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It’d be bad for business to take no for an answer.

Luckily for us, I was very persuasive when I wanted to be.

“You’ll get the next one,” he said half-heartedly, patting my elbow. “Night, Dana.”

“Later, Nick. Get home safe.”

He turned, disappearing up the steps with his voice floating back to meet me where I stood at the door. “But, hey! Dana! Never say never; eternity is an awfully long time to beat yourself up.”

I didn’t bother to reply, letting go of the bar so the heavy metal slammed between us and heading back through the inverted-cross door toward the private rooms.

My love life—or recent lack thereof, really—was no business of his.

Well, unless you counted my coven. But that was… different. Settled. I liked to have a side piece or two to keep me busy.

To keep lifeinteresting.

Though, even I had to admit, it seemed like those days were behind me.

Out of habit, my eyes flicked from booth to booth as I took the long, semicircle hallway toward the main club. We’d never had after-hours stragglers before, but until I’d walked the entire floor, I wouldn’t be able to relax enough to head to my office to tackle the veritable mountain of paperwork awaiting me.

It never occurred to me just how much of the mundane day-to-day shit Cherie had been doing. She’d always made it look so easy—which wasn’t even in the stratosphere of words I’d use to describe what it was like to run an operation like O.

There was purchasing, staffing, coming up with the acts, dealing with the clients and the girls... A never-ending checklist of things to complete that were constantly being rearranged by whatever fire was burning the hottest at the moment.

Exhausting.

My nose turned at the sticky, overly sweet smell of perfume lingering in the air, undercut by the salty alkaline tang of spilled blood. Luckily for me, the cleaning crew would be in soon with their arsenal of steam cleaners and industrial-strength disinfectants to clear the club, getting it ready for another night of mayhem when we reopened tomorrow night.

Nick’s words weighed on me like a physical thing. I know he didn’t mean to, but pointing out my obvious interest in Vi… It ate at me as I moved through the familiar task of pulling back curtains, stacking sticky cups, and rearranging discarded throw pillows—anything I could do to make things a little easier for the barbacks flitting between the alcoves collecting empties.

It’d been a long time since I’d felt attraction for someone. Well before Cherie had gotten sick. My wife had been as smart as she’d been unlucky, carefully concealing her illness until it’d progressed to the point that she had no choice but to tell us.

Not that there was much that could be done for a vampire once they’d become bloodbound.

Believe me, we fucking tried.

But, there were four surefire ways to kill a night child.

A stake through the heart.

Decapitation.

Burning.

Andstarvation.

Sunlight was really less of a concern than movies and books made it out to be—I could see why the idea thatblood-sucking monstersexploding into a cloud of dust if they stepped outside during the day was pretty attractive to terrified, uneducated people, but it was utter fiction.

Humans never were good at being kind about things they didn’t understand.

Sure, the sun was our natural enemy, but we wouldn’t immediately drop dead with a little exposure… Just a wicked sunburn and a headache to match.

Thank god for vampricine, a specially made glass that’d been developed a few hundred years ago that protected us from the sun’s harmful rays. Shaders, its digital version, is what made the Lower City a safe haven for my kind.

The chances that a human would be fast enough to stake you, smart enough to trap you in a fire, or strong enough to decapitate you were small. And even smaller was the threat of starvation given how easily accessible our preferred food source had made themselves.

In the old days, we had to hunt or make agreements with willing humans to accept our venom—a natural aphrodisiac-like drug—in exchange for enough of their blood to sustain ourselves. But now? Synthetic blood products were all the rage. You could get through your entire immortal existence without ever tasting the real thing.