“So, you’re really going to take it this far.”

Paradise looked into the black glass of the window beside her. Reflected in the mirror-like surface, Princeps Peyton, first blooded son of Peythone, was just as she remembered: classically handsome, with those intense blue eyes and his thick blond hair brushed straight back from his forehead. He was wearing his signature rimless, sapphire-tinted sunglasses to hide the fact that he was probably high, and his right-off-the-yacht clothes were tailor-made for his muscled body. With an aristocratic voice that had a rasp, and a brain that was somehow able to counter-act all that THC, he was considered one of the most eligible bachelors in the glymera, part Great Gatsby, part Jack Sparrow.

As she breathed in, she could smell his cologne and a hint of smoke.

“How are you, Peyton,” she muttered.

“You’d know if you answered your damn phone.”

Paradise rolled her eyes. Even though the pair of them had only ever been friends, the bastard was wholly irresistible to females. And one of his problems, among many, was the fact that he knew it.

“Hello?” he demanded.

Paradise turned and faced him. “I don’t have a lot to say to you. Which, considering you reduced me to nothing but a pair of ovaries for breeding, shouldn’t be a big surprise. I don’t have much to offer other than that, right?”

“Will you excuse us?” he said to the male sitting next to her.

“Abso-fucking-lutely.” Axe, the tough guy, slipped out as if he were getting away from a stink bomb. Or a squeaky female dressed in pink ribbons and bows.

Peyton sat down. “I’ve apologized. At least to your phone. What more do you want me to do?”

She shook her head, thinking of that first year after the raids. So many of her kind had been killed by the Lessening Society during that horrible assault on the race, and those who had been lucky enough to survive had left Caldwell, retreating to safe houses outside of town, out of state, out of New England.

Peyton had gone south with his blood. She’d gone west with her father. And the two of them had spent countless, sleepless days talking on the phone just to keep sane and process the fear, the sadness, the horror, the losses. Over time, he had become someone she touched base with not just once a night, but all throughout the endless twenty-four-hour cycles of days, weeks, months.

He had become her family.

Of course, if times had been remotely normal, they wouldn’t have gotten so close—especially not if the contact had been in person. As an unmated female from a Founding Family, she wouldn’t have been allowed to fraternize so freely with any unmated male without a chaperone.

“You know all those hours we spent on the phone?” she said.

“Yeah.”

“I felt like you had my back. You didn’t judge me if I was scared or weak or nervous. You were just … this voice on the other end of the connection that kept me sane. You were sometimes the only reason I made it to nightfall.” She shook her head. “And then this comes up, and you body-slam me with the glymera bullcrap—”

“Now hold on—”

“You did. You laughed at me and told me I couldn’t do this.” She clamped a hold on his mouth, shutting him up. “Just stop talking, okay? Let me get this all out. Now, you might be right: I might fail out of the program. Fine, I’ll fall on my butt—but I’m allowed to be here on this bus, and I have the same shot that everyone else does. And you of all people, who’s made fun of every one of the idiot society females your family’s tried to set you up with, who’s told me you think the festivals are stupid, who’s rejected the business expectations your father put on you—you were the last person I thought would ever go old-school on me.”

He sat back and stared at her through those blue-tinted lenses. “Are you done now? You off your soapbox?”

“FYI, being a smart-ass is really going to help you here.”

“Just want to know if you’re ready to put this feminist shit aside and actually listen to me.”

“Are you kidding me?”

“You haven’t once given me a chance to explain. You’re too busy filling in my side of things with all this free-the-nipple crap. Why bother letting the other person in on the conversation when you’re having such a great time being judgmental and superior? I never thought you were this way.”

Welcome to a parallel universe, Paradise thought.

Before she could stop herself, she snapped, “And here I just thought you were a drug addict. I didn’t know you were a misogynist as well.”

Peyton shook his head and got to his feet. “You know what, Parry? You and I really do need to take a break.”

“I totally agree.”

He looked down at her from his height. “Fuck me for thinking you’d need a friend in all this.”

“Someone who wants you to fail is not a friend.”

“I never said that. Never once.”

As he turned away, Paradise almost yelled after him, but she let him go. It wasn’t as if the talking was getting them anywhere. What was happening instead? Pretty much everyone on the bus was looking at them.

Man, things were getting off to such a great start.

One hour after dark, Marissa dematerialized to a thicket of forest on the far side of the Hudson River. The cold wind whistling through the pine boughs made her shiver, and she pulled her Burberry wool coat closer to her body. Breathing in, her sinuses hummed from the lack of humidity and the fantastically clean air of the Canadian high-pressure system that was blowing in from the north.

Looking around, she thought there was something fundamentally dead about November. The colorful leaves of Fall were down and rusted on the ground, the grass and underbrush were wilted and gray, and the cheerful, false-cozy of winter’s snowfalls had yet to blanket everything in white.

This was the vacant transition between one version of fabulous and the next.

This was nothing but cold and empty.

Pivoting around, her keen vision zeroed in on an utterly unremarkable concrete structure about fifty yards ahead. Single-storied, with no windows, and only one dark blue door, it looked like something that the city of Caldwell had built for water-treatment purposes and then abandoned.

As she took a step forward, a stick broke beneath her loafer—and she froze at the sound, wrenching around to make sure there was no one behind her. Damn it, she should have told Butch where she was going. He’d been so busy getting ready for the new recruits’ orientation, though, she hadn’t wanted to bother him.

It was okay, she told herself. There was always Last Meal.

She would talk to him then.

Crossing the distance to the door, her palms broke out into a sweat in her gloves, and her chest got so tight, she felt as if she were wearing a corset.

God, she hadn’t had one of them on in how long?

As she tried to do that math, she thought back to her life before she’d met Butch. She’d had all of the status and none of the position that anyone from the glymera could have asked for. As the unclaimed betrothed of Wrath, son of Wrath, she had been a cautionary tale, a beautiful curse who had been pitied and avoided at the aristocracy’s events and festivals.

Her brother had always watched over her, however, a largely silent and yet loyal source of comfort. He had hated that Wrath had always ignored her except when he’d needed to feed—and in the end, that hatred had driven her brother to try to kill the King.

One of many attempts on Wrath’s life, as it had turned out.

She had been suffering and limping along in her unhappy lot, expecting nothing more, but wanting a proper life for herself … when she had met Butch one night at Darius’s former house. Her destiny had changed forever as she had seen the then-human standing in that parlor, fate giving her the love she had always sought but never had. There had been repercussions, though. Perhaps as part of the Scribe Virgin’s dictate of balance, all of that goodness had come at a huge cost: Her brother had ended up kicking her out of his house and his life just moments before dawn one morning.