Bride (Ali Hazelwood) by Ali Hazelwood

            “Good.” I try for a small smile. “You?”

            “I’ve been better.”

            “I’m sorry.” I give him a cursory look. Then another. Maybe taking care of someone else’s distress will alleviate mine. “Is there anything I can do?”

            “No.”

            I go back to focusing on the streetlights and wait impatiently for Mick to finish puttering around and start the car, but I don’t know why. I have no reason to be impatient, because I have nowhere to be. No place to call mine.

            “Have you talked with Ana recently?” I ask. If Lowe sends me elsewhere, I likely won’t see her again. I guess I’ve grown overly attached to her, too, because my heart squeezes even tighter.

            “No,” Mick says. “But I think it’s for the best.”

            I lean my temple against the window. My head pounds with a dull kind of ache. “Why is that?”

            “It’s complicated.”

            I huff out a sour laugh, and my breath mists the glass. The same fucking words as Lowe’s. What a cunning way to get out of telling the truth. “You Weres sure love to say—” A bug prickles my skin, and I swat it away. But when I turn around, what I find is not something I can make sense of.

            Mick.

            Holding a small syringe.

            Injecting it in my arm.

            I look up at his face, trying to parse what is happening. “I’m sorry, Misery,” he says. His voice is soft and his eyes are sad, down-tilted in a way that makes my battered chest hurt even more.

            Why? I ask.

            Or I don’t. The word doesn’t make it out, because I’m tired, and my limbs are heavy, and my eyelids so laden with iron that the darkness behind them feels too sweet to—





CHAPTER 27




                             There is very little he wouldn’t do, very few people he wouldn’t kill, just to ensure her well-being.





When we were young, eleven or maybe even twelve, before Serena managed to grasp the difference in our physiologies, she would sometimes get bored of spending her afternoons all alone doing homework or watching TV, and slink into my room to shake me awake when the sun was still too high in the sky. She’d be surprisingly ruthless, more forceful than her little body looked capable of. She’d grasp my shoulder and waggle it hard, with the force of a pack of rottweilers chewing their favorite toy into a slimy chunk of plastic.

            That’s how I know that she’s here, with me. Even before I open my eyes. Vampyres do not dream. Therefore, this commotion must be happening for real. And there is simply no other being in The City, on this Earth, who could be this fucking—

            “Annoying,” I say.

            Or slur. My tongue is still asleep, far too cumbersome for my mouth and made of papier-mâché. I should open my eyes, at the very least one of them, but I suspect that someone embroidered my eyelids to my cheeks and then soaked them in superglue. Upon consideration, the best choice would be to ignore all of this and go back to my nap.

            “Misery. Misery? Misery.”

            I groan. “Don’t—yelling.”

            “Then don’t—going back to sleep, Bleetch.”

            The word tears my eyes open. I’m once again on a damn bed, where I once again don’t remember lying down. My internal clock is shot, and I have no clue whether it’s day or night. I instinctively move my neck—ouch—checking for sunlight pouring in, and find . . .

            No windows. I’m in a wooden attic, large and climate-controlled, with ceiling-high shelves full of books on every wall. There is a plate on the coffee table nearby with leftover pasta smeared all over it, and a small pile of soda cans and plastic water bottles.

            I take an achy breath, feeling the drugs fade at a snail’s pace. It’s not day, not yet. Not even close to sunrise. I must have been out an hour, two tops, which means that Mick didn’t carry me that far. Mick—Mick, what the fuck, Mick?—must have decided to stash me with—