He smiled, an unfortunate gesture that caused his already broken lips to split further. I grimaced. His gums had shrunk and pulled back, making his teeth look longer and more animal than ever before. His single fang—the other had been permanently lost in a fight with me—was yellowed like that of an ancient skull.

Peyton shifted, his bones grinding against each other. The padding between his joints must have been worn down to dust. He was, in effect, the living dead, and not in the way most vampires were. He was a walking, talking corpse.

That realization was all it took for the remnants of fear clinging to me to fall away. He was pathetic, and I didn’t fear the pathetic.

“I see they’ve been keeping you comfortable.”

“I see…” There was a rattle in his voice, his throat too dry and raspy to make more than a few words at a time. “I see…you…are much…changed.”

The Tribunal mantle came with a big level up in vampire power. Vamps could sense each other’s levels as easily as humans could register age by looking at someone. In that sense, I had some pretty impressive power wrinkles since I was now the big, bad boss.

“So it seems.”

“Tell me…cherie…do you…think of me…often?” The wicked glint in his solid-black eyes was unnerving, but I did my best not to slip backwards into my fear.

“I try not to think of inconsequential things anymore,” I lied.

“Do you…know…what I will…do? When…I am free?”

I rocked back on my heels, my calves aching from being kept in a low squat to stare at him. “What? Go to the salon? You’re in dire need of some deep conditioning.” I sniffed dramatically. “And a bath.”

He smiled, and a clear liquid oozed from the cracks in his lips that he made no attempt to lick away. “I will…make you…pay.”

Any warmth I’d begun to feel was gone. The glittery blue light felt cold, and in spite of the open door behind me and Sig so close, I felt alone and uneasy. Peyton couldn’t hurt me, and he would never be free. But something in the promise of his words made me frightened of him in spite of how illogical it was.

That’s the beauty of fear, it does not yield to reason.

“You’ve tried to kill me twice before.” Lowering closer to the ground, I braced my palms against the floor and inched my way towards him, looking much more like a wolf in that moment than the vampire I was meant to be. “You failed. You will fail again. But let’s be clear, here, Peyton…you will never get out of here. Not while I’m still living.”

He tried to grin at this, but moving his mouth so much in such a short time must have been uncomfortable. His lips were stuck against his teeth, letting me see his one yellowed fang. I grinned back so he got a good long look at my own fangs, both white and untouched. When I was close enough, I placed my hands on his cheeks and pulled his face towards mine. Peyton struggled and gnashed at me, but for once I knew he was no match for me physically.

“I will…”

I snarled when he took a pause, and the glint in his eyes faded. “You will do nothing. You’ll fester and rot here. Starving until you are just a bag of dry skin holding a pile of bones. You’ll never drink from anyone again.” I dropped one hand and cupped his face with the other, squeezing until his mouth was forced open. The stare I gave him then was loaded with threats. “Maybe I should neuter you now.”

His tooth was dry and coated with a layer of what felt like dust. I didn’t want to think about what it really was when I gave the elongated canine a wiggle. “Looking a little long in the tooth,” I teased, my voice bitter. He tried to clamp his jaws shut and bite me in the process, but the grip I had on his chin made it impossible. My fingers tensed on the fang.

“That’s enough,” Sig interrupted. His presence in the room caused the blue glow to shrink back into the darker recesses. Was there anything he couldn’t scare? “Secret, visiting hours are over now. You can come back and play with Monsieur Peyton some other time.” The French pronunciation spoken with Sig’s Scandinavian inflection sounded alien but somehow more beautiful.

I couldn’t let go. I’d never had the upper hand with Peyton before and I wasn’t willing to give it up on command.

“Secret,” Sig warned. He didn’t need to say more than my name. I understood the implication loud and clear. I couldn’t kill Peyton, and I couldn’t enact any kind of punishment on him without the express permission of my fellow Tribunal leaders. Sig might let me, knowing my history with the Cajun maniac, but Juan Carlos would point out that Peyton’s punishment was already worse than death.

Maybe he was right.

I released Peyton’s chin, and he wiggled his jaw.

“I hope you like it here,” I told him. “Because you’re never, ever getting out.”

“We…will…see.”

When I passed Sig on the way out of the hovel, I didn’t miss the fearsome look he fixed on Peyton. Sig would make sure Peyton never got out, I felt certain of that. As much as Sig often terrified me, he was a just leader, and it mattered to him whether I lived or died. This was one evil he could protect me from.

