A growl that sounds more beast than human rolls out of the tall asshole beside me, and every muscle in my body goes rigid like I’ve been doused in cold water. My feet move before I decide to move them, three steps back, four, my body making a decision my brain hasn’t caught up to yet.
My throat closes. I must be hallucinating. His eyes flare completely black, his teeth lengthen into fangs that glint in the dim light, and the tips of his fingers sharpen into claws. I blink, shake my head, but the monster in front of me doesn’t disappear. It’s real.
Shit.
We let a fucking monster inside our house.
That’s not a man at all. My body knows it before my brain does.
I take a few more steps to stand protectively in front of Kallie, putting myself between whatever that dude is and her.
He’ll have to get through me first.
He’s bigger. Taller. But I work out. Some. It’ll have to be enough.
Fuck.
But Kallie pushes me away, again, like always, and goes to stand right in front of Alek. I grab at her arm, trying to yank her back.
“Casey, stop. He won’t hurt me. He’s here to protect me.”
“How the fuck would you know that? He’s a… He’s a…”
“A vampire,” she finishes, the word sounding foreign and sharp. “Yeah. Trust me, I’m just as thrilled about it as you are.”
The brittle edge in her voice throws me completely. Vampires? She’s talking about vampires like they’re real, like one is standing in our living room right now.
I don’t have time to dwell on what ifs and questions though because the hissy threat on the other side of the door bangs again, this time so violently that it sounds like he’s throwing himself at it, trying to knock it down.
“Back up Kallie. This door isn’t going to hold much longer.”
Alek’s voice is calm, normal, but his words are distorted by the long ass fucking fangs.
“But they can’t come in, can they? I’m not inviting them in.”
Another bang, followed by a fist punching a hole straight through the metal door.
Holy fuck.
“Stark knows. He’s on his way.”
Who the fuck is Stark?
“How—” Kallie starts to question, but another fist makes it through the door and this time claws shred the hole bigger like it’s made of just thin paper.
The metal shrieks and tears, the brackets offering no resistance at all.
Red eyes lock onto mine through the shredded door. The frantic energy in them stills, focusing into a beam that drills right into my skull. The panic I felt seconds ago dissolves, replaced by a thick, warm fog. I was supposed to do something… protect Kallie… but the thought unravels like a frayed rope. It doesn’t matter. Nothing does.
“Invite me in,” a voice commands. I feel my body stumble forward, moving before I’ve decided to move. My own voice responds, flat and distant, as if it belongs to someone else.
From far away, someone—I think it’s Kallie—screams, “No!” but the sound is muffled, unimportant. My thoughts keep sliding off whatever I try to hold onto.
“Please, come in.”
Bangs and growls echo around me, red eyes coming closer and closer, then something clamps down on my shoulder—hard, wet, wrong—and my own scream is the last thing I hear.
Chapter Twenty-Four
