All Chapters of A Date with the Future: Chapter 1 - Chapter 4

Ashgrove Hall had a way of feeling emptier every time Damon came home to it, which struck him as an impressive feat for a building with sixty rooms and a staff of forty.He rode back from the Hollow Bridge alone, the way he'd come, and let the horse pick its own pace through the dark. Vampires didn't need horses, not really; he could have run the distance faster on foot and arrived without breaking the composure he'd spent three hundred years learning to keep. But there was something steadying about the ride, about the ordinary rhythm of hooves on packed earth, that he wasn't ready to give up yet.Selene was waiting on the front steps when he arrived, which meant someone had already ridden ahead with the news. Selene always knew before he did. It was, depending on the day, either the most useful or the most irritating thing about her."You're not dead," she observed, taking the horse's reins from him without being asked. "So either the meeting went well, or the wolves have terrible ai

The first course arrived before either of them had found anything safe to talk about, which Damon privately considered a mercy, since it gave his hands something to do besides betray how closely he'd been watching her across the table.The Council had spared no expense on the theater of it: a clear broth that steamed faintly in the candlelight, poured by a silent attendant who refused to meet anyone's eyes, the kind of dish designed to be picked at slowly while conversation, not food, did the real work of the evening. Damon had attended a hundred dinners like this one over the centuries, treaty dinners, mourning dinners, the careful diplomatic choreography of two sides pretending civility while quietly measuring each other for weakness. He had never attended one where he'd had to fight this hard not to stare at his dinner companion instead of his plate."So," Elena said, breaking the silence first, which he was already coming to understand was simply how she operated: never comfortabl