He could say literally anything and I’d lap it up.
Yeah, this is definitely worse than feeling sick.
I licked my lips, realizing he was waiting on an answer.
And the best I could manage was a shaky nod.
Yes, the bow was foryou.
Our benefit.
Right. There was more than one.Vampire pets, Adeline had said. Three in this pack.
Would they all feel this way?
Would they all makemefeel this way?
“This omega cunt is taken,” Torvald snarled, shattering the moment as he pushed off the wall and rounded on the vampire. Up to his full height, he blocked me from his rival, the pair squaring off like hissing alley cats. “Finders keepers, you vampirefuck—”
And then he was gone, ripped away from me and hurled into the opposite wall. Blink and you miss it, his drunk alpha body left cracks in the stone he hit so hard, and then two blinks later, Ambrose had him by the throat. Holding him high in the air, a full arm’s length up, his untied dress shoes dangled over the cobblestone, and the vampire just watched impassively as Torvald sputtered and pounded at his arm.
I pressed back against the wall, fear and desire and guilt blending into something I didn’t recognize.
So… the legends were true.
Vampires movedfast.
And there were so many other stories about their abilities—
“Now, now, finders keepers isn’t the code in these walls.” Unblinking, Ambrose tipped his head to the left, then the right, looking more primal by the second as he surveyed his prey. “We mustn’t touch what isn’t ours, Torvald. Surely you’ve learned that by now?”
He then looked pointedly down, and both Torvald and I followed his gaze to—
I clapped a hand over my mouth to muffle the startled squeak.
Ambrose had a knife to Torvald’s exposed dick, that giant erection deflating by the second.
“If you call any of these lovely omegascuntsin my presence again,” he mused, sounding perfectly polite and conversational as the blade’s tip nudged Torvald’s shaft, “you’ll leave Mistletoe a castrated alpha.”
Ambrose cocked an eyebrow, waiting, while Torvald sputtered and wheezed, his porcelain flesh getting redder by the second, his feet kicking at nothing—until finally, the smallest of nods earned his freedom. The vampire dropped him like he was dumping trash in the bin, and we both watched the alpha’s knees buckle and slam into the stone below. Gasping, my attacker staggered to his feet, then stormed off down the hall into the shadows, frantically shoving his limp dick back in his pants. A few long beats later, the stairwell door creaked open and slammed shut, thebangmaking me flinch.
And that slight movement caught the monster’s eye. Heart in my throat, I stayed perfectly still as Ambrose looked me over, slowly folding his knife and pocketing it in his jacket. He then offered his hand, big and smooth and pale.
“Hollis, is it?”
I blinked back at him. No one used my actual name, not even my parents. Named after some great-grandmother six times removed on my omega mother’s side, it had always felt too mature for me. Too grown-up.
When he said it, it sounded elegant.
“Holly,” I clarified softly. Once again, all that piss and vinegar in my soul dried up in front of an alpha, but this was… different. It wasn’t outright terror making me shrink. This was something more. Something deeper.Yes, he was a monster, a bloodthirsty creature of the night—the first I’d ever met. But he made me feel like a real omega, small and delicate and protected, and for the first time in my entire life, neither I nor my inner self bristled at that.
Instead, I found myself slipping my hand into his, inhaling sharply at the ice of his touch.
“That’s it, little one,” he rumbled, the alpha grit in his words coming with their own gravitational pull. “We’ve got a private room just down the way.”
His fingers folded over mine like a steel cage—a steel trap, more like, one I couldn’t slip no matter how hard I tried.
But I didn’t try. I let him pull me closer and tuck my hair behind my ears, one strong hand still grasping mine, the other righting my chemise and fixing the straps. He had a pleasantness to him that threw me, because the rest of him was all predator, from the way he moved to the burn his gaze left each time it roved my body.