by Juliet Lyons
I laughed aloud, because that was what I always did when Jonjo was around. He sprinted back to me, wrapping his arms around my waist and swinging me around like we were dancing the waltz.
I knew then I’d never love anyone else.
Feeling a tear plop onto my cheek, I jolt back to the present. Peter is staring at me, his gray eyes round with sympathy. I swipe at my face. “Jonjo was saving up for us to get married,” I explain, trying to stay in the present—the warmth of the café, the soothing twinkle of lights. Anything not to go back to that dreaded day the world stopped turning. “He was working day and night at the docks on the Thames, unloading cargo from shipments coming in from overseas. One morning, his mother knocked at my door. There was an accident. A rope had snapped, and a heavy load had fallen onto some men waiting to bring it ashore.”
A sharp, icy pain stabs at my chest. They say time heals all wounds, but I’ve had more than enough time to know that’s bullshit. Real pain is never forgotten. Real pain closes a person up to the world like a suit of armor. “He died instantly.”
Before Peter can respond, the waitress appears with our breakfasts, placing two plates in front of us. Although it’s undoubtedly a feast of magnificent proportions, it suddenly holds all the appeal of a bowlful of lard.
Peter’s hand lands on mine, rubbing a calloused thumb in circles on my skin. I wait to feel something—a bolt of electricity, a throb of lust—but it only feels warm, comforting. “Did the family receive compensation?”
I shake my head and smile sadly. “Maybe if he’d been officially employed, but he was a casual laborer. Workers like Jonjo had few rights back then. His family was left even poorer without his wage coming in.”
“So that was that,” Peter says. “You never married?”
How I wish the answer could be no.
I slip my hand out of Peters to toy with my fork. “I was married a short time after. I had no choice.”
“Who to?”
Why did I ever start this conversation?
“Leonard Wallis.” The name sticks in my throat. Even now, I can still smell him coming in through the door in the evening. I’ve worked hard over the years to forget his face, but I’ll never forget his scent—to this day, the whiff of melted iron turns my stomach. “He was a blacksmith who lived nearby.”
I remember my father saying, if he was kind to horses, he’d surely make a kind husband. Someone should have told him horses and women are two very different species.
“Why did you have no choice?” Peter asks, continuing the interrogation.
If he wasn’t so nice, I’d be gone by now. I never talk about this. Ever.
“My family said I had to leave home,” I explain. “They were waiting for me to marry Jonjo and move out. When he died, they said I still had to go.”
Peter opens his mouth to express his disgust, but I cut him off. “They had too many mouths to feed as it was. When Jonjo passed away, Wallis made me an offer—apparently, he’d always been keen on me. He went to speak with my father the day of Jonjo’s funeral, and I came home to find them both sitting in the parlor. My father made it clear from the start—marriage to Wallis or the workhouse.”
Lord, how I’ve regretted not choosing the workhouse.
“I was naive. He was a lot older than me. I assumed he wanted someone to keep the house clean while he was at work. I was utterly broken, a hundred times worse than when Liza died, and I wasn’t thinking clearly. All I could think was that entering the workhouse was as good as signing your own death warrant. I was desperate.”
“Did he treat you well?” Peter asks in a hopeful tone.
“Sometimes,” I lie. I force a smile, as if I’m a news anchor returning to a lighthearted story after announcing mass genocide. “So, that’s the story of the shop on Beechwood Street. That’s why I stopped like I did outside. It was on that step I first met Jonjo. That’s the reason why I’ve pretty much always lived in East London.”
I exhale and sit up straight in the seat, picking up my knife and fork. “Now you know everything about me.”
Which is the second lie I’ve told today. But by now I’ve realized he can never—will never—know the rest.
Peter gazes at me, his brows knitted. “You’re a remarkable person, Cat,” he says.
I brush off the compliment with a wave of my fork. “Trust me, I’m not.”
For the next quarter of an hour, we eat our breakfasts in companionable silence.
Against the odds, I manage to shovel down just over half the food on my plate. I already ditched the cappuccino back at Starbucks, so there’s no way I can keep turning my nose up at his offerings. When the waitress has taken our plates and I’ve paid—much to Peter’s protest—we button ourselves back into our coats and walk across the common.
The temperature has dropped since we first set out, the few joggers that sail past shooting puffs of breath into the morning air. The grass sparkles with dew, and a whiff of roasted horse chestnuts lingers on the chilly breeze. Halfway across, near a tiny copse of trees, Peter sinks down onto a park bench. I sit beside him, still dazed after our discussion, as if I’m caught with one foot in the past and one in the present.
I’m not totally in the zone when he reaches up to brush a wayward curl from my forehead.
Oh Christ, he’s going to kiss me.
It happens so fast that there’s not a split second of time to consider whether I want him to or not, and ducking is just bad etiquette.
I freeze as his lips, warm and dry, land on mine. To my infinite horror, an image of Ronin appears behind my closed eyelids. I emit a low growl of frustration from the back of my throat, and Peter, mistaking the noise for lust, pushes my lips open with his. He cups my cheeks with cold fingers and probes my mouth with his tongue.
