Chapter 1
Emmy stepped off the plane in Anchorage, Alaska, and shook her entire body like a dog getting out of a filthy pond. She’d been forced to fly coach, and it’d been hideous. She’d traveled either private or first class all her life, but her stupid parents were pissed and had shut off her trust fund.
And Alaska was cold. Not icy-death cold, but enough she felt it walking through the jetway. She checked her phone to see it was thirty-eight degrees in April, nearly May. It’d been eighty degrees in New Orleans when she left, but her welcome had worn thin once her funds had run out. She’d gone to Mardi Gras for the parties and then stayed with an old friend from Tulane. God, yetanothercollege she’d been kicked out of, but damn, had it been fun.
And that thought brought back the whole reason she’d been sent to fucking Alaska.
Her mother had lived a cloistered life, but her father had not. Emmy had expectedhimto understand her need for fun and adventure! What’s the use in being young and full of life if you don’t have adventures!
And if he’d let her actually spend her trust fund, she wouldn’t have had to borrow the Bugatti to see how well it handled. Besides, she’d planned to return it. The owner was out of town, and she’d disabled all the onboard tracking shit, and hacked his home security so it showed the image of the car in the garage, without images of her slipping behind the wheel.
How was she to know the insurance company had a separate security setup built into the electronics?
But she was happy to see Spence waiting for her in the luggage area with that languid yet alert wolfish posture, still sexy as fuck, and his wide smile told her he was happy to see her. He hugged her and said, “You look great, as always. How was your flight?”
She considered unloading about screaming babies and the scent of unwashed humanity, but decided not to bitch. Abbott, who she’d have to get used to calling Zander, could’ve sent his private plane for her if he’d wanted, but he had not. She was here as flock, with a fucking contract she’d read online and would be expected to sign in motherfucking blood. But she’d be getting sex with vampires, and her own money, plus college tuition paid. Also, food and a roof over her head, which she’d learned over the past months do not come easy without a trust fund and parents paying your way.
“We didn’t crash and burn. How is Alaska?”
“Cold but interesting. Kind of like living on another planet sometimes. I’ll have the driver make a loop through the university on our way to the house. Anything you need to stop and pick up on the way?”
She shook her head. She had twenty-three dollars to her name, and she was starving because she hadn’t eaten anything on the layover in Denver.
He tilted his head. “I can front you a little cash if you need toiletries. It’ll be a few weeks before you get your first paycheck.”
She lifted her chin and met his gaze. “I guess that means you know the whole sordid story. Does everyone?”
“Kendra and me. Fawn. There will be vampires you don’t know, the ones who didn’t leave with the former Master of Alaska, and they won’t know the details. At least, not at first. You know how gossip works in the supernatural world, and coteries are right up there with wolf packs.”
“I have a little cash, but yes, if we can stop so I can buy shampoo, conditioner, and a few other things, please.”
No way was she going to borrow money. She’d just have to buy the cheap stuff and live with it. She needed a razor, too.Fuck.
The trip into the big-box pharmacy wasn’t terrible, and when she reached for a protein bar, Spence told her, “There’s a mom-and-pop place we can drive through on the way, and I can put it on the coterie card. I can sense your hunger, and feeding you is on us now that you’re here. Or itwill be once you sign, but I can fudge it a little. Besides, I’m hungry too, and it’d be rude to eat without offering food.”
“Thank you.”
The wind clawed at her when they hit the parking lot, whipping into her jacket and finding exposed skin. His driver had stayed with the vehicle, while the other man sitting up front had gone inside with them. She figured they were both security, and that made sense. Zander loved Spence and would want to be sure he was safe. She looked around, and the sun was low in the sky despite the fact it was only midafternoon. The air smelled like mountains and pine, and she breathed it in. She could also scent the sea, along with the usual city scents.
She and Spence ate burgers and fries while they drove through campus, which wasn’t very impressive, but whatever. She’d been kicked out of seventeen colleges in nine years, and the fact this one was letting her take classes was probably only because of Abbott’s influence. No, he wasZandernow. Shit, that was going to take some getting used to.
The drive to the coterie house wound up a small mountain through towering evergreens and past silent houses set far off the road. When they pulled through the gate, the driveway meandered through two turns before the house came into view, and Emmy sat up straighter.
The house was sleek and modern with a lot more glass than she’d expected, but with the magnificent view below them of Anchorage glittering at the edge of an inlet, all those windows made total sense.
Once inside, the stone and wood, the tall windows, and the sweeping view of the mountains behind and the city below reminded her of the house she’d grown up in, looking down on Chattanooga and the Tennessee River from the brow of Lookout Mountain.
And Uncle Abbott had been her neighbor back then. She’d heard that as Zander, he was more laid-back and not as tight-assed, but she wasn’t going to believe it until she saw it for herself.
Spence walked her through a kitchen with commercial appliances, showed her where her drawer in the refrigerator was, pointed to the laundry room, the workout room, and the huge media rooms — one set up for video games, another for watching programs.
And finally, he walked her to an upstairs office, where he unlocked a desk drawer, retrieved a contract, and attached it to a clipboard. However, he moved back in front of the desk to sit in one of the chairs in front of it. “Several of us use this office, including Zander, when we don’t want to take a visitor downstairs for a meeting. It’s also used for most flock business. If you have need of it, you’ll have an app on your phone that’ll let you request a time slot.”
She sat in the chair facing him, and he handed her the contract.
“Read through it before you sign.” She saw the steel nib pen within reach on the desk, but she’d known this was coming.
She sat back and read through the contract, and it was identical to the one Spence had emailed to her days earlier.Zander would provide room and board, a pitiful salary that the contract called modest, and he’d pay for her tuition and books. If she made less than a C in any course, or if she let her GPA drop below a two-point-seven, she would owe him the cost of tuition and books, and if she couldn’t pay it, she’d become an indentured servant until the fees were considered repaid, and a spreadsheet outlined the time she’d serve for every thousand dollars she owed him.
