Page 20 of Vamp CEO Bit You Where?

"Jasmine." Quiet. Urgent. "I cannot say this in the middle of a sidewalk. Walk with me. Twenty feet. That's all I'm asking."

I shouldn't. Every sane part of me says run. Instead I follow him into the mouth of an alley between a shuttered bakery and a parking structure, and stay angled toward the open street, so I can bolt, because some animal in me has stopped trusting the man I've spent months attracted to.

"Explain," I say.

He meets my eyes. "What you saw was real. Every bit of it."

"That explains nothing."

"It does." He takes a breath he doesn't seem to need, and I notice that now. My awareness spikes. "The man. What he did. What he is." A pause. "Vampires are real, Jasmine. He was one."

The word should be funny. A punchline, something I'd roll my eyes at. It isn't. It lands in the center of me where the woman's wide eyes already live, and itfits, and that's what breaks me.

I wait for him to say it's a joke. That I'm in shock, wasn't real, there's a reasonable explanation and a glass of water waiting at home. But he just watches me with those gray eyes the streetlight can't settle on, and I understand, all at once, that the nightmare doesn't have a safe edge left for me beside him.

He isn't out here in the dark with me. He belongs inside it.

14

SEBASTIAN

She keeps her back to the brick and two arm-lengths of road between us. Smart. I stay near the far end of the side street, with the glare from the avenue shining on me, and I don't move toward her.

"You saw the truth." A couple drifts past the opening, laughing about something, and I wait until their voices thin into the traffic. "I won't insult you by pretending it wasn't."

"Say it." Her palm is flat against the wall, like she needs something solid under her hand. "Just tell me what you are."

So I do. "A vampire. The man at the event, the one whose mouth was—" I don't continue that part because she knows. "Also one. We're not many. But we're old, and most of the time, careful. We've stayed hidden for centuries. Living inside humanity. Hospitals. Banks. Boardrooms. Normal places that no one would like twice at."

"Centuries." She tests the word like she's deciding whether it will hold her weight. "You expect me to?—"

"I don't expect anything. You asked. I'm answering."

Her eyes go to my mouth, quick, then away, like she's caught herself doing it. I don't interrupt it. It's the most honest thing she's done since she ran.

"How many of you are there?" she asks.

"Enough to need rules. We govern ourselves in clans—families, more or less, held together by blood and money and grudges that outlast nations. Above that sits a Council. It exists for one reason: to keep humans from learning we're here. They settle our wars quietly. They erase our mistakes."

Her gaze flicks to the main road, where taxis crawl past and people keep laughing into the night. Ordinary life, untouched. I watch the realization reach her in pieces: every bright window, every hospital wing, every bank vault suddenly becoming a place where monsters might sign forms and smile calmly at reception.

"And you?" Her chin lifts. "Where do you sit in all that?"

"I built the machine that does the erasing."

She goes very still.

"Crowe Technologies isn't a cover story, Jasmine, but it isn't only what the press releases say either. Underneath the products there's a network. When someone feeds where he shouldn't and a phone catches it—the network finds the footage before it spreads. A witness account. A leaked photo. A line in a database that connects two things that should never be connected. We bury it. I created that. I run it. I have for years. Moving when people notice I haven't aged. Changing the name as I set up a new business."

"You—" Her voice climbs, then she clamps down on it and checks the avenue beyond us. When she speaks again it's barely above a whisper, and it's worse for being controlled. "People see something. They try to warn each other. And you make it vanish."

"Yes."

"That's the company I work for."

"Yes. And I should have told you what sat underneath it."

Now the anger arrives, the fear giving her enough room to find it. "Do you have any idea—" She stops. Starts again. "Have you fed on people? Off them. Like he did."