Chapter 1

I was a vampire hunter's lowest blood-slave, and the vampire noble Lucian von Karstein fell in love with me. He turned against his entire family for my sake.

But there was a curse in my blood: if I let myself love him, I would die.

So I had no choice but to trample on everything he felt and force us apart. That day, I threw away the family crest he treasured most.

And then, in the middle of the night, after he'd fallen asleep, he came out to dig through the trash for it.

"Good thing the scavengers didn't get it. Look at the detail in this crest."

It was almost midnight. The streetlamp gave off a dim, sleepy glow. I crouched by the trash station, picked up the crest, and wiped the grease off it with my sleeve.

The curse stirred warm in my chest—the hunter’s blood rising in warning. Don’t be good to him. You’ll get yourself killed.

I bit my lip and ignored it.

My ancestor was the hunter the Vampire Council feared most. She killed seventeen pureblood nobles, and her name is carved into the Council's list of dangers.

To make sure every generation after her carried on that work, she planted a curse in our blood.

If any descendant feels something for a vampire, sides with a vampire, or abandons the hunt, the curse activates.

The first time, it's a needle. The second time, a knife. The third time, the blood tears the heart apart from the inside.

The Hunters' Guild lost a confrontation once and had to offer a hostage to a vampire family. So they treated me like an object and shipped me north, to the vampire noble Lucian von Karstein.

Four years ago, I had seen him.

I was fourteen that year, freshly run away from the countryside.

I'd drifted around a long-distance bus station for a while, then found work at a restaurant.

After I scalded the back of my hand, the owner threw me out. I had nowhere to sleep and nowhere to go.

I was sitting on a bridge railing, staring at nothing, when I met a man.

He wore a black coat with a silver bat crest pinned at the collar.

Under the streetlamp his skin was almost translucent, and his eyes were a deep, unreadable red-brown.

His gaze was heavy and very still. He had the look of a handsome, elegant prince out of a fairy tale, and for a moment I couldn't pull my eyes away from him.

He stopped, looked at me for three seconds, then walked over. “You’re hurt.”

He took me out for the first McDonald's of my life, then to a hospital to treat the burn, then dropped me off at a school.

Then he took an envelope out of his coat pocket and tucked it under the bottom of the paper bag.

“Don’t let anyone else write your story,” he said.

I counted the money in that envelope later. Eighty thousand dollars. A stranger gave a girl crouched on a bridge railing eighty thousand dollars.

Back then, in my eyes, he was a god.

Four years later, the Holts told me the man I was being sent to was named Lucian von Karstein. The youngest vampire noble in the north, heir to House Karstein.

I searched for his photo online. He wore a black tailcoat with a silver crest, his face cold and sharp, his eyes a deep, dark red.

I recognized him.

I was delivered to his castle as a slave. The lowest kind, the kind you could dispose of however you liked.

The Holts stuffed me into an airtight carriage and left me with one sentence. "When you get there, don't embarrass the family."

The carriage arrived at night. An old vampire who looked like a steward ran his eyes over me with a list in his hand, then gave a snort. "A human slave? The Council's taste really is getting worse."

He handed me off to the head maid, a vampire woman who'd lived three hundred years. The wrinkles on her face looked like a cracked riverbed, and she looked at me the way you'd look at a piece of rotting meat.

"You'll live in the junk room," she said. "Don't go into the main building, don't appear anywhere the master can see you, don't touch any of the antiques. Every day you'll clean the abandoned kennels."

There was dried blood crusted in the cracks of the kennel floor, and the air reeked of rot and rust. My quarters were a windowless stone partition beside the kennels. One iron door, a bundle of moldy hay, a small lamp I had to fill with oil myself. The oil was handed out once a week, half a bowl at a time.

My job was washing clothes, not with my hands, with my teeth.

The head maid said real slaves bit the stubborn stains off the collars, and she piled every task the other servants refused to do onto me.

I knelt in the laundry room biting cold linen, my mouth full of the taste of fibers and blood.

Around me, the other servants laughed.

"A vampire hunter? Hah. My dog's worth more than her."

"Look at that face. Doesn't it look like a rag scorched ruined by silver?"

By the third day my throat had gone too dry and too frightened to make a sound. No one gave me water.

While I bit the clothes, I would sneak a lick from the wash basin, fishy and cold, but at least it kept me alive.

On the nineteenth day, I saw Lucian come home.