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Garroway didn’t return to the safehouse for nearly a fortnight.

It dismayed me because the dhampir had become my sole friend among this trio. At least Garro was personable—or as personable as a bloodthirsty Buver could be. Vallan was surly and loathsome, while Skartovius was too caught up in his own schemes for me to consider him an ally.

Skar mostly spent his time at Manor Marquin as Lord Ashfen, arriving at the safehouse only every other day or so with news and, I suspected, to check on me.

On the third visit, I noticed the fraying in his eyes. Though he put on an air of impassiveness and indifference, the lines of his smooth forehead were deepening more often. They were flashes of consternation and veiled anger or frustration.

Or is that fear I’m seeing? Is a monster like Skartovius Ashfen capable of feeling fear?

Of course, I would never ask him what ailed him. I knew it well enough: Skar’s bloodthrall was out in the wild, ostensibly missing.

“Can’t you just speak to him in your mind and call him back?” I asked one night. I was reclined on the bed, reading a tome Skartovius had seen fit to provide me from his library in Manor Marquin.

Even though Olhav didn’t have a knowledge center, Skar made an effort to create one in his own lair. I had told him the daytime hours in Olhav were beginning to bore me, which prompted him to return with the book.

The bastards didn’t let me leave the safehouse without an escort. They didn’t lock me up, either, so in truth I could have easily gone out on my own during the days when there were less threats and vampires roaming the streets.

But that tingle of fear that knotted in my belly never quite went away when I debated staking out on my own. Skar had warned me of the dangers of being a human alone in Olhav, and I didn’t wish to test my luck.

So, like a good little prisoner, I stayed put until the nighttime hours when the vampires awoke and joined me.

Skartovius was sitting at the table, scribbling something on a page. Vallan was out at the North Mines, managing the silver deposits. He was there more often than here, and I had a feeling it was partly so he could avoid having to talk to or see me.

Skartovius unfolded himself and stared at the high window in front of him. “Our mind-speak has been . . . unstable as of late,” he admitted.

“That’s worrying, isn’t it?” I noted how his shoulders stiffened. A man like Skartovius Ashfen did not simply display worry . “Garro has been your bloodthrall for how long, exactly?”

“Does it matter?”

“To me it does.”

He glanced over his shoulder with narrowed eyes, as if trying to ascertain the trap I was leading him into. “Forty-seven years, six months, and twenty-three days.”

I blinked wide. “That’s quite . . . exact.”

“Our bond is inexorable.”

“This is the first time something like this has happened?”

A small nod.

“Think it has something to do with my blood he drank to heal?”

“I think it has everything to do with your blood, little temptress.”

I winced. “Sorry.”

“You do not control what runs through your veins. It is Garroway’s fault for succumbing to the temptation.”

“He would have died without it, Skartovius.”

“So you say. Vampires, even half-bloods, are notoriously difficult to kill.”

I sighed. “The explosion from Vallan’s firebomb did a lot of damage. Put some holes in him. He looked like shit.”

“Aye. I should have been there.”

My head tilted on the cot, looking at him sideways. Is that regret I’m hearing? These vampires never ceased to astound me. I learned more about them by the day and, if nothing else, that was useful for my purposes of one day overthrowing the whole lot of them and liberating Nuhav.

Forty-seven years Garro’s been his slave, his thrall.

I pondered that, setting my book on my belly.

The tome was an interesting treatise on how the alignment of the stars may impact the power of a vampire’s blood.

When I had tried to discuss its contents with Skar, he scoffed, saying he had just pulled the first thing he saw from his shelves to shut me up, and calling the theory nonsense.

Garroway doesn’t look more than twenty-five summers aged. In truth, he’s at least twice that, probably more. It baffled me, the power these creatures had at their disposal—the ability to never age, to heal supernaturally fast, and the inordinate strength and speed they possessed.

Even with the negative aspects—the whole daylight turning them into torches thing, silver igniting their blood, their undead qualities and weak, blackened hearts, and the fact they lose all semblance of humanity once turned—it’s amazing to imagine the power I’d have at my fingertips.

I shook my head and blinked up at the ceiling. It was a foolish notion—a childish daydream—to consider wanting to become a vampiress. In the past, the bloodsuckers had terrified me absolutely. They still did, but now there was more nuance to it.

It was difficult denying the draw I felt around these monsters. They were both stoic and sensual. Grotesque and strangely erotic, one minute opening up a man’s chest to feed on his organs and veins, and the next calling me by charming pet names.

