“Yep.”
“Romy Spencer?” he asks then, seemingly still needing the confirmation.
“That’s me,” I reply dumbly, raising my hands out to the sides. As the nostalgia wears off, the reality of seeing the boy I once fantasized about all grown up andhere, of all places, sends me to the pits of despair. “What…what are you doing here?”
His jaw is tight, and his voice is painfully quiet. “You know why.”
He’s here…with the other malevampires…toselect…
I swallow hard, taking an involuntary step back.
He notices, but I’m not surprised. Calloway Slater always noticed everything.
Cal
Romy Spencer is the woman in the yellow dress.
Romy Spencer is myfatedmate.
The three-years-younger-than-me adorable girl who used to chase me around the playground begging to hang out with me instead of the mean-girl clique her teacher wanted her to be a part of. The girl who treated me and my brothers as her equals in a sea of people who looked down on us. The girl whom I often wondered about when we left our first foster family and were moved out of Boston Prep and into the public school across town.
It’s the worst news of my life to finally come face-to-face with her here.And it’s the most anything has ever made sense to find out she’s the one the universe picked for me.
Everything in me locks on her, like there’s no world where she isn’t mine.
And even though it’s been years since I’ve seen her, I feel as if I know her more than I know myself. As if my entire being is attuned to everything that is her.
Every breath she takes feels like it echoes through me and her visible fear hits me like a blade to the ribs.
Right now, she’s scared of me. I can see it in the light blue of her eyes and the slight shake of her legs.
I don’t blame her—seeing me like this, here, can only paint one picture about the kind of man I’ve grown into.
“I’m sorry to see you here,” I say quietly, rubbing the back of my neck and begging the burn inside me to gentle. I don’t want to frighten her any more than I already have—intrinsically, it kills me to scare her at all. “But Iamglad to see you.”
Because even now—even like this—being near her feels like finding something I didn’t know I’d been missing my entire life.
“You’re a…”
Vampire.
I nod, leaving the word silent between us. It’s not even a question what she’s thinking. I can read it as though it’s my own thought. There may be a few adjectives in front of it—evil, greedy, sadistic, morally bankrupt—but the noun is the same. I am a vampire. And by being here, I am the scariest version of one.
One who takes. One who lies. One who thinks he’s above everyone and everything.
I can’t remember a moment when I’ve longed for simpler times of childhood, but right now, I do. I long for a time in the past when Romy Spencer and I were attached at the hip and things like humans and vampires and bloodlines and class systems were never discussed.
A time when innocence was at the foundation of everything.
Everything inside me wants to throw her over my shoulder and run her straight out of this fucking nightmare. Truthfully, my body is strongly championing for it and I have to clench my hands into fists just to keep my composure.
Now isn’t the time to fuck up. Not only would I be risking my brothers’ and their mates’ lives, I’d be risking hers too. And fuck me, I wouldn’t be able to handle that.
Romy might be clueless about what she means to me—that she’s managed to become the equivalent of my entire world in what feels like a nanosecond and an eternity at the same time—but every cell inside my body isaware.
“But…I didn’t… Cal…” She pauses, her voice shaking as it breaks.
She knows exactly why I’m here and the monster it makes me, even if it confuses the memories she has of me as a kid. Sheknows. I can feel it in the tremble of her hands and the way her heart races and her breaths come out stilted. And I see it written all over her face.