Outside, with the door closed behind us, I couldn’t shake the uneasy feeling that had begun brewing since we’d first arrived. “Why would you bring me here?”

“I thought it would be good for you to see him like this.”

I shook my head. “No.” Turning to him so we stood only inches apart in the small hallway, I stared into his pale blue eyes. “Some skeletons are left in the closet for a reason, you know?”

Sig smiled and took one of my hands, pressing my fingers to his lips as if he meant to kiss them. His soft mouth grazed the sensitive whorls of my fingerprints, but it was too late for me to pull back when he bit into me.

“Ouch,” I exclaimed, trying to jerk my hand away when sharp pain exploded in my pointer finger. “What the hell?”

“Touch the door,” he instructed, releasing me. “Touch it and you may keep your skeleton locked up as long as you like.”

I did as he told me, pressing my bloodied digit against the rough wood. The blue light engulfed the brown surface with a gasping whoosh, and the silver lock re-materialized.

“Wow.” Staggering back as the tingle of magic crawled over my skin, I inched as far from the door as I could without seeming to be afraid of it.

Sig came to stand beside me and placed an arm around my shoulder, giving me a friendly squeeze, only he was compressing my gunshot injury. Involuntarily, I yelped.

“What on Earth?” He gave me a quizzical look then his gaze trailed down to the small shiny circle of skin beside my clavicle. Eventually the scar would mostly disappear, leaving only a white mark instead of the current pink, but I couldn’t hide it from him now. He knew all too well what would leave a mark like that. “Silver?”

“You bet.”

“Who?”

A sad smile crept across my face. “I guess Peyton isn’t the only one who wants me dead.”

Chapter Eleven

A howl shredded the peaceful silence of the night, jarring my already rattled nerves. The full moon glimmered between the fingers of the forest trees whose spring foliage had begun to fill in. Instead of leaves, the limbs were covered with kelly-green buds, eager to open. Beyond the tree edge, the wide, sprawling field of Central Park’s Great Lawn invited me to step out of the woods and into the free expanse before me.

I inched forward, then stumbled. My feet had become entangled in the heavy skirt of the white wedding dress I was wearing. Layers of white tulle clasped at me like expensive shackles, and only sheer luck kept me from falling to the ground.

Deja vu.

Another howl, and another. A chorus of wolves sang into the night, and their song drew ever closer. They didn’t sound like they were coming to say hello, either. They sounded hungry.

I hiked up my dress and ran, further challenged by the spindly stiletto sandals I was wearing. I loved sky-high heels as much as any good New York City girl, but I was cursing the name of Manolo Blahnik as I tried to jump over low-lying branches while wearing them.

By the time I was out of the woods my hair was a tangled mess hanging in my face. I brushed the wayward strands back and felt something on my head I hadn’t noticed before. Wrenching the metallic object free of my curls, I pulled it from my hair and got a look at what it was.

A crown. Not a bridal tiara, but an actual crown made of gold branches that looked so realistic I wondered if someone hadn’t dipped willow in gold leaf to make it. In the knots of the branches were emeralds the size of my thumbnail and so many diamonds the damn thing lit up like the Fourth of July even in the bare light of the moon.

The moon.

The howling began anew, and I remembered what had set me running in the first place. I held my crown tight to my chest and began to sprint. Now that I was in the open I could see I wasn’t alone in the field. A few hundred meters away was a man wearing a beautifully tailored tuxedo. His hands were in his pockets and his smile was apparent even this far away.

Lucas.

You know this. This isn’t new. You know this, my mind told me. But all I could think about was escaping the hungry pack that was hot on my heels. The only thing on my mind was getting to Lucas before they got to me.

I held my dress up the best I could without losing the crown and hauled ass across the field. I ran on the balls of my feet so the heels wouldn’t trip me up, but when I was a few feet from him, something brought me crashing to the ground anyway.

“Fuck,” I cried. The proximity of the howls was much closer now. In my fevered imagination I could hear the click of sharp canine teeth and almost feel the panting mouths of the wolves looming over me.

I tugged my dress free of whatever had brought me down, and the white fabric came away a deep crimson red. The more layers I pulled back of the endless gown, the bloodier they became, glistening wetly in the moonlight. A memory I couldn’t quite grasp made me check my hands, assuming the blood must be my own.