Fated to My Forbidden Vampire novel · Chapter 1 of 24
Chapter 1: The Broken Glass
Clem cuts her palm at a vampire gala, the heir's wrist scar lights, the regent orders her seized, and she screams at the heir to do something; he does, and in the car he says the oath runs the other way.
The glass broke in my hand because my sister knocked my elbow on purpose.
I know it was on purpose because she smiled first.
Pippa had been smiling at me all night, which should have warned me.
She had found me at the diner on Tuesday with a story about a charity gala at the Marlow Hotel.
The caterer was short two waiters.
It paid three hundred dollars cash for one night.
"You're a hard worker, Clem," she said. "And I owe you."
I was twenty-five, I had a prison record, and I was cleaning offices before dawn to cover rent.
I took the three hundred dollars.
So there I was in a black vest on a Saturday night, carrying a tray of champagne through the ballroom.
The guests were strange in a way I couldn't name.
They were all pale and beautiful, and nobody was eating.
The cheese tray had not been touched.
My left wrist had started to itch under my sleeve.
That scar was six years old, and no doctor had ever told me what made it.
It ran around the bone, and it only itched when I was scared.
"Nervous?" Pippa said, passing close behind me in her cream pantsuit.
"I'm fine," I said.
"You're shaking."
Then her hip hit my elbow, hard, right as I turned.
The tray tilted.
I caught a falling flute on instinct and it burst in my fist.
The pain came late, a bright line across my palm, and then the blood.
It ran down my wrist and dripped off my fingers onto the white marble.
Three drops, four.
The music did not stop so much as die.
Two hundred heads turned toward me at once.
Nobody gasped, and nobody screamed.
They went still the way a dog goes still when it hears a can opening.
I saw nostrils flare in every direction.
I saw a woman in green silk lick her lip without noticing she did it.
Across the room, a man dropped his wine glass.
It hit the floor and shattered, and he didn't look down.
He was tall and lean in a dark coat, and his hair was white, pure white, tied back at his collar.
He looked about thirty.
He was staring at the blood on my hand.
My scar flared.
It went hot as a wire and lit up silver under my sleeve, and I swear the light came through the fabric.
Across the room, the same silver ring blazed on his bare wrist where his cuff had slid back.
"Well," said a warm voice by the stairs. "Well, well."
An old man in an ivory suit came down the steps with a silver-topped cane.
He had a white moustache and the manner of someone who owned every room he entered.
"Thaddeus Manigault," Pippa whispered, as though I should know.
"Regent of this Court," the old man announced, to everyone. "And I regret to say, my friends, that our young heir has thralled a human."
A murmur went through the hall.
"Thralled," someone said. "Against the Compact."
I looked at the man with the white hair.
He hadn't moved.
His hands were shaking at his sides.
"Seize the girl," Manigault said gently. "Bring her to the cellar."
Two guards in black came off the wall.
One of them took my arm above the elbow and his fingers closed.
I did what my body had learned in county.
I drove my elbow back into his face.
Something crunched, and he swore, and let go.
The second guard grabbed my braid and yanked, and I kicked backward at his knee.
I'd have lost anyway.
So I did the only other thing I could think of.
I looked straight at the white-haired man across the room and screamed.
"Do something!"
I didn't know him.
I had no idea why I picked him.
But he flinched, and then he moved.
I have never seen anyone move like that.
One moment he was by the far wall, and the next the guard holding my braid was across the room, folded over a table.
The first guard went down under a hand that looked like it barely touched him.
Then there was an arm under my knees and another behind my back, and I was off the floor.
"Stop him!" Manigault roared, and for the first time his voice rose.
The man carried me through a service door, down a staircase, and into a cold alley that smelled of rain.
A black car sat running at the curb.
He put me in the back seat and got in beside me.
Blood from my palm was soaking my sleeve, and he turned his face away from it and gripped the door handle until the metal bent.
"Drive," he told the driver, and then, to me, hoarse: "Press the cloth against it. Please."
I pressed.
My hands were shaking.
"Who are you?" I said. "What did that old man mean, thralled? What did you do to me?"
He closed his eyes.
When he opened them, they were dark brown, wet, and terrible.
"Emeric Rutledge," he said. "And I did nothing to you, I swear it."
The scar on my wrist pulsed against the cloth, in time with the one on his.
"They have it backwards," he said. "You aren't mine."
He looked at me.
"I'm yours."
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