Page 50 of Collared by the Vampire Prince

Which means…

I groan. He left the coat on purpose.

A kindness? From a vampire?

No. There is always an ulterior motive with his kind.

What that motive might be, I cannot imagine.

I fling it aside.

The cold sinks deeper into my bones as I sit scowling at the coat. It’s too cold to lie down, but also too cold to stay like this. I sneeze, hard, and eventually the coat wins.

I drape it around my shoulders and curl onto the bed, his scent lingering in the fabric—cedar and faint spice, with something darker underneath. Bitter and hopeless as winter air trapped in a room. Beneath it all is the distinctly, infuriatingly masculine scent of him.

A scent I am growing to hate.

“Lights off,” I command the red gloom.

The room goes completely dark as the lights and clock blink out. Not even my night vision can pick anything out.

It unsettles me that I felt no answering brush of magic from any of it. Not from the lights. Not from the clock. Not from the doors, or the Academy gates, or even the locket when I handed it over. It had lain dull and ordinary in my palm.

The loss of my sense of magic is suffocating, like trying to draw breath and failing. The collar has smothered that part of me almost completely.

Yet I still feel the locket’s absence, my hand drifting beneath my collarbones where it should sit.

He can take the locket. He cannot steal its song.

Huddled beneath the coat, I hum it under my breath, the rising melody that made my chest swell whenever I opened it—the anthem of Wolden, from the days of the Wolf Kings, before Henrikk swallowed the eastern realm whole and renamed it, along with all his conquered lands, the Volmasque Kingdom.

To me, it has always sounded like a call to arms.

Mary always hushed me when I sang it where others might hear.

Outlawed for sixteen years, the song has already begun fading from the hearts and minds of wolves, threatening to vanish altogether. I hum it into the dark, soft and stubborn and mine. Someone should remember.

And somewhere in the melody, sleep finds me.

Chapter 9

Kira

The knock comes out of a dream.

Not quite a nightmare. Something grey and confused, full of running feet and underground stone passages winding beneath the mountain safehouse. Red torchlight gutters along the walls. Mary’s voice calls my name from the far end of a corridor that stretches longer the faster I run.

Kira.

Kirabelle.

Something is chasing me.

The air turns freezing. Frost needles my lungs. I taste icemelt on my tongue, and something dark as leather slips over my mouth, muffling my scream—

Kira.

The second knock is sharper.