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“Great. Carolina brought half the damn coven with her tonight,” Dean sighed.

“Is that a bad thing?” I asked.

“I know your eyeballs work just fine. Look at her.”

My eyes definitely worked. Carolina’s hair was the color of warning lights and fire trucks, and it caught the glow from the beer signs and the painted streaks of orange on her shoulders. Her black jeans hugged her curves in ways that should be illegal. Her boot laces wrapped to mid-calf, and her coat fit her like a spell, custom-tailored to say, “Don’t even.” Her friends flanked her in a tight formation: one girl, wiry, with a nose ring the size of a lifesaver, and a guy whose eyes were so pale they looked like marbles. Witches, all of them. The kind of local royalty you didn’t mess with unless you had a death wish or a death plan.

I didn’t mean to stare. Didn’t mean to do anything, in fact, except keep my head down and finish my beer before the next disaster. But when Carolina moved, the whole room bent around her: conversations stuttered, silverware clinked, and the vampire sitting in the bar’s worst seat found himself with a fist around his own glass, pulse doing things it hadn’t done since before I was dead.

She strolled right past me without a single glance in my direction, and her perfume hit first: smoke and green things, like someone had bottled the feeling of rain after a lightning storm. My chest constricted. It was an actual, physical squeeze, the kind you get after a hard sprint or a scare. The urge to follow, or at least get a better angle, was so dumb and so overpowering that my legs twitched under the counter.

Dean saw it. He didn’t say anything, but he refilled my pint from a bottle that looked suspiciously more expensive than the tap and slid it over with a sideways look. “On the house,” he said, voice low. “You look like you just saw the Fourth Horseman.”

I grunted, trying for nonchalance. “Is that what she’s going by these days?”

Dean chuckled, which was an improvement over the usual snort. “Just saying, you keep making that face, you’ll scare off the clientele. Or bring ’em in. Hard to say with this crowd.”

The air in the bar had a crackle now, a static charge that fizzed against my skin. I sipped the beer, eyes darting to the mirror behind the bar so I could watch Carolina’s reflection without being a total creep. Her group commandeered a booth near the back, the one with the least light and the best sight lines. It was a power move. She sat facing the door. Her friends settled around her. The other girl started talking a mile a minute, gesturing with hands that left faint afterimages in the air. The guy listened, but every so often his gaze flicked around the room, cataloging threats. Or entertainment possibilities. Probably both.

Carolina leaned back in her seat with her arms draped over the booth like she owned the place and scanned the bar with the clinical precision of a bouncer counting heads. Her blue eyes, darker than denim and maybe indigo in the right light, stopped briefly on me. I didn’t look away in time. Our eyes met. No, that’s not right: her eyes collided with mine, and something in my skull went full fucking tilt. The pressure in my chest doubled. I clamped down on the bar top to keep from doing something idiotic, like waving or smiling.

Instead, I did the next-worst thing: I tried to act normal.

I picked up my glass. My hand shook just enough to make the beer tremble, which was humiliating, but probably better than biting a hole in my tongue. I willed my face to neutral, but the inside of my brain was going fucking haywire, sparking with words like “mate” and “fate” and “absolutely not, you dumbass.”

Dean, always a generous audience for failure, raised his eyebrows. “You okay, man?”

“Fine,” I lied, the word snapping out too fast.

He made a face that said, you and everyone else, but let it drop. “Want me to run interference? I could spill something on her, say it was an accident.”

“No.” I snorted. “Last time you did that, you almost got the place banished to the shadow dimension.”

He smiled, but his eyes turned cautious. “Just trying to keep the peace.”

The next five minutes were a game of chicken between my pride and my curiosity. I wasn’t going to get up and introduce myself. I wasn’t going to stare. I wasn’t even going to let myself think about her for more than five seconds at a stretch, which is why I kept reciting beer ingredients in my head like a spell to ward off obsession. But every time I looked up, my gaze caught hers. Not every time, but enough. She never smiled. Never frowned. Just watched, like I was a bird that had crash-landed through her window, and she was trying to decide if it was worth letting me out or just ignoring me until I died on the floor.

After a while, her friends started laughing at something, and Carolina joined in, head tipped back so her hair cascaded over the booth like a spill of wine. For a split second, all the brashness she’d walked in with disappeared. The challenge in her posture melted, and the laugh that escaped her was so unguarded it hit me like a tuning fork, buzzing straight into my brain. Then the moment passed, the mask dropped back into place, and she glanced my way again, as if daring me to say something. I didn’t. I wasn’t an idiot. Well...not a total idiot.

I looked down, focused on my beer, and let my mind drift. I tried to figure out what the hell had just happened, and why my body was acting like it had a mind of its own. I didn’t believe in fate, or soulmates, or any of the crap the other vamps used to justify their bullshit. But the way Carolina looked at me, no, through me, left a feeling that was electric and cold at the same time. Like a warning. I didn’t understand it.

My elbow caught my glass as I reached for the last of my beer. I grabbed for it and only made things worse. Beer sprayed across the bar. I muttered an apology and reached for the napkins. “I’ll take my check.”

He gave me a long, measuring look. “You sure?”

“Yeah,” I said, already regretting everything. “Gotta get home. Early day tomorrow.”

He nodded, wiped his hands on the towel, and leaned in. “You want my advice?”

I didn’t, but that never stopped Dean. I waited.

“Stay out of her way. You got enough trouble.”

I grinned, but it felt hollow. “Story of my life.”

He dropped the check in front of me, but it was blank. I glanced up, and he just shrugged. “You’re good for it.”

I left a twenty on a dry patch of counter and stood, careful this time not to let the stool sabotage me. Carolina rose from the booth and swept toward the door. I looked up as she passed and froze mid-apology to Dean. Our eyes met again.