Chapter 27
Violet
Rowan leaving me alone in the diner left a sour taste in my mouth.
I should be good and wait. He’s only with Jules.
I wasn’t worried about Rowan and her hooking up.
Not when he had practically confessed to me.
That was not the cause of the unease I felt as I watched them walk off.
I didn’t actually know the reason I felt so worried, but I hurried to pay the bill so I could follow after them.
Settling the tab took longer than it should have, giving Rowan and Jules a bit of a head start. As I rushed out the door, the cool night air blasted against me and pebbled my skin. I was about to turn the corner when I heard an inhuman shriek.
My heart nearly stopped, but I ran like hell towards that sound. I had no idea what I expected to find, but Rowan wielding a road flare and fighting one of those creepy twins from the club was not it.
“Rowan!” I called for him as I ran. I wanted him to know that I was there, that I was coming, that I had his back, that he wasn’t alone.
Then the idiot turned to look at me, like he forgot he was in the middle of a back alley brawl.
What happened next. . . I wasn’t prepared for what happened next.
I expected the three of them to wrestle around on the ground: punching, kicking, grappling. Maybe one of the twins would pull out a knife. I saw Rowan gouge out an eye, and I winced from the scream that followed.
What I was not prepared for was discovering that vampyres really did exist by watching two of them bite down on Rowan’s throat.
The world tilted. My mind rejected what my eyes insisted was real: twin mouths latched onto Rowan’s neck, their faces transformed into something predatory and wrong. Not metaphorically predatory. Actually inhuman, with features that had shifted into angles that shouldn’t exist on a human face.
I didn’t think. Thinking would have paralyzed me.
Instead, I let muscle memory take over, launching myself at the nearest twin’s back.
My arms snaked around his throat in a perfect rear naked choke, my bicep pressed against one carotid, forearm against the other.
My legs wrapped around his waist, heels digging into his hips for leverage.
Ten seconds or less. That’s all it took to put someone out when you cut off blood to the brain.
I’d practiced the choke dozens of times on the mats and always secured the nearly immediate tap from partners who didn’t want to black out.
The science was simple: compress the carotid arteries, stop blood from reaching the brain, lights out.
I squeezed harder than I ever would while rolling on the mat, putting every ounce of strength into the hold. My bicep burned. My forearm ached. Almost as if it were staged, the sky opened up, and it began to downpour. I counted in my head as I waited for his body to go limp.
One Mississippi. Two Mississippi. Three Mississippi.
He didn’t even notice I was there.
Four Mississippi. Five Mississippi. Six Mississippi.
His throat felt wrong under my arm. Too cold. Too hard. Like trying to choke marble wrapped in silk.
Seven Mississippi. Eight Mississippi. Nine Mississippi.
He kept feeding. The wet, sucking sounds continued. Rowan’s blood ran down the creature’s chin, mixing with rivulets of rain, dripping onto the alley floor into water and rotting garbage.
Ten Mississippi.
Nothing. No slackening. No tap out. No sign he even felt my arms around his throat.
Eleven. Twelve. Thirteen.
My arms shook with effort. Sweat mixed with rain, making my grip slip. The vampyre reached back with one hand, casual as swatting a mosquito, and grabbed my wrist. His fingers were ice against my skin.
He pulled my arm away from his throat like I was a child playing at violence.
The strength in those fingers defied reason, defied physics.
I’d grappled with men nearly twice my weight, learned to use leverage and technique to overcome raw power.
But this wasn’t human strength. This was something else entirely, something that made all my training worthless as a paper airplane in a hurricane.
“Please,” I gasped, abandoning technique for desperation. “Please stop. You’re killing him.”
The vampyre’s twin pulled his mouth from Rowan’s throat long enough to laugh. He looked at me with his one good eye. Blood painted his lips, turning his teeth into crimson daggers. “That’s rather the point, love.”
I tried to wrench free, to throw myself between them and Rowan, but the one holding my wrist yanked me off his back and tossed me aside. I hit the alley wall hard enough to drive the air from my lungs. My vision sparked white, then gray, then cleared.
The road flare had rolled into a gutter and was being swept away in a river of sludgewater. As the flickering red light faded, I saw how pale Rowan had become. His skin looked like snow, his lips tinged blue, his eyes rolling back to show only white as he fought to stay conscious.
