I Disappeared Before My Vampire Mate Could Turn Me

Nine days left.Conrad cleared his entire schedule for the week. No Elder Council meetings. No territory disputes. Nothing.The Dominion treated it like a second miracle.I didn't say anything. I just watched him cross things off his calendar and thought about the unbinding spell working quietly through my bloodstream.—Day three was the anniversary of my mother's death.She'd been gone for four years. Every year on this date I went to the small cemetery in Queens, left white lilies, and sat with her for a while.Conrad remembered without me telling him."I'll come with you," he said that morning. "We'll go at sunset, before the district business starts.""You don't have to.""She mattered to you. Of course I'll come."Sunset came. I was dressed and ready at the front door by six.At six-fifteen, my phone buzzed with a message from Elias.Running late — he says go ahead and he'll meet you there.I stood at the front door for another minute.Then I went alone.—I sat with my mother fo

The day of the Turning ceremony.I woke before sunset and lay still for a few minutes, listening to the manor.Downstairs, staff were already moving. Someone at the front entrance was directing a flower delivery. Hundreds of moonflowers. Conrad had ordered them three weeks ago, personally reviewed every stem, sent back two entire shipments because the blooms weren't fully open.He had put more care into choosing flowers for a ceremony I was never going to attend than he had put into a single one of the evenings I'd waited for him alone.I got up, showered, and dressed in ordinary clothes.Not the gown. The gown was in the storage room down the hall where I'd put it four days ago. I hadn't looked at it since.I did one last walk through the room.Three years of living in this space and almost nothing here was actually mine. The furniture was Conrad's. The art on the walls was Conrad's. The heavy drapes that blocked out daylight, the blood-ward etchings above every doorframe, the faint c

I was in Prague when the trial started.My east-facing apartment had a window that caught the morning light before anything else in the building. I had chosen it for exactly that reason — morning light, human hours, a life that ran on the sun instead of the moon.Elias found me through a human-world email address I hadn't thought to close. He was careful about what he said. Just facts. Dates. Outcomes. No editorializing. No apologies on Conrad's behalf. Just information, delivered with the same quiet professionalism he'd applied to every other aspect of his job.I read his messages over coffee with the morning light coming in. Each one a small, clean piece of a picture I already mostly understood.—Isabeau's personal archivist turned on her voluntarily.His name was Henri. He had served her household for sixty-two years, handled her correspondence, maintained her records, catalogued every letter and document and notation she had ever produced. He was, by all accounts, devoted to her.