23
Romy
From nerves and silence to unease and uncertainty, the moment the tempo of our debut to the stage shifts, it’s impossible to miss.
This isn’t the normal process, or at least, the crew working this room and standing guard at the door aren’t acting like it as they scramble and shout into the microphone radios at their chests.
An intense roar has built behind the mirrored wall in front of us, and the sounds of thuds and yells and grunts soon follow.
Girls glance between one another as one of the guards steps forward and holds a hand for us to stay.
“What’s going on?” Abigail asks, all her normal bravado reduced to nothing. At the sound of chaos and pure brutality on the other side, fear has finally reared its head.
“I don’t know,” I offer, trying to be a voice of calm. “But we should probably go back to the ballroom.”
Women scream and scatter everywhere as one of the vampires comes crashing through the mirror in front of the platform stage they’ve constructed for us to parade on and lands splayed and lifeless on the carpet in front of us.
“Oh my God!” Abigail’s shriek is high-pitched and pointed as she jumps off the back of the stage.
The whole room behind the glass reveals an all-out war between the vampires, Cal at the center of it.
But before I can fully process it, a hand clamps around my arm and yanks me backward.
A strangled gasp tears from my throat as cold fingers dig into my skin, and I look up to find a huge vampire with eyes as dark as night staring down at me.
“You’re coming with me, you little cunt.” His smile is pure evil and a growl escapes his throat, but that growl quickly shifts to strangled grasp when two hands wrap around his throat.
“I will fucking kill you,” Cal spits, his hands gripping the vampire’s neck so tightly the whites of his eyes turn black.
The vampire is taller than him, but he’s clearly stronger, and in the blink of an eye, Cal squeezes his throat so hard that the big bastard’s body goes limp. A harsh snap fills my ears, and the vampire hits the floor with a thud.
But when another vampire lunges for Cal, he doesn’t make it three steps before he just drops mid-step. His body turns to a crumpled heap of bones in a flash.
Between one heartbeat and the next, Cal pulls me to him, pressing my body tight against his chest. He kisses me, and when his eyes lock with mine for a half second, they’re fierce and focused and alive.
“Go,” he commands just before four more vampires start to circle him. “Go, Romy!”
I want to stay with him, I want to make sure he’s okay, I want to do a million and one things, but when Cal’s voice is in my head, urging me to get out, I know what I have to do.
Right now, just standing here, I’m a distraction. I’m another thing for him to worry about. And as I told him last night, those are both things I refuse to be.
He has a job, and I do too.
And it’s about damn time I start doing it.
I jump down from the stage, sprinting over to where the rest of the women are panicked on the far side of the room. “Hey! Everyone! Follow me!” I raise my voice over the din and start herding them, unstopped by the guards now that they’ve scattered to join the fray. “Come with me!”
Panicked enough to listen, they follow my direction in droves until we’re out in the hallway and looking for a place to get away from the danger.
The other women are here too, having heard the commotion from the holding room set up in the ballroom, and as we all run around in our lingerie, it makes the weirdest scene of scattered ants I’ve ever seen.
It’s like a bomb threat at a strip club, for Pete’s sake.
“Hey!” I yell on another command. “Everybody listen to me so I can get you to safety!”
The women are wide-eyed and terrified, and a quiet hush falls over the group as they point me out to one another and huddle together.
Suddenly, the pressure to come up with an escape plan feels monumental.
Cal was explicit with the instructions of where I was to go, but as expected, he didn’t provide much insight on how to convince the women to come with me.
“As you can see, things are turning bad,” I say, the understatement of the century a trademark of my discombobulation that’ll go down in history. “I know what to do, though, so I need you all to remain as calm as possible and follow me.”
“Come on!” Hillary shouts, stepping up to the plate as my VP of Operations. I’m so freaking thankful, I could cry, but I don’t. The tears will only blur my vision, and I’m going to need that to escape. “Follow Romy!”
Hustling quickly, I usher them back down the hall and past the steps we’ve taken to our rooms every night with only hopes and freaking prayers that there’s an exit in this direction.
I’m going on nothing more than instinct and lack of choices, as all the violent chaos and commotion from the men is currently doing a great job of blocking every other direction.
I glance over my shoulder, looking back as we run in a group of flying hair and wispy undergarments that would do the Playboy Mansion proud.
Hillary rushes to fall into step with me, linking arms and crying lightly. “Okay. So. This is scary, and I think you were right about this being a very bad thing. When we heard you all screaming, I tried to come see if you were okay, but the guards wouldn’t let us leave the room.”
“I know,” I say quickly. “They tried to keep us in there, but the fight was too intense. They had to try to help, so everyone stopped caring about us.”
“Fight? The vampires are fighting ?” she asks, horrified.
I wince. “Killing each other, Hil. They’re killing each other.”
“Oh my God. Over what?”
“Women, I assume. But I don’t know. It doesn’t matter anymore. What matters is finding a way out of here and quick. Cal told me where to go to get safe.”
“If the vampires are so bad, how do you know you can trust him?” she questions reasonably as we keep running, the pack of half-nakedness following behind us.
“Because I just… can ,” I say with only conviction in my voice. “Trust me. There’s so much I have to tell you, but for now, just know we can. And if you can’t do that right now, do it for the other reason. Because we’re shit out of other options.”
“Got it.” She nods.
Cutting the chitchat and focusing on the objective, Hillary and I lead the group of women on a wild, weaving run through fifteen long halls of distinguished portraits and full bookshelves.
Discouragement grows as we turn the group around for the fifth time in a row, coming to yet another dead end.
“Shit.” Fighting dejection, I breathe hard, trying to hold oxygen in my lungs.
“Romy?” a woman in all black suddenly asks, her appearance from the hall at my side both confusing and relieving me all at once. She’s not one of the women to be auctioned—she’s covered in way too much material.
“Yeah?” I ask.
“I’m Kylie.” She hooks a thumb over her shoulder to another beautiful woman behind her. “And this is Blair. We’re Rook’s and Kane’s mates.”
“Mates?” Hillary asks, startling me from right behind.
I nod. “Cal’s brothers’ mates. And…I’m Cal’s.”
“Holy shit, you’re joking! Way to bury the lede, Romy!”
“Come on,” Blair interrupts. “Door’s this way. More gofers will be here soon, so we have to move now.”
Cupping my hands around my mouth, I yell to the women who’ve scattered now, frantically searching every room on the hall. “Ladies! Over here! Come on! The door’s this way.”
A game of telephone transpires as they work to pass on the message, and Hillary and I wait at the entrance to the hall, counting until we’re sure all the women have made it through.
Out on the lawn, we move in the low light of the still-rising moon in a cluster like a bunch of scantily clad geese.
“I swear,” I mutter to Kylie, Blair, and Hillary, having sprinted back up to the front of the group after we were sure everyone was out.
“If this weren’t so terrifying, it’d be a hell of a story to make fun of.
I don’t even want to think about what it’s going to look like when we make it to the road. ”
“We have a bus waiting with a hundred sets of sweats inside,” Blair says with a laugh. “Kane and Rook procured it earlier today on Cal’s orders.”
“Thank God,” I manage with a laugh as we finally make it to the tree line Cal told me would be here.
And just like he said, the light beckons in the distance. It’ll still be a long trek in the pitch dark in six-inch heels or bare feet—but the nightmare is almost over.
I can see the end of the tunnel.
And the future with Cal on the other side of it sure looks bright.
As long as he makes it out alive…