It’s a bad kiss—so terrible I could cry. In fact, as I politely extract his tongue from my mouth, I very nearly do.
“I’m sorry,” he says breathlessly. “But I’ve wanted to do that ever since you opened the door to me three days ago.”
Words fail me. I nod instead.
Why? Why must evil, ancient demon assholes hold the monopoly on good kisses around these parts? Life is so unfair.
“You don’t have to apologize,” I say, staring at my shoes—today, black suede Manolo Blahniks. “I liked it.”
Yes, I’m a world-class liar as well as a dirty demon lover.
His eyes light up like candles in church on a Sunday.
“But I’d prefer to take things slowly.”
He grins. “That’s fine. Maybe we could go out for dinner again? A movie perhaps?”
I smile. “Yes, I’d like that.”
Just then, I feel my phone vibrating in my coat pocket. I take it out and look at the screen. There, as if summoned, is the number of Ronin’s club flashing before my eyes.
I am so screwed.
Chapter 8
Ronin
I’ve been at the club a few minutes when Harper puts in his first appearance of the day. He’s in casual clothes—tight-fitting jeans with a rumpled, blue shirt. From the scent of a woman’s perfume all over him, it’s obvious he hasn’t been home yet.
I cock a brow. “Good night, I take it?”
He grins, crossing the room to my desk and depositing a hefty file next to my laptop. “The usual.”
“Sex, drugs, and rock ’n’ roll?”
“Something like that.” He motions to the file. “These are the company details you asked for regarding that firm, Baverstock and Marshall. Charlie said to tell you he left a note inside with possible points of interest.”
I drag the file toward me across the desk. “I’ll look it over.”
“Charlie also said there was a message on the machine last night from Cat Adair.”
I flinch, managing to keep myself from reaching out and grabbing Har
per by the collar of his unlaundered shirt.
“What did it say?” I ask, trying to sound casual. If I had a beating heart, it would be pounding in my ears.
“It said she’s one of Anastasia’s. There’s a name I haven’t heard in a few years.”
Of course. Why didn’t I see it sooner?
Harper trails from the room, letting the door close softly behind him.
A few years back, not long after vampires were revealed to the world, an ancient named Anastasia did the unthinkable.
She died—destroyed by an old witch’s curse locked in an amulet.
Before her, no ancient had ever come close to death. Take me, for example. I could jump off the world’s tallest building or stroll into a shower of machine-gun bullets and walk away without so much as a scratch. Even our old friend decapitation, though messy, is ineffective. Unlike vampires, we are not and never have been completely human—a factor that’s been key to our survival all these centuries and a stark reminder of a time when angels and demons ruled the earth.
But Anastasia’s destruction wasn’t the only thing that sent shock waves through the vampire community. The moment she ceased to exist, all her subjugates, the humans she turned over the years, lost their immortality. The venom running through their veins—the very poison that had turned them into vampires all those years ago—died the second that she did, restoring their humanity. An ex-employee of mine, Logan, was one of those affected. He went on to live a completely normal human life. Last I heard, he and his wife, Silver, were living in Kent with their two children.
If Anastasia turned Catherine, she should by rights be human again. But she isn’t.
Because of me.
My trousers tighten the second I remember that night we spent together all those years ago. It happened shortly before Anastasia met her unexpected demise, before the realization that the vampiric life could be reversed ever came to light. I’d just found out that a government agency was using her website, V-Date, to wheedle information from its clients about the vampire world. I showed up at her apartment, guns blazing, to confront her. She denied everything, of course.
Before then, I’d only met Catherine a few times. I’d always found her attractive, but I was far too consumed by the goings-on at my club to pay her much attention.
Until that night.
She was wildly angry at me for poking around in her business, her brilliant, brown-green eyes flashing with rage.
I remember being aghast. Her angry at me, London’s overlord, for doing his job. She should have been groveling, not glaring at me as if I were something she’d found stuck to the bottom of one of her designer heels. There was a moment in her apartment, as we both stood snarling with rage, when I realized I would either kill her or kiss her.
Unsurprisingly, I ended up kissing her.
The astonishing thing was that she kissed me back—fiercely. We fell into bed, tearing at each other’s clothes, her hand already inside my pants, my mouth fastened around one of her rock-hard nipples. We had great sex. The best I’d had in years—wild, hot, animalistic.
I bit her, but unlike the bites with human women, I lost control, allowing my venom to enter her bloodstream. I was so deeply immersed in the moment that I didn’t for one second pause to consider what I was doing.
I sigh, picking at the edge of the brown folder Harper brought me. When an ancient bites or exchanges blood with another vampire, the vampire is no longer tied to the one who originally turned them. They become chattel of the second ancient. New blood or venom is always stronger than what’s running through their veins. I’ve used this trick a couple of times over the centuries, though it’s generally frowned upon and often seen as a betrayal of the ancient who turned them.
In old times, a vampire was answerable to his ancient, a servant. But these days, with freedom of speech and amnesty and all the rest, the old laws are far more relaxed. In cities like London, they’re almost nonexistent. I’ve never once tried to exert my will over Catherine. What would be the point?
