lips stained dark with wine or lipstick, I couldn’t tell which, in the dim glow of my desk lamp.
She collapsed onto her bed without bothering to remove her shoes—black stilettos with silver buckles that caught the light. The mattress springs groaned under her weight.
“Long night?” I asked, noting how abnormal it was for her OCD tendencies to let that slide. Alice was the type who color-coded her closet and kept her textbooks arranged by height.
She giggled into her pillow, the sound muffled and girlish. “You could say that.”
Rolling over to face me, she somehow made smudged charcoal eyeliner and mascara look elegant, like a magazine spread titled “Morning AfterChic.” Her black hair was a tangled mess of waves, and her dress—a sleek emerald number—was wrinkled across the bodice.
“Did you see the news?” she asked, her voice losing its playful edge.
I nodded, my throat tight. “Grateful it wasn’t you.”
“I carry a knife for emergencies. Though I’m not sure that would matter much based on what I heard about the body.”
I grimaced. “Was it bad?”
She sighed, a heavy exhale that seemed to deflate her as she nodded. Sitting up slowly, she pulled off her jewelry with deliberate movements: dangly earrings first, then a delicate silver bracelet, then three rings that clinked together as she dropped them into the ceramic dish on her nightstand. Her shoes came next, kicked off with small thuds against the dark wooden floors.
“Poor kid. He was a senior. Almost done with school.” Her voice went quiet as she reached for her makeup remover, the bottle squat and pink on her cluttered dresser. Pensive in a way I hadn’t seen before, like she was contemplating mortality for the first time.
