Page 114 of Collared by the Vampire Prince

“Hello,” I say brightly to everyone, pretending not to notice.

“Kira! I was beginning to think you’d changed your mind.”

Despite not having read the book, I am soon immersed as Harvey recounts the story of a foolish young woman and her boyfriend who enter a haunted house searching for a potion said to make its drinker invulnerable—only for him to lose his nerve and abandon her inside, leaving her trapped with the handsome ghost haunting the house, whom she eventually falls in love with.

“Well? Did we love it?” Harvey asks, gazing around at us.

“No,” Becky says with a scowl. “I vote romance for our next book.”

“That was a romance!” Harvey insists.

“It was not! It had blood and ghouls and was creepy as fuck.”

“I liked it,” Clara murmurs.

“So did I, until the ghost killed her!” Becky grumbles.

“She got a good punch in, though,” Harvey says.

“Ugh.”

“Come on! That was the best part!”

I find myself grinning ear to ear as the pack descends into squabbling about mysterious potions and ghost punching.

For an hour, no one is bitten or ordered to kneel, and no one discusses obedience, collars, or the correct way to offer one’s throat. We argue over how the story could be improved and whether any person with sense would drink some unknown substance glowing green in a haunted cellar. Clara presses another biscuit into my hand. Becky leans closer to whisper that Harvey would absolutely drink it if someone promised it would make him irresistible.

“I’m already irresistible,” Harvey says.

The round of laughter that follows should make me feel better. It does, and that is worse. Because the longer I sit there with them, warm and fed and almost laughing, the more I remember what I have lost. Mary. Byron. My friends. My life. Not only my future, but my past. The people I grew up with. I even miss the safehouse.

These wolves are not my friends.

I cannot afford for them to become my friends.

Yet when Clara smiles at me across the plate of biscuits, and Becky nudges my shoulder with hers as Harvey launches into another dramatic defence of ghost-punching, my chest begins to ache.

It will be hard to leave them.

I push the thought away. Tomorrow, I promise myself. Tomorrow, I will return to the business of hunting the prince.

Chapter 18

Nathaniel

Iremain in the shadows of the alcove long after she flees, the echo of her footsteps swallowed by the corridor. She did not resist as much as I expected her to. At one point, she had pressed back against me—instinctive but undeniable—and it had stirred my senses to life.

Even now the memory makes my blood run hotter.

It felt indecent, pinning her to the wall like that. Grinding myself against her. Those privileges don’t belong to me. Someone else should be whispering those filthy promises in her ear.

Except I did whisper them. I held her close to me and meant every wicked word.

I want her.

The realisation lands with dangerous force. Lust floods my veins, sudden and total. I am already hard, my fangs aching in a way that has little to do with blood and everything to do with her.

The feeling cannot be trusted. It would be absurd to let myself become undone by lust—mine or hers. And I am not completely convinced she was not pretending. She hasn’t even been at the Academy two weeks. Am I really to believe she has had a sudden change of heart, particularly after my stunt in the assembly hall?