Paid to Leave, Pregnant With the Vampire Kings Heirs novel · Chapter 2 of 24

Chapter 2: The Grey Car

Linnea ditches the family's car and phone, takes the money and a bus north, and feels the bond pull until June opens the cottage door and the landline rings at eleven.

I read Ambrose's text four times in the back of the grey car.

Then I put the phone in my lap and told the driver to pull over at the next gas station.

"I'm going to be sick," I said, and that part was true.

He pulled in beside the pumps and kept the engine running.

Inside, I locked myself in the restroom and opened my banking app with both hands shaking.

The money was there.

Fifty million dollars, in an account the Tempest lawyers had opened for me that morning.

I had a credit union account I'd kept since nursing school, with four hundred dollars in it and my grandmother's lake town on the statement.

I moved every dollar to that one.

The app asked if I was sure.

I pressed yes.

Then I pressed the side button until the phone went dark, and I walked back out and set it on the driver's seat.

"I need a minute at the counter," I told him. "Keep it warm for me."

He nodded.

I bought a bottle of water and a pack of saltines and walked straight out through the stockroom door at the back.

A delivery man was smoking by the dumpsters.

"Where's the bus stop?" I asked.

He pointed with his cigarette.

It was a quarter mile away, and I walked it with one hand on my stomach.

The ATM next to the bus shelter gave me eight hundred dollars from the old account.

The ticket to Overend Landing cost sixty-one.

I paid the cash and sat at the back with my coat over my knees.

The grey car was still sitting at the pumps when the bus pulled out.

I watched it until the road bent.

For the first two hours I felt nothing but the saltines going down.

Then, somewhere past the state line, a pain landed in my chest so hard I dropped the water.

It was hot and sharp and it wasn't mine.

I know my own pains.

This one had a weight to it, and a color, and a name.

It was Ambrose.

The blood bond carries strong feeling both ways.

For two years I had felt it as warmth in my ribs when he walked into a room.

I had never felt it like this.

A woman across the aisle asked if I was okay.

"Fine," I said. "Bad news."

I pressed my fist into my sternum until the pain eased, and it didn't ease much.

He had seen the signed paper.

Somewhere five hundred miles north, he was standing over my name and feeling what it did to him, and I was feeling it too.

I wanted to turn around.

I did not turn around.

I put my hand on my stomach and said in my head, not yet, not yet, not yet.

The bus let me off at dusk in Overend Landing, where the lake was black and the diner had its lights on.

My grandmother's cottage is a mile past the last streetlight.

I walked it.

There was a light on in the kitchen window.

I stopped in the road.

Then the front door swung open, and June stood in it in her scrubs with a dish towel over her shoulder.

"Get in here, you idiot," she said.

I had not called her.

I had not even said a word to anyone.

"How did you know?"

"A man named Ambrose Tempest called the ER at noon and asked for me by name," June said. "He sounded wrecked. Get in. It's freezing."

I went in.

She sat me at my grandmother's table and put a mug in my hands.

"Chamomile. I checked the box twice. It's safe for whatever you've got going on."

"How do you know I've got something going on?"

"Because you've been holding your stomach for forty feet and you smell like saltines."

I laughed, and then I was crying, and June sat down and held on to me until it stopped.

When I could talk, I told her all of it.

The clinic.

The screen.

Three.

June sat very still.

"Three," she said. "With a vampire."

"Yes."

"Which is medically not a thing."

"The doctor said so."

"And then you signed a paper for fifty million dollars."

"They already knew," I said. "June, they knew before I walked in. Somebody told them. If I'd fought, they'd have had me locked in that house by dinner."

She was quiet for a second.

"Okay," she said. "Then you did right. You keep every cent. I'm putting that in writing on the fridge."

"He texted me. Two minutes before I signed. He said not to."

"And you didn't see it."

"No."

"Do you think he knows?"

"About the babies? No." I looked down at the mug. "That's why I have to hide them."

June stood up and looked at the clock over the stove.

It said ten fifty-nine.

On the kitchen wall hung my grandmother's old landline, with the cord she never let anyone throw out.

Nobody had called it since her funeral.

"Linnea," June said. "Is there anyone who has this number?"

The clock ticked over.

The phone rang.

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