“You’re coming with me, you little cunt.” His smile is pure evil and a growl escapes his throat, but that growl quickly shifts to strangled grasp when two hands wrap around his throat.
“I will fucking kill you,” Cal spits, his hands gripping the vampire’s neck so tightly the whites of his eyes turn black.
The vampire is taller than him, but he’s clearly stronger, and in the blink of an eye, Cal squeezes his throat so hard that the big bastard’s body goes limp. A harsh snap fills my ears, and the vampire hits the floor with a thud.
But when another vampire lunges for Cal, he doesn’t make it three steps before he just drops mid-step. His body turns to a crumpled heap of bones in a flash.
Between one heartbeat and the next, Cal pulls me to him, pressing my body tight against his chest. He kisses me, and when his eyes lock with mine for a half second, they’re fierce and focused and alive.
“Go,” he commands just before four more vampires start to circle him. “Go, Romy!”
I want to stay with him, I want to make sure he’s okay, I want to do a million and one things, but when Cal’s voice is in my head, urging me to get out, I know what I have to do.
Right now, just standing here, I’m a distraction. I’m another thing for him to worry about. And as I told him last night, those are both things I refuse to be.
He has a job, and I do too.
And it’s about damn time I start doing it.
I jump down from the stage, sprinting over to where the rest of the women are panicked on the far side of the room. “Hey! Everyone! Follow me!” I raise my voice over the din and start herding them, unstopped by the guards now that they’ve scattered to join the fray. “Come with me!”
Panicked enough to listen, they follow my direction in droves until we’re out in the hallway and looking for a place to get away from the danger. The other women are here too, having heard the commotion from the holding room set up in the ballroom, and as we all run around in our lingerie, it makes the weirdest scene of scattered ants I’ve ever seen.
It’s like a bomb threat at a strip club, for Pete’s sake.
“Hey!” I yell on another command. “Everybody listen to me so I can get you to safety!”
The women are wide-eyed and terrified, and a quiet hush falls over the group as they point me out to one another and huddle together. Suddenly, the pressure to come up with an escape plan feels monumental. Cal was explicit with the instructionsof where I was to go, but as expected, he didn’t provide much insight on how to convince the women to come with me.
“As you can see, things are turning bad,” I say, the understatement of the century a trademark of my discombobulation that’ll go down in history. “I know what to do, though, so I need you all to remain as calm as possible and follow me.”
“Come on!” Hillary shouts, stepping up to the plate as my VP of Operations. I’m so freaking thankful, I could cry, but I don’t. The tears will only blur my vision, and I’m going to need that to escape. “Follow Romy!”
Hustling quickly, I usher them back down the hall and past the steps we’ve taken to our rooms every night with only hopes and freaking prayers that there’s an exit in this direction. I’m going on nothing more than instinct and lack of choices, as all the violent chaos and commotion from the men is currently doing a great job of blocking every other direction.
I glance over my shoulder, looking back as we run in a group of flying hair and wispy undergarments that would do the Playboy Mansion proud.
Hillary rushes to fall into step with me, linking arms and crying lightly. “Okay. So. This is scary, and I think you were right about this being a very bad thing. When we heard you all screaming, I tried to come see if you were okay, but the guards wouldn’t let us leave the room.”
“I know,” I say quickly. “They tried to keep us in there, but the fight was too intense. They had to try to help, so everyone stopped caring about us.”
“Fight? The vampires arefighting?” she asks, horrified.
I wince. “Killing each other, Hil. They’rekillingeach other.”
“Oh my God. Over what?”
“Women, I assume. But I don’t know. It doesn’t matter anymore. What matters is finding a way out of here and quick. Cal told me where to go to get safe.”
“If the vampires are so bad, how do you know you can trust him?” she questions reasonably as we keep running, the pack of half-nakedness following behind us.
“Because I just…can,” I say with only conviction in my voice. “Trust me. There’s so much I have to tell you, but for now, just know we can. And if you can’t do that right now, do it for the other reason. Because we’re shit out of other options.”
“Got it.” She nods.
Cutting the chitchat and focusing on the objective, Hillary and I lead the group of women on a wild, weaving run through fifteen long halls of distinguished portraits and full bookshelves.
Discouragement grows as we turn the group around for the fifth time in a row, coming to yet another dead end.
