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It’s part of what made O a premium experience. We offered a safe place to play and feed with willing participants. For a cost, of course.

The last few centuries, being a vampire hadn’t been so bad. Never feeling cold or getting sick, being able to experience all life had to offer without the drag of age wearing you down… until the Blight.

The disease had exploded into the population, thinning our numbers and turning covens against each other as their sires and initiates became bloodbound en masse. A few hundred years ago, less than one percent of the vampiric population would develop the illness, making it impossible for the affected night child to synthesize blood. The human equivalent would be as if the body stopped processing the nutrients in food—slow, agonising starvation and eventual organ shut down until your miserable death.

It was painful.

It was incurable.

And it took my wife from me only six months ago.

A fact that’d painted my entire life in a wash of grey since she admitted, through gritted teeth, what was happening.

Dropping a girl like Vi—temptation down to the smell of the vanilla and honeysuckle blood in her veins—into the middle of my club felt like fate laughing in my face. Like Cherie herself was telling me it was time to get on with it. Enjoy life again.

I could practically hear my sire’s laugh, her lilting French accent teasing as she bent to whisper in my ear.

You’re welcome, Dana.

But I didn’t feelgrateful. I feltcheated.

I finished my sweep of the private rooms and headed to the main bar, the light pop music playing from Ren’s phone speaker familiar as I picked through the room, putting a couple of missed chairs up onto tables.

Out of the corner of my eye, I caught Ren laughing at something Vi said, making my head turn. The chair paused midair, held aloft as I took in the scene.

Ren and Vi were backed against the shelves of glittering bottles, the vampire’s hands framing either side of the human as she ran her nose along her neck.

I couldn’t quite make out what Ren whispered in her ear, but judging by Vi’s sharp intake of breath and parted lips, it wasn’t a stretch to assume that workplace decorum had long since left them.

Vi’s hips moved, grinding against Ren’s knee between her thighs with a breathy moan that made the hairs on my arms stand up with electricity. Every crumb of my attention was fixated on the girl, her eyes swinging from Ren to find mine.

I froze like a deer in headlights, unsure if I should leave them to their moment. But any question I could’ve asked died on my tongue as Vi smiled, her head tilting to the side to bare her creamy pale throat to Ren.

“Bite me,” she whispered, voice soft and needy, thin with the whispered gasp that escaped her as Ren tightened her hold. She pressed her thigh against Vi’s centre more firmly, earning a delicious noise of pleasure that I wanted to replay for hours. “And then share me with Dana.”

“Of course, Pet…” my covenmate hummed, the tightly coiled muscles of her back shifting under her button-down as her lips pressed into the supple flesh. “But first, it’s only fair we show Dana how prettily you fall apart for me, isn’t it?”

“Dana?” Vi called, and the image fractured and pixelated, warped like an old television screen.

I blinked hard, rubbing my eyes.

What the fuck was that?

“Earth to Dana,” teased Vi, leaning over the counter to get a good look at me with her head tilted adorably to the side. Surely it was a coincidence that that move gave me a clear look down the front of her dress… right? “You okay, boss?”

“Er—” I cleared my throat, glancing around the room and finding it different than it’d been a moment before. The chairs already flipped onto tables, stools on the bar, and the rest of the room already broken down for the night, with the curtains of the stage drawn heavily in a swath of decadent maroon velvet.

God, Dana. You’ve been working too much. Get a grip.

But, something stuck out to me. And it wasn’t just the hint of Vi’s lacy black bra.

“What do you mean byboss?” I asked, trying to ignore the way I could practically taste the hallucination I’d just had in the air, a whisper of Vi’s desire coating the back of my tongue like perfume.

She sighed dramatically, nudging Ren with her hip and catching the vampire off guard, her eyes lingering on the side of Vi’s face appreciatively.

“I mean…” Vi said slowly, milking the way my covenmate’s body stilled with attention. “I guess I didn’t totallyhateworking the bar tonight…”

“Helps that your coworker is so good-looking, right?” Ren interrupted hopefully with a crooked smirk.