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Chapter 1

Ruby

Opportunity does not always come knocking.

Sometimes, it comes striding in with expensive boots and hypnotic blue eyes that follow you as you try to serve drinks in a strip club filled with all kinds of shifty characters. I felt his eyes on me and tried to ignore him. When I finally decided to meet his glance, I felt a shiver of shock running down my spine.

A vampire in the club!

How had he managed to get into this place without being torn limb from limb?

The Diablos was a well-known shifter club and MC meeting place, run by the extremely dangerous Tomás and his pack of wolves. This was shifter territory and vampires knew to keep away. The vampire might have been smarter but this place was crowded and even if only half of the clients jumped him, he wouldn’t make it out alive. There had been talk of a war coming between the shifters and the vampires and tensions between them were higher than ever.

The vampire kept to the back of the room, his head turned down.

Yet, I could feel him pulling me towards him. I forced myself to do my job, fetching drinks, giving out change, wiping spills from the floor.

There was a strange energy in the club that night.

Something was off, wrong.

The customers were edgy and aggressive, Tomás and his crew kept to one end of the club, staring out at the dancing girls without even seeing them. I could see the tension in his body language, the throbbing vein in his neck, the rigid posture. When he was like this, it was better to steer clear of him. One wrong word could set him off and I had seen him backhand one of the other waitresses once. She had fallen against a table, knocked her head and hadn’t been seen at the club since.

I could see that it was going to be one of those nights where I just prayed to make it through the shift. Hopefully, the vampire would have left by then, and most of the customers would settle down.

No such luck, of course.

Half-way through the evening, some guy grabbed me around the waist, pulling me close.

“Don’t you look good?” he leered at me.

“Good enough to eat, I bet.” I tried to push him away, nicely, first. This is what we’d been told to do.

“How about I take a little nibble?” he came closer, his beer breath in my face as he grabbed my ass and tried to kiss me.

“Get off!” I said firmly, and when he did not respond, I elbowed him in the solar plexus with my elbow. I knew exactly where to direct all my energy and he went down like a ton of bricks. Unfortunately, he took my shirt with him. He had grabbed hold of it and as he fell, it tore off my body. I wasn’t wearing a bra, as per the rules, and cheers went round the club as I stood, suddenly topless.

My instinct was to immediately cover myself, but I knew how pointless this was. All around me were naked women, dancing on the stage. I couldn’t show any weakness, I had to pretend this was nothing. The bouncers came to keep the men from jumping me right there and I leaned down, grabbed my top from the drunken fool’s hands and put it back on, tying the ends together in an attempt to fix the tear. Guys were cheering all around me and I had to get out of the throng before someone else grabbed me. I ducked away to the side, checking that my breasts were firmly covered again.

“That was nicely done,” I heard someone say. “I would say you could be up on the stage among the dancers, with assets like those but they’re not for public consumption, right?”

Even before I looked up, I knew it was the vampire.

It was his voice.

So sexy and seductive, cultured in a way that set him apart from the others in the club, most of whom could not speak in complete sentences.

“What are you doing here?” I hissed at him, under my breath.

I didn’t want to risk anyone overhearing us talk. If I was caught even just talking to a vampire, it would mean certain death.

“My name is Luc D’Essay. I am a general in King Vlas’s army.”

The Vampire King. This was not just any vampire, I realized. This guy was someone important.

“I need your help,” Luc said, taking my elbow and steering me to a quiet corner of the club.

“My help?” I thought he was insane. I was a lowly server in a strip club, right at the bottom of the hierarchy here.