CHAPTER 7
BY HALFWAY THROUGH HER shift, Dani knew something was seriously wrong. She’d spent the morning fumbling to pack boxes as quickly as she could, aware that she was moving too slowly and failing to meet her quotas.
But try as she might, she couldn’t seem to get her eyes to focus. The bright lights on the warehouse floor had caused her headache to intensify. Every time she reached for a product to pack it into a shipping container, it made her so dizzy she thought she would pass out.
After the third mistake stuffing packing envelopes, she was pulled off the floor and sent home without pay.
Outside, she leaned against the warehouse wall where there was a bit of shelter from the falling snow and pulled her lunch from her satchel.
She hadn’t gotten a chance to take her break, and she was starving.
There were two small rolls filled with sliced cheese, ham, tomatoes and lettuce, an absolute delicacy.
She tucked into her lunch hungrily, pausing to drink from her water bottle.
The snow was starting to come down heavier, and there was more predicted by nightfall.
If she didn’t get home soon, it would make a mess of the only road back into the city.
The main road that the delivery trucks had to use would be plowed at regular intervals.
Luciano Cavalieri wouldn’t lose a single silver in shipping delays no matter what sort of conditions he had to send his drivers out in.
It was the roads closer to home that worried her as the poorest blocks in the city were either saved for last or not plowed at all during blizzards.
No, she had to get home before this got any worse.
Shoving her lunch bag into her satchel, she started for home. Powering on her phone, she pulled up the group chat with her sisters.
Dani: On my way back now. Not feeling well.
A response from Evan came back right away.
Evan: Got Ava from school. Errands to run. Will you be home in the next hour? I think she needs help with her math homework.
Ava was frighteningly good at math, to the point that her teachers had talked about moving her up into high school classes next year to keep her challenged.
She definitely did not need help with anything math-related, and certainly not from Dani, whose talents lay more in creative writing and who got a headache just from thinking about algebra.
Pulling her satchel snug across her body, she quickened her pace, remembering Evan’s warning from earlier.
It was two miles back to their apartment, two miles where she would have to walk through a sparsely populated industrial area of the sector.
Worse, she couldn’t walk much faster than this if she didn’t want to risk falling on the ice.
Her phone pinged with another text.
Alex: I can’t see you again. Something has come up. You’ll probably see the announcement in a little while.
The frozen road suddenly seemed to swirl around her. Snow whispered against the ground as it fell, tears freezing on her cheeks.
She’d known this was how things would eventually end, that a prince and a sanguine would never be allowed to secretly correspond. Their lives were too different. He had everything. She came from nothing. Worse, was what their friendship represented. Even the possibility of it was far too dangerous.
But for a few fleeting hours, some tiny part of her had fantasized about it, what it could have been like for Alex to be hers.
The actual details had been hard to imagine.
They came from two completely different worlds.
The idea of inserting herself into Prince Alexander’s royal life at the palace, with its protocols and daily schedule, felt as foreign to her as picturing him having morning tea at their chipped table in the kitchen that was propped up by a piece of brick under one broken leg, or imagining him huddled around the fire with her and her sisters reading books aloud when the heat was running low.
In the end, it was nothing more than a fairy tale.
It had been a lovely fantasy to indulge in for a short while, but it was over.
She had to forget about Alex, about the guarded prince she’d barely gotten a chance to know.
For all the trappings of luxury he possessed that she didn’t, the infinite wealth and the power of the crown, his life seemed incredibly bleak.
So why did her heart ache every time she tried to accept that she would never see him again? Why couldn’t she make herself go in and delete his contact information from her phone?
Scrolling through her media feeds, she found a broadcast about to go live from the palace. The royal seal of the Visconti family, a silver crown dripping with blood, shimmered away in a ghost of fog, revealing Prince Alexander and Lara Cavalieri standing together behind a podium.
Lara was stunning. Her long mahogany brown hair flowed over her shoulders in soft waves. The silk blouse she’d chosen looked stylish and put together when paired with tiny pearl earrings. She was the image of a future princess standing beside her prince.