I frown, remembering what Catherine said back at her apartment about me failing to see the bigger picture. Is her anger over the bite—and subsequently losing a second chance at humanity—the driving force behind her grudge? Or is there another reason, something obvious that I’m missing?
I’m about to flip open the Baverstock & Marshall file in front of me when it hits me. Anastasia, a truly vile sociopath, only ever turned the depraved. It was her agenda for as long as I knew her. Murderers, rapists, child killers—anything less just wasn’t worth her time.
What did Catherine do?
Catherine is feisty, a tiny bit deranged, but she’s no killer. She’s far too sanctimonious for that. Maybe, as was the case with my old friend Logan, Anastasia merely mistook her for a psychopath all those years ago.
Could her old life be the “bigger picture” she was referring to? But if it is, why would she blame me for a past I played no part in?
With a deep sigh, I open the file and hold up Charlie’s note, his bad handwriting scrawled almost illegibly across the page. I squint, holding it up to the spotlight in the ceiling before reading:
The company Baverstock & Marshall was founded by Charles Baverstock and Geoffrey Marshall in the early nineteen seventies. They were previously chartered accountants. The company was small but grew considerably, opening offices throughout South East England and later one on Wall Street, New York. The founders retired in the mid-1990s. During the Great Recession of 2008, the company almost sank into administration, but a private investor bought them out, keeping the company name. The name of the private investor was George Whinny, one of Britain’s top ten richest men.
I drop the page onto the desk and flick through the notes he’s printed out. Mostly stock exchange records and press clippings. Nothing that screams vampire killers. How disappointing. Then again, if the company is as large as it appears to be, maybe it’s merely a coincidence that both the dead vampires worked there.
I open a drawer in the desk and shove the file into it. Esme hasn’t been in touch since our phone call, so at least I don’t have her breathing down my neck. But still, if I don’t make progress soon, I’ll have to call Scotland Yard again, remind them of the time I helped them save a woman from a serial killer’s clutches. Funny how they’re only ever keen to form alliances when it’s a human life at stake.
My thoughts wander back to Catherine. I itch to call her, go over to her flat, but what would be the point? She’s made up her mind. I stand and head out into the bar, hoping for a distraction. The overhead lights are on, and without the darkness and strobe lighting and hordes of revelers, it’s a bit like seeing a high-class hooker in broad daylight. The room is too stark, too real.
Strange how I’ve never seen it that way before.
The only person around is Melda, the cleaning lady. She sits in a booth, polishing the silver candle holders for our next speed-dating night.
“Good day, Melda,” I call out, ducking behind the bar to fix myself a scotch.
She narrows her eyes without looking up from her yellow rag. “Good day, Mr. McDermott.” The light glints on a massive gold crucifix at her withered throat.
Often, Harper asks me why I employ a surly, religious woman like Melda to do our cleaning when she so clearly disapproves of our vampire culture. The official answer is she’s the best cleaner we’ve ever had. In reality, it’s because her presence keeps me in check. So long as Melda is here, the place can’t be all bad. I can’t be all bad.
“Did your daughter-in-law have her baby yet?” I ask, grabbing a bottle of Grouse and unscrewing the lid.
“Next week, she is due,” Melda replies, frowning.
“Maybe if it’s a girl, they’ll name her after you,” I suggest, taking a crystal tumbler from the shelf next to the beer taps.
She purses her lips. “Perhaps.”
I glug an inch of liquid into the glass and put the bottle back beneath the bar. “I do so enjoy our conversations, Melda.”
Melda makes a little humph noise at the back of her throat but doesn’t reply.
Before I can goad her further, the door at the top of the spiral staircase opens and Harper appears. Behind him are three scantily clad women.
Melda glares at me, raising her eyebrows before picking up the candlesticks. “I’ll work in the back room,” she mutters, shuffling off across the empty dance floor.
A cold dread settles in the pit of my stomach as Harper leads the three women down the stairs. Could these be the Brazilians I accidentally requested?
“Ronin,” Harper says cheerfully. “There you are.”
Where else would I be? I think, glowering at him. As I circle the bar, drink in hand, ready to greet the women, I nurture a vague hope they’re tonight’s entertainment. A girl group, burlesque dancers—anything is preferable to having to wriggle out of another sexual encounter.
Harper’s dark eyes are shining with glee, a wry smile tugging the corners of his lips. He is an image of self-satisfaction. “Ronin, meet Randy, Dallas, and Electra. They’re from Brazil.”
“Good day to you, ladies,” I say, my jaw clenched tight.
I’ve forgotten their names already.
With a half-baked curiosity, I survey each of them, wondering if today will be the day a pair of bee-stung lips and pert cleavage reawakens my old urges. But as I slide my gaze across three pairs of perfectly rounded, fake breasts, the beast in my pants is as limp as it was just a few seconds ago, when I was teasing Melda.
The women, however, do not share my apathy. One of them boldly steps toward me, an artfully manicured hand toying with the collar of my shirt.
“Where do you want us?” she purrs. Her eyes are like mercury—silvery gray and deadly.
