CHAPTER 2
JULIAN
Three AM is my favorite hour. The city sleeps below my penthouse windows—forty-five floors of steel and glass between me and the humans dreaming their brief dreams. The quarterly reports glow on my screen, numbers that would make most people weep with joy or despair. I feel neither.
My phone buzzes. A delivery notification from LifeSource Medical:
Your monthly supply has been delivered to the secure refrigeration unit. Thank you for your continued partnership.
I invested in the blood bank thirty years ago, back when it was a struggling nonprofit hemorrhaging money.
Now it’s one of the most respected medical supply companies on the West Coast. Ethical sourcing.
Rigorous standards. And a standing order that arrives like clockwork to a private entrance my household staff never questions.
The arrangement works for everyone—they get an investor who never asks for returns, and I get sustenance without the complications that come from hunting.
I haven’t taken from a living human in over a century. Some of my kind consider it weakness. I call it strategy. Dead bodies attract attention. Missing persons generate investigations. Shell companies and medical supply chains generate tax documents.
Wealth compounds when you have two hundred years of interest and the patience to let legitimate businesses grow.
The building I’m sitting in cost me forty-three million, and I own six others like it across three continents.
All of it traceable. Legal. Boring. The kind of empire that accountants admire and forensic investigators find unremarkable.
I’ve been reviewing acquisition targets for six hours. My coffee went cold around midnight. I haven’t touched it since it’s only there for keeping up appearances. I should probably dump it and pour another cup I won’t drink.
A second notification appears on my secure tablet. This one requires a biometric scan to open.
Monthly status report received. Exposure risk: minimal. Continue current protocols. —V.C.
The Vampire Council. Always watching. Always measuring. They’ve been monitoring me since Prague, though they’d never admit that’s the reason. Routine surveillance, they call it. Standard procedure for all assets in high-visibility positions.
I know better. After what happened in ’74, I became a person of interest. The kind of vampire who makes choices they don’t understand.
I send back my standard response—a single checkmark showing compliance—and close the message.
The alert chimes from my secondary monitor. The one running Spellbound’s backend systems.
I built the app four years ago on a whim. A puzzle. Could an algorithm predict human compatibility better than chance and pheromones? Could I map the chaos of attraction into clean data points?
The answer, I discovered, is partially. Humans are predictable in the aggregate, fascinating in specific cases, and disappointing in practice.
I should ignore the notification. I have seventeen companies to run, eight board meetings this week, and a merger in Tokyo that requires my attention. The app was supposed to be academic. Observational. A way to study human connection from the safe distance of code and data.
I open the alert anyway.
“New request flagged for manual review.”
The system flags unusual requests. This one pinged every anomaly detector I built into the code. I pull up the profile.
Poppy Rose Gable. Twenty-eight. Los Angeles. Lifestyle influencer with 847,000 followers.
The photos are all staged. She’s pretty in a modern way—the kind that photographs well and sells skincare items. Blonde hair. Blue eyes that look better in person than on screen, I’d bet. A smile that doesn’t reach those eyes in any of the pictures.
I’ve seen thousands of profiles like this. Curated. Calculated.
Yet, something won’t let me close the file.
Instead, I read her request, and the honesty surprises me. Most requests are coded. Euphemistic. This one reads like a confession.
I smile. Not the fake expression I use in board meetings. An actual one.
Budget: $5,000. I know that’s probably not enough for what I’m asking. I can go up to $7,500 if you’re really good at pretending to be smitten.
She’s offering me seven thousand dollars. I spent more than that on my watch.
I should close the file.
I open her Glowstagram instead.
The feed is what I expected. Aesthetic breakfast shots. Outfit-of-the-day photos. Sponsored posts for skincare, supplements, and sustainable fashion. Each caption is a small essay about wellness and self-love, while living your best life.
The comments are effusive. Adoring. Thousands of people who think they know her.
I scroll back six months. The posts look identical. Same lighting. Same smile. Same captions about gratitude and growth.
But something shifted eight months ago. The smile gets tighter. The captions get longer, more defensive. There’s a three-week gap where she doesn’t post at all—unusual for someone whose income depends on consistent content.
When she returns, she’s different. Still curated, still careful, but brittle underneath. Holding herself together with aesthetics and affirmations.
I found a post from nine months ago. An image of her hand wearing an engagement ring. The caption is simple: “He asked. I said yes. Sometimes the best things happen when you stop looking for them.”
The next post is three weeks later. No explanation. Just a quote about new beginnings and a photo of her apartment with new furniture.
