Page 16

And then I was alone again, with no one but my bird to keep my company.

Maybe hating myself was the easy way out.

Vesper

Why? Why the fuck did it have to beherI had to bunk with?

I would’ve taken anyone. The stupid, beefy football team reject who laughed too loudly at jokes. The man with the psychopathic tendencies who stood at the back of the room, his eyes intently glaring at whoever even brushed past him.

Anyone.

Anyone who wouldn’t give a fuck about what I needed to do here. Someone too hung up on the excitement of working for the family that they wouldn’t even look twice at me.

And then they gave me a room withher.

My hands paused as I spread out the wrinkles on the thin sheets the family assigned me, trying desperately not to give in to the urge to turn and look at her. She had been silent since the assignment, not giving any indication of how she felt about bunking with me.

That’s what I hated about her type the most. You could never tell what they were truly thinking. Not unless they wanted you to. Everything else was just a carefully curated mask held in place with barbed wire instead of strings.

It wasn’t long until I gave into the urge to look. The tingling in the back of my head told me she might have been looking at me, but when I did finally turn, she was too busy looking at her own bed.

The room itself was small, with only enough space for two twin beds, each of us having a dresser and a nightstand. The bathroom was at the foot of my bed, but the inside was lackluster. The stone was water damaged, and there was moss growing in the corners of it. No doubt there was also a fair share of mold hidden in the cracked floors.

The family was well off—this was a fact based on how they showed off numerous times, even in the short span that I had been here. The floors on the upper stories were furnished with thick, expensive, and most likely imported rugs. Each surface shined, as if it had been polished for hours by some poor maid. And the vampires themselves were decked out in jewels the size of my fist. The family wanted to show the rest of the world what they did with all of the money they accumulated throughout the years. Even the floors smelled of roses.

Even the windows seemed to be made out of crystal and sent shimmering rainbow refractions across every surface.

But it all changed as soon as you reached the guards’ quarters. The shimmering windows were barred. If there were rugs, they were worn and frayed. Stone covered the floors, walls, and ceilings, many of which were cracked, and chunks had fallen out. Even walking down the hallway to this room, I had almost gotten hit with one of those stray chunks as it fell from the ceiling.

It became clear what the family truly cared about, and it wasn’t us.

The family cared about image.

And then, when you got down to the basement where the guards spent their time, everything looked as if it hadn’t been updated in the last century.

As if the conditions weren’t bad enough, the universe decided to play one last trick on me and assign her and me to the same room.

The person in question was still hunched over the bed, her sheets were already spread out across the small mattress, and she started to meticulously empty her backpack.

The bright red hair was hard to miss. She wore the same clothes that had been assigned to me, but she decided to embellish them with two leather weapon straps that crisscrossed on her back.

The weapons were missing, but they seemed to hold daggers.

As if sensing my stare, she turned slowly, her bright green eyes meeting mine. A small, feral-like smile spread across her lips.

It was one I’d seen many times over when we were training at the prince’s compound, and the exact reason why I didn’t want to get near her. It was the only slip of her mask I had ever seen.

She straightened up and turned before closing the space between us. She got way too close for me to think that her actions were anything but threatening.

And she is taller than me.

She looked down at me, her smile widening. I took note of her shaggy haircut, half up, half down, and showing her pierced ears, both of which had daggers in the holes. Her skin was littered with freckles, some seemingly arranged in a pattern I couldn’t recognize.

But what was dangerous about her were her eyes. They were sharp. They saw everything. Maybe even the thing I wanted to hide.

“I don’t think we had a chance to introduce ourselves,” she said, her eyes searching my face and then slowly narrowing in on part of my neck. The exact part where my tattoo was currently being hidden by magic.

A chill ran through me, and I took an involuntary step back.