Page 2 of Vamp CEO Bit You Where?

I sit down gracefully. I answer his questions, and they're good questions, sharp ones, designed to find the seams in a person. When he asks about my last role I answer without polishing it first.

"My work was credited under another name. I objected. The company found my objection inconvenient."

His composure flickers—not surprise. Recognition, almost. "And you signed their silence."

"I signed for the severance. The silence I'm spending however I choose."

That earns the smallest curve at the corner of his mouth. But what unsettles me most is his focus never wanders, never distracted by a phone, never performs the busy importance these men usually wear like cologne. He listens as though every sentence I say matters to him personally, and there's nothing flattering in it. It feels closer to hunger held very carefully in check. When he stands to end the meeting, he extends his hand. His grip is cool and exact.

"You'll hear from us," he says. "Soon."

I ride the elevator down certain of two contradictory things: that I've somehow already gotten the job, and that the conversation I have just had isn't an interview at all. It is about me. Specifically, personally, and for reasons I can't begin to explain.

2

SEBASTIAN

The door closes behind her, and the office does not return to normal. It should. I have sat in this room through hostile boards, through threats delivered in three languages, through the slow arithmetic of war, and the room has always been mine again afterward. Now it holds the warmth of where she sat, and my body has decided, without consulting me, to keep track of it.

I remain seated. That is the first sign. I have no reason to stand, and I do not trust what that would look like.

Her pulse is still in my ears. I cataloged it without meaning to—the steady rhythm under the navy collar, quickening once when I asked a question, settling again because she refused to let me get under her skin with the wrong one. Living warmth. Iron and salt and something beneath it, the specific signature of one human heart, and my own answer to it: recognition older than this building, older than the country, a certainty arriving fully formed. Mine. The word is absurd. I discard it. It returns.

Every vampire of any age has read the accounts the way children read about dragons—a rare thing, a dangerous thing, a thing that happened to someone else two centuries ago in astory. A human mate. The bond does not ask permission. It names her, and then it waits to see what I will do.

I pour water I don't need and drink it, because the motion is ordinary and I require something ordinary. Gideon comes in without knocking, which he has earned over a century.

"She's in the elevator," he says. "Polite to the desk staff. Didn't look back." He stops. "You're seated."

"I do sit often."

"Not like that." He studies me as though I'm a perimeter. "Your face is doing the thing where it does nothing. You do nothing at people you're about to fire. You don't do it at an empty room."

"I'm thinking."

"You think with your feet up and a problem on the screen." He folds his arms. "What happened in here?"

I could tell him. He is the one person in my life I could trust—he knew me before the empire, before the network, when I was still learning how to wear the century. But the word feels too new and too unguarded, and once it leaves my mouth it becomes a fact other people can use.

"I want a full background on Jasmine Carter," I say instead. "Quietly. Financials, employment, family, anything her last firm buried. Treat her as a security question."

His pale eyes don't leave my face. "She interviewed for an assistant job."

"She'll have my schedule, my correspondence, my movements. That's exposure. I must vet her."

"You vet exposure with a standard check. You don't ask for family." A beat. "What did you hear?"

"A risk," I say. "Run it, Gid."

He holds the silence longer than I would like. Then he nods, because he is loyal even when he isn't satisfied, and that distinction has kept us both alive.

It comes back inside the hour. Crowe Technologies can find a person's debt fast. Gideon reads it aloud while I stand at the window with the city laid out and unhelpful below me.

"Eight years, clean record, well-regarded—until two weeks ago." He scrolls. "An executive named Owen Whitaker presented her restructuring plan as his own work. She had proof. Drafts, timestamps. She took it to their HR. They paid her to leave and sign away the right to say so."

"And the industry?"

"He moved first. Made calls. Her name's gone to shit everywhere." He sets the tablet down. "She isn't difficult. She's been made to look difficult by a feeble man."