Alex looked… awful. Was he sweating under the bright lights? Something was definitely wrong. Had those dark circles been under his eyes last night?
Clearing his throat, Alex began to speak.
“Lara and I are so excited to announce a new foundation that our two families have decided to form together. Both of us feel strongly that access to healthcare is a fundamental human right and one we want to ensure everyone in the sector has access to, especially our most vulnerable citizens.”
He blinked, hesitating. Dani slowed her steps as she squinted down at the screen. They were making the announcement live. This pause clearly wasn’t planned, if the twitch by Lara’s left eye was any indication.
Lara smiled, quickly jumping in. “Alex and I couldn’t be more thrilled to be supporting a foundation that will provide medication to vulnerable children in our sector.
Our partnership between the royal palace and Cavalieri Pharmaceuticals will help identify families that need assistance and make sure they get the medications they need.
We identified our first family, and wanted to ensure they got not only medication, but food and heating oil as the upcoming Christmas holidays approach. ”
Dani’s heartbeat raced. It was a ridiculous bit of theatre, designed to repair the damage caused by the pictures that had appeared in the tabloids, but if there was any chance that they might get the insulin Ava needed—
Her phone pinged again, signaling that a bank transfer had come through. When she clicked to review it, she saw the amount was twice what she’d been promised.
Shoving her phone in her pocket, she hurried down the road towards home, fighting the fresh tears that were threatening to form.
This was Alex’s way of telling her goodbye. She understood that. But he wasn’t making it any easier, saying they could never see each other again, while finding ways to quietly take care of her.
Somewhere off in the distance, a deep boom sounded, the force of it enough to rattle her chest even from miles away. Dani looked off to the east, where a dark plume of smoke was rising. She quickened her steps.
Her phone vibrated again.
Evan: Where are you?
Dani: Half a mile from the first checkpoint, maybe a little more?
Evan: Hurry.
Dropping her phone into her satchel, Dani began to run.
The road leading out to the shipping facility was mostly deserted but for a few delivery vans, all of which refused to stop when she begged for a lift into the city.
She could hardly blame the drivers. They were monitored remotely by camera and picking up hitchhikers was a fireable offense.
It turned out it was better no one had picked her up.
As soon as she neared the city outskirts, she saw the road had been barricaded off.
A mob wearing masks had forced several of the trucks to stop.
As Dani watched, the drivers were pulled from their trucks at gunpoint.
Another team was busy cutting the locks off the back compartments with bolt cutters.
“Get this van to the border crossing,” a male insurgent ordered. “We won’t have long before they redeploy.”
Dani hesitated, not wanting to approach the mob, but knowing there was no other way back into the city. Ava was alone, and would no doubt be scared. If looters came to the apartment—
No, she couldn’t think like that. Ava knew to keep the door bolted until she or Evan got home. This was hardly the first time the city had descended into rioting.
Keeping her head down, Dani approached the mob. When she got within twenty feet, she raised her hands to show she was unarmed.
“That’s close enough,” one woman barked. “Didn’t you get the order to shelter in place?”
“It must not have come through. I was just finishing my shift. There’s a dead space where we don’t get any signal. They sent me home with no pay because I was sick and was making too many errors.”
“Of course they did.” The woman snorted. “Work us to the bone for pennies, then take every last one of those pennies so they can live in their gilded palaces, drinking fae wine every night.” She squinted into Dani’s face. “Why do you look familiar?”
Dani kept her eyes cast downward. “I just need to get home to my sister. Please, she’s only ten and she’s sick.”
“She’s the prince’s sanguine,” a man called from somewhere back in the crowd. “The one Alexander Visconti bought. Her face has been all over the media feeds.” His eyes traveled all over her body. “Wonder how much he’d pay to get his whore back?”
Dani felt ice flood her veins.
Within vampire society, blood thralls were sometimes given privileges those in the regular human castes were not.
Access to better housing. Extra food rations.
All of this was in addition to the payments that came from selling blood, which were not inconsiderable.
This led to most of them being ostracized the moment they returned home.