Page 167 of Collared by the Vampire Prince

“You’ll die.” He speaks with such grave certainty.

Heat flashes through me. “You don’t know that.”

“Oh, but I do.” He begins to take another step, but stops when I tighten my grip upon the finial. “I have seen you try to fly before.”

My grip slips a fraction. “What?”

“Outside a village. Over the hills, beyond the trees, in a field of wildflowers.” Something flits across his face, almost too soft to recognise. Then his tone reverts to its usual glibness. “It was a sunny spring day, yet you spent most of it throwing yourself from the same tree. The results were consistent, if not encouraging.”

The roof seems to tilt beneath me.

“You’re lying,” I say, even as the memory returns.

“You caught your left wing upon a hawthorn tree. You swore at it for several minutes before attempting the same thing again.”

My left wing never recovered from that nightmare. If the branch had not snapped, I might have hung there for hours, my wing stretched and aching beneath my weight, my paws clawing uselessly for a trunk they could not reach.

I stare at him through the rain. No one else was there that day. Or so I thought.

“You’ve been watching me?”

“I have.”

I narrow my eyes. “For how long?”

“Long enough.”

“That tells me nothing.”

He shrugs one shoulder, but for all his feigned indifference, he never blinks.

I change tack. “You know Byron and Mary. Which means you know about the Resistance.” It’s a risk to mention the organisation, but he looks utterly unsurprised. “Does your father?”

Nathaniel’s gaze remains fixed upon mine, his wet hair whipping across his eyes as he sneers. “He knows that some ragtag band of rebels survives in the south, scattered among cottage hideaways.”

The careless tilt of his head—as though the Resistance is too insignificant to warrant concern—sends heat flashing through me.

“Then why hasn’t he killed us all?” I demand.

“Because the Resistance is already dead.”

For a moment, even the wind seems to fall away.

“What?” I stammer.

“He has no need to destroy what has already been dismantled. Your numbers dwindle. Your missions fail. Whatever remains is no threat to him.”

“That’s not true. We are alive and thriving.”

“You are surviving.” His voice cuts cleanly through the storm. “Barely.”

“You know nothing about us.”

“I know you have spent years hiding from a war that ended long ago.”

“We are not hiding!” The protest tears painfully from my throat.

I want to tell him that the war cannot be over while Henrikk sits upon a stolen throne. That survival is an act of defiance. That hope remains so long as even one wolf refuses to kneel. But my last mission with the Resistance flashes through my mind. We failed. Our leader died that night, and everything changed. Byron stepped into his place.