I scrambled forward on hands and knees through the garbage and water. “No! Please, stop!”
I knew this feeling. This helplessness. This watching something terrible happen while being too weak to prevent it.
In that other life, Edward had kept me ignorant and isolated specifically so I would feel this way.
So I would know, bone-deep, that resistance was pointless.
That I was nothing. That my struggles were entertainment at best, annoyance at worst.
And that part of me watched Rowan die and knew the same truth: I am powerless.
Rain began to slice down harder in razor sheets, cold and sharp against my skin. It plastered my hair to my face, mixed with tears I hadn’t realized were falling. The vampyres kept feeding, their throats working as they swallowed, and swallowed, and swallowed.
Arms wrapped around me from behind before I could throw myself at them again. Small arms, but strong as steel cables. Jules. I hadn’t heard her approach, but suddenly she was there, holding me back while I thrashed and fought and screamed.
“Don’t,” she whispered harshly against my ear, though her voice trembled. “Don’t get closer, sweetie. They’ll take you too.”
“I don’t care!” I tried to elbow her in the ribs, stomp on her feet, throw my head back into her face—every technique I’d learned for dealing with a rear grapple.
But Jules had positioned herself perfectly, her chin tucked against my shoulder, her body angled to avoid my strikes.
“Let me go! Jules! Let me go, they’re killing him! ”
“I know, sweetie. I know.” Her voice broke on the words. She was crying too, I realized. Her hot tears mixed with rain on my shoulder. “But you can’t stop them. Neither can I.”
The feeding sounds grew wetter, more obscene. Rowan’s hands, which had been pushing weakly against the twins' shoulders, fell to his sides. His head lolled back to the pavement.
“Rowan!” My scream shredded my throat. “Please! Please, somebody, help him!”
The alley stank of garbage and blood and rain. Somewhere, a cat yowled. Somewhere, people were living their normal lives, eating dinner, watching television, completely unaware that the world contained monsters who could drain a man dry in an alley.
Rowan’s eyes found mine across the space between us. Still conscious, somehow. Still aware enough to see me struggling, failing, breaking apart. His lips moved, forming my name without sound. An apology, maybe. Or a goodbye.
That’s when the air changed.
It happened between one heartbeat and the next: the temperature dropped ten degrees, the rain eased, the distant streetlamps flickered. A scent drifted through the alley that overpowered the garbage and blood. It reminded me of jasmine, lavender, and warm summer stones.
The twins released Rowan immediately, their heads snapping up like wolves scenting a larger predator. One of them actually whimpered. The sound was so incongruous with their previous dominance that I stopped struggling in Jules’s arms.
They dropped to their knees in the filthy alley water, heads bowed so low their foreheads scraped the ground.
“Mistress,” the one-eyed vampyre gasped.
A woman I least expected stepped from shadows that shouldn’t have been deep enough to hide within. She moved like liquid poured into the shape of a person, each step deliberate and graceful.
“Natalia?” I whispered.
She was still just as beautiful as when I’d seen her last, but in that moment, she was also terrifying.
The rain made her dark skin look like polished onyx, and turned her snow white hair into a darker grey.
She wore a bubblegum pink tube top and a skirt that should have looked cheap, but instead looked like she was slumming for fun—playing at being a college party girl.
Thigh-high stockings completed the outfit, making her legs seem impossibly long in combat boots.
Dear god. She’s not human either.
“You stopped. How disappointing,” she said, a lilt to her voice that I had once found alluring. Now it sent shivers of icy fear throughout me. My stomach turned. She’d been watching. Watching while they fed. Watching while I begged. Watching while Rowan died.
She glided past where Jules still held me, close enough that I caught more of her scent: not just jasmine and stone but something else, something that made my body scream warnings. She knelt beside Rowan, studying him.
“This one. . .” She reached out with one perfectly manicured finger, not quite touching the blood running down his throat. “This one, I was considering having for myself.”
The phrasing made me want to vomit. Having him. Like he was a vintage wine or an expensive meal. A thing to be consumed at leisure.
The twins exchanged terrified glances. “Forgive us, Mistress Natalia,” One-Eye stammered. “We didn’t know you had claimed him.”
“I had not.” She tilted her head, hair sliding over one shoulder like water. “Not yet. But I was. . . interested. Especially when he offered to help me. And now you’ve gone and broken him.”