Preston Whitmore. I found him in her tagged photos. Tall. Handsome in that generic way. The kind of face that belongs in advertisements for luxury cars. He’s tagged in forty-seven posts spanning two years, then nothing.
His current girlfriend is Serenity Moon. She teaches yoga and posts about crystal healing. She has half the number of followers as Poppy, but twice the engagement. Her feed is all sunset meditations and green smoothies, and photos of her and Preston looking content.
I close Glowstagram and return to Poppy’s request.
She’s desperate. Desperate enough to hire a stranger. Desperate enough to be honest about it. Desperate enough to offer money she can’t afford to lose.
I should decline. I have rules about this. About staying distant. About not letting humans get close enough to see what I am.
The Prague Rule. No attachments.
I made that rule fifty years ago, in a hotel room in Prague, staring at what Damien had left of Anya.
Brilliant, fierce, human Anya—who’d made the mistake of loving me.
Damien left her body arranged on the bed like a gift.
A note pinned to her dress: Attachment is a liability. I’m helping you remember.
His revenge for what happened in 1878. For Katya.
I can still hear the hunters breaking through the door. Still feel the impossible math of that moment—Katya in one direction, Margaret in another, and only enough time to save one. I chose Margaret. And Katya died while Damien was too far away to reach her.
You chose her over Katya, he said afterward, his voice hollow. Over us.
He vanished after that. My progeny, my closest friend for decades—gone. I thought I’d lost him to grief. I didn’t know he was waiting.
But Anya wasn’t my first loss. There was Margaret—committed to an asylum after I told her what I was, burned alive in 1897. I arrived too late to save her. And Corinne, who saw me feeding in Prague and chose the river over living with the knowledge.
Three women. Three deaths. Each one my fault in a different way. I told myself loving me was the danger. That something in me—something broken, something monstrous—poisoned everyone who got close.
The Prague Rule exists for good reasons.
I learned them the hard way.
For fifty years, I’ve kept to the rule. Built empires. Accumulated wealth. Maintained distance. I attend galas and charity events, date occasionally—brief affairs, surface-level, with women who want my money or status more than they want me.
I’ve perfected the art of being alone in crowds.
This request should be easy to decline. It violates everything the Prague Rule was designed to prevent. Fake dating means proximity. It means pretending to be human for extended periods. Spending four days maintaining an illusion that could crack at any moment.
More importantly, it means being seen.
I pull up Poppy’s video submission. The app requires a short video introduction—another feature I added to catch the micro-expressions that photos hide.
She’s sitting on her couch, wearing an oversized sweatshirt. No makeup. Hair in a messy bun. The ring light creates harsh shadows on her face.
“Hi. I’m Poppy. This is weird. I’m aware of how weird this is.
” She laughs, and it’s nothing like the fake laughs in her Glowstagram videos.
“I’m not usually this kind of person. You know, the person who hires fake boyfriends.
Nope. Not at all. I’m the person who has a five-year plan and color-codes her calendar. Someone who knows what she wants.”
She picks at the sweatshirt sleeve.
“Except I don’t. I thought I did. I thought I wanted Preston and the house in the suburbs. The life we’d planned. Then he left, and I realized I’d spent two years planning a life I’m not sure I ever wanted.”
Her eyes meet the camera. Lighter than in her photos. More blue than gray. Tired.
“My sister is getting married. She’s older than I am and has her entire life figured out.
My ex will be there, looking happy and well adjusted—everything I’m supposed to be.
Ugh, and then there’s my mom. She’ll make comments about my biological clock,” she says, wiping away a tear.
“She means well. Here’s the thing... my followers will expect perfect content.
And I just... I just can’t do it alone.”
She takes a breath.
“So I’m asking a stranger to pretend to love me for four days. Which is either the saddest thing I’ve ever done or the smartest. I haven’t decided yet.”
The video ends.
I watch it again.
Then a third time.
She’s not what I expected. The curated influencer persona is armor. Underneath, she’s honest. Messy. Human in a way that most humans spend their lives trying to hide.
I know what it’s like to build a perfect exterior while falling apart inside. To smile for audiences while drowning in private. To be so lonely in crowds that the silence feels like its own kind of wound.
I know what it’s like to be seen as something you’re not and wonder if the real you is worth knowing at all.
This is a mistake. I can feel it in my bones—the ones that have survived 257 years by avoiding this kind of complication.
I should decline. Maintain my distance. Stay safe behind the walls I’ve built from wealth and power and detachment.
The Prague Rule. No attachments.
My fingers move across the keyboard anyway.
I mark myself as interested, and hit send before I can reconsider.