The Vampire Lord's Substitute Bride

Hazel Sterling POV:

Grey light came through the wet window and gave no warmth. I had slept in pieces, waking at every drop on the tin roof.

I unlocked the bedroom door and looked out.

The couch was untouched. The wool blanket over the back had been folded into a square, edges lined up.

Julian stood at the counter with his back to me. A crystal tumbler sat in front of him, full of something thick and dark, and he wasn't drinking it. He was watching it settle.

I made myself step out. "Morning. Do you want breakfast? I can do eggs. Or toast."

He turned his head. Those eyes held me where I stood.

"I don't eat breakfast."

"Right. I do, though." I moved to the fridge to get out of his sight line.

There was milk and half a dozen eggs and not much else. I cracked two into the skillet and let the butter and the noise fill the room. Then I talked, because talking kept my hands steady, and I talked the way Chloe talked.

"This kitchen is medieval. At home I only drink the almond milk they ship in from California, and this town doesn't have one decent grocer."

He leaned in the doorway with his arms crossed, watching me the way a man watches something through glass.

I slid one egg onto a saucer and pushed it across the counter. "Here. Eat something. For manners, if nothing else."

He looked down at it. Something tightened along his jaw and was gone.

"I told you I'm not hungry."

"Suit yourself." My face went hot. I took a fork and ate alone.

The only sound was metal on ceramic. He stayed where he was, unblinking, and the room felt smaller with him in it.

When I finished I washed the plate and wiped down the counters. I needed my hands busy. On the shelf in the living room, a row of old books sat in cracked dark leather, the spines stamped with a script I couldn't read.

I picked one up. "Do you read these? They look like museum pieces."

A cold shadow came over the page.

He was beside me. I had not heard him cross the room. He took the book out of my hands, his fingers brushing mine, and put it back in its exact place on the shelf.

"They're fragile," he said, without any edge at all. "Don't touch them."

"Fine." I stepped back. "No need to make it a thing."

The rest of the day we stayed out of each other's way. He sat by the window and didn't turn pages at a normal speed. He walked into the woods without a coat in the rain and came back hours later with nothing wet on him, not a bead of it.

By evening my head hurt. I went to the bedroom, got out my cracked phone, and held it by the window where one bar came and went.

I texted my friend Stella: I'm settled in. The husband is quiet. Everything's fine.

I sent it and let out a shaky breath. I couldn't tell her the truth. I couldn't tell anyone that I was sharing a house with a man who felt like a corpse that had not gotten the message.

I stared at the black screen, and the back of my neck went cold.

I turned around.

The window was black. The trees outside were black. Nothing was there.

But the sense of being watched was so strong my hands started to shake.

Julian Beaumont POV:

I stood sixty feet up in an old fir, hidden in the rain, looking straight through the thin curtain into her window.

The walls of this cabin are paper to me. I could hear the hum of her phone, the uneven trip of her pulse, and the lie she had just sent to her friend.

Hazel.

She doesn't know that from the hour she crossed my threshold, the cold in this valley stopped being cold to me.

Her scent came off her like freesia that had opened inside a spring storm. It hit the back of my throat like something poured, not swallowed. My venom glands ached with a hunger I had not felt in three hundred years. When she set that plate of burnt eggs in front of me, the instinct to put her through the table and drink her dry came up so hard that my claws were out before I knew it. I kept my hands flat on the table until they retracted.

It passed. It always passes.

But it wasn't her blood that kept me in that tree all night.

It was her mind.

Three hundred years, I have heard everyone within miles of me. Their small greeds, their wanting, the things they keep folded away from the light. All of it, all the time, at volume.

Except her.

When I look at Hazel Sterling there is nothing there. No whisper. No stray thread of a thought. A blank, whole and quiet, like one clean room in a city that never stops.

I can hear her heart. I can smell her fear. I cannot hear a single thing she is thinking.

She believes she is fooling me. She believes I am something she has to keep calm.

I had her name before she reached my door. Money leaves a trail, and the Sterlings have never been careful with theirs. I let her sign the other name anyway. It costs me nothing to let her keep it, and I would rather she told me herself.

I have walked this earth three hundred years. She is the first thing in it I cannot open.