Page 24 of Cruelly Bitten

The closet was filled with dark clothes—mostly button-down shirts and pants.Definitely Cam’s style, I noted, fingering some of the fine fabric.

I pulled one of them off the hanger to glance at the label. It was a well-known Italian brand from before the revolution.

Cam used to wear these,I thought, slipping the shirt on over my head. It was unbuttoned at the collar, allowing me to easily pull it down over my body. Cam used to love it when I wore his clothes, mostly because his shirts fit me like a dress. And the buttons made it easy to remove.

I rolled the cuffs twice until they fit around my wrists, then I explored the rest of the closet. “Well, you may not have gotten the personality right. But you certainly know how he liked to dress,” I told Fake Cam. Wherever he was.

I spent a few more minutes exploring the closet before moving on to the bathroom. The dark marble finish paired nicelywith the stone floor—the same floor that went through the closet and into the room I’d woken up in.

Glass decorated a walk-in shower. No bathtub. Two sinks. Pretty standard as far as bathrooms went, but it possessed a distinctly masculine appeal. Perhaps because of the dark tones and lack of natural lighting.

Plush carpet met my bare feet as I wandered out of the bath area and into a bedroom. I half expected to find Fake Cam on the bed, but he wasn’t there. Just a dark swirl of sheets and pillows, and something metal glinting off the low lighting.

A laptop, I realized as I crept forward.

I stared at it for a second, then surveyed the rest of the room, searching for Fake Cam.

He wasn’t near the dark wood dressers, and they were too close to the wall for him to hide behind. I ducked to check beneath the bed—clear.

Frowning, I started toward the living area adjacent to the bedroom. There was a long sofa and a single chair with a kitchenette behind it.

No Fake Cam anywhere.

I opened the refrigerator.Empty. Great.

The cabinets had a myriad of red wine in one section, then plates, bowls, and glasses. Another had some cooking pots and a drawer of utensils.

But nothing edible other than the alcohol.

Typical vampire, I thought, retracing my steps back into the living room.So where did you go?Because he wasn’t anywhere in here, and I suspected the door across from me led to the exit.Are you waiting beyond there for me? Hoping to catch me and punish me?

I frowned. “What would be the point of that?” I asked aloud. “You already had me flat on the bed before. So why bother with this game?”

I assumed he would be able to hear me with his vampiric senses.

“I’m not going out there,” I told him. “I’ll just play with your laptop instead.”

I half expected him to enter and say something like, “It’s password protected.” But nothing happened.

Shrugging, I decided to follow through on my threat. If it was connected to any sort of communication network, then I could reach out to Damien.

I settled onto the bed and pulled the computer into my lap, then opened the screen. It came to life without a sound, the password protection tied to a thumbprint.

It was a solid security measure, but Damien had taught me all the backdoor tricks. I lifted the device to check some information on the back, then held the start button down with another key.

My attention flicked to the door when the computer made a restart noise.

Still no Fake Cam. Fine. At least I had something to do with my time now. Better than just lying down on a mattress, awaiting my fate.

Keep underestimating what I can do, Fake Cam,I thought at him when a few more sounds followed.

“Pretty much all computers have an admin control—something to override the initial login. It’s to help protect the device from the technologically illiterate,” Damien had once told me. “Like Ryder.”

The male in question had flipped him off in response. “Want to play with my favorite toys, Damien?” Ryder had drawled back at him.

“Always,” my brother had replied, his lips curling into a smirk while his eyes danced across the screen in front of him.

I could hear him in the back of my head coaching me on next steps as a blue screen appeared requesting an admin key. He’d drilled the entire process into me after weeks of coaching while Ryder had observed with lazy interest.