Page 31 of Chain Me

He raised an eyebrow as he reached for the pen. “François?”

“I hired him a few weeks ago. He’s very…r-reliable,” I stammered. Honestly, it was the principle of the matter.

François, though slightly hated, was still someone I’d hired on my own. Dublin could lock me away in a tower if he wanted, just as long as he let me keep what little of my life I’d managed to rebuild.

“Fine.” He jotted down a line on a fresh page in the contract book. “What else?”

“And…” I swallowed hard, flexing my fingers against the mattress. “You apologize for what you said about me.”

He raised an eyebrow. “If that is what you wish…”

“And,” I added. “I want you to be honest with me. If I ask you something, anything, you tell me the truth. No secrets. No games. No lies.”

“Agreed.” With a stroke of his pen, he added another line. As he finished, his eyes cut to mine. “But I would like to second that request. You keep nothing from me. Nothing.”

He held the pen out and shoved the book across the table.

I sighed, biting any more questions back. We were on a dangerous precipice, mere inches from falling off. Only God knew what waited down below, and I wasn’t that inclined to find out for myself.

With a single stroke, I signed my name and watched him do the same.

And the sight alone shouldn’t have imparted the most stability I’d felt since…

Well, since he’d left.

“So, what now?”

“Now?” He tucked the contract book into his pocket and stood. “You uphold your end—you come with me, no dramatics.”

“And,” I added with a sigh, “I show you where your contract is?”

He nodded. “Where is it?”

“Where else?” I countered. It was obvious in a sense—what imposing shelter would make for the perfect hiding place for a vampire’s soul? “Home.”

On the Brink

Gray Manor rose upon the hill like the disapproving relative most people complained about. The one bastion of my life that I could never seem to escape.

My only comfort was that Dublin didn’t seem particularly fond of it, either. Stone-faced, he guided his car onto the property, following what little commands I gave.Follow the main path. Then go beyond the house, beyond the gardens, farther…

“Here,” I croaked once we’d reached the very end of the property.

Looming before us stood what my mother had lovingly referred to as the Crowning Jewel of both heritage and home. Our family crypt. Even now, the structure held the same morbid fascination for me that it had during my childhood.

Made entirely of stone and almost simple in appearance, the structure contained Gray bodies spanning at least three centuries, back from the time of my great-grandfather many times over, James. Given what a diverse and interesting bunch we were, I almost pitied it.

“You hid it here?” Dublin wondered. He had leaned toward my side without me realizing and I flinched as his chill raised goosebumps over the back of my neck. A part of me wanted to hate him still—hate the fact that he could sit so close to me as though nothing had changed.

I snuck a glance at his face, alarmed by how neutral his expression seemed.

Apparently, we were both in denial of recent events.

“Georgie and I used to play here as children,” I found myself muttering. Compelled by some need to explain the safety of my hiding place perhaps? Or maybe his skeptical frown amused me. “We used to sneak notes back and forth by stuffing them into this empty urn kept on a shelf for decoration.” An ironic fixture, given my mother’s general loathing of any frivolous displays. “Sometimes, I used to come here to think.”

“You…playedin a crypt?”

As his expression shifted, I wasn’t sure what might appear. A wry twist of his mouth wasn’t my first suspicion. God, it couldn’t be a smile.