Little temptress, little honey badger, silverblood. All three of them have unique sobriquets for me that seem to speak to how they see me.

To Skartovius, I was a trophy he resisted touching. To Garroway, I was tenacious like the animal he named me after, and perhaps a bit . . . unkempt and wild? And to Vallan, well, I could only imagine “silverblood” as an insult, since silver was the biggest weakness of all for vampires.

Still, the insult rolled off the tongue. I found myself enjoying it.

If someone had told me I would one day find more pleasure in the company of three bloodsuckers than my own kind, I would have laughed and pushed them off the Olhavian Peaks.

Now, I hardly knew myself. Something inside me was changing the longer I stayed with these men.

I was still lucky enough to retain my sanity and humanity, my empathy, but I felt more scheming and daring with them.

They were the ultimate bodyguards, after all, making sure no harm came to me. No one else in my life has ever been that for me. Even if I don’t want it, I can’t deny the power I feel when I’m walking in the presence of Skar next to me on the streets of Olhav. No one touches a hair on my body.

“I would like to go to the Chained Sisters,” I said, apropos of nothing. Long minutes had passed in silence.

He lifted his head from his letter. “You’ve been there twice already this week. I’m sure Iron Sister Keffa would not enjoy you giving their location away.”

I frowned, sitting up and kicking my feet off the edge of the cot. “Do you think Mistress Mortis will send more assassins after me?”

“For the last time, they’re not assassins. They’re bounty hunters trying to bring you to her.”

“You wouldn’t know,” I jabbed. “You weren’t there.”

He stood from the table and rubbed his forehead. “Aye, as you never fail to remind me.”

When I became bratty like this, Skartovius tended to pace and look annoyed. It was a sign I was grating on him. I had to keep pushing as far as I could to gauge my boundaries with the bloodsucker.

Skar needed to know how ridiculous it was trying to keep a grown woman under his thumb, when the truth was I held the power here. I was the one with the Loreblood which, evidently, everyone needed.

So far, things had been going swimmingly. Little temptress or not, he couldn’t deny me when I got a harebrained idea in my mind

“So? The Sisters?” I tilted my head and pouted. “I want to see Jinneth. Let the Iron Sister tell me herself if I’m unwelcome. Or you could let me go by myself . . .”

“Out of the question.”

I seethed. “Before you came along, trying to act like my overprotective father, I was a prizefighter in the Firehold and underground pits of Nuhav.”

“Yet Garroway defeated you,” he snapped back, “and he’s only a half-vampire. The beings you’d face on these streets are largely fullbloods.”

My lip curled in a sneer as I stood from the bed, jamming a finger into his chest. “You can’t keep me locked in here at night, Skartovius. I’m already a prisoner during the day.”

“Fine,” he relented, flaring his nostrils. “Let’s go, brat princess.”

Jinneth and I strolled along an embankment overlooking a babbling creek near the Chained Sisters’ stronghold. The creek trailed down a hill and connected like a spider web with other small streams, forming into a larger river that eventually waterfalled off the edge of the cliff.

This was our usual route—close enough to the Hall for someone to always be watching us, far enough so we could be alone.

This time, it was Vallan and a softly weeping dhampir named Lyroan, walking about twenty paces behind us. The young woman wore the gray robes of her sect and kept sniffling into the wide sleeve, continuously asking why Vallan was “doing this to her.”

Vall was a mix of grunts and awkward answers. I hadn’t been surprised to see him at the Chained Sisters’ abode when Skar and I arrived, though a bit disappointed he preferred to find shelter with this crying girl than me and his own “brother” at the safehouse.

Skar had stayed behind to speak with Keffa Caernyd and, I imagined, to get a break from me.

“It’s not you, girl. I’m busy.” Vallan spoke with all the tact of a cinderblock.

Lyroan was a redheaded, freckled half-blood of ample size, yet she was vertically challenged and only came up past Vallan’s stomach. They were an odd mix, those two.

“Will it ever change? Will you ever come to my chambers again, my dashing prince?” Lyroan asked, holding her hands clasped together in prayer.

My head twisted from around my shoulder, eyes rolling in exaggeration as I looked forward. It made Jinneth snicker.

“You promised me a dhampir whelp of my own, bastard!” she screeched suddenly, and I heard the dull thud of her tiny fists smacking against his chest.

Vallan grunted in response.