Kiss of Vengeance (True Immortality 2) - Page 5

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As the bass thudded through the club like a heartbeat, Rose rubbed her fingers against her temple and ignored the clamor of calls from the club goers who wanted a drink from the bar.

She was done here.

Zagreb was a beautiful city. It had an interesting history, great architecture, a good vibe, and the people were friendly. But it was like a flip had switched inside her after the encounter with that strange girl and her

brother the night before.

Suddenly the music in the club was too loud, the hundreds of bodies claustrophobic, and their never-ending desire for alcohol irritating. Rose just wanted peace and quiet. Somewhere to lay her head so she could think straight.

Where to go from here?

Someone nudged her hard, and she looked up to see Josip frowning at her. He pointed to the waiting customers without saying a word. Rose sighed. There wasn’t much time left on her shift. The club was closing soon. She could finish up.

And then she’d finish up for good.

Mind whirring as she fixed a cocktail for a customer, it took a moment for the creeping sensation down her spine to take hold. She stiffened.

Someone was watching her.

Okay, she knew there was a crowd at the bar probably watching her, waiting their turn for drinks, but that wasn’t what she felt.

Someone was hunting her.

An inexplicable ominous feeling settled over her. A sudden dread in her gut.

Rose lowered the bottle of gin in her hand back onto the shelf as her heart raced hard and fast.

A memory slammed into her of one of the worst things that had ever happened to her. College. Freshman year. Her roommate had invited her to a fraternity house party. Halfway through the night, after downing shots that had no effect on her since she had an almost inhuman ability to hold her alcohol, Rose had felt it.

The sudden dread.

The creeping feeling of crawling flesh, as if someone wasn’t just watching her but hunting her. She’d thrown off the feeling as absurd. Until she’d climbed the stairs to the second floor of the frat house to find an empty bathroom and someone had attacked her from behind.

He’d covered her mouth with his hand as he’d hauled her into a dark bedroom.

Unfortunately, her attacker had thought she was drunk. He’d also underestimated her strength because of her slight build.

Rose was strong.

Exceptionally strong.

As he’d pinned her arms to the bed with one hand while he shoved his hand up her skirt with the other, Rose had unleashed that strength upon him. She’d yanked her arms free of his hold and shoved her hands against his body.

He’d flown across the room, crashing against the wall.

A still figure lying on the floor.

Fear had propelled her out of that room without even checking his identity.

Not that it mattered.

It was all over campus the next day that Judd Grant, a sophomore in the fraternity house, was dead. He’d died of a heart attack. Unusual for someone so young, yes. Not impossible.

The mystery had been the hole in his bedroom wall.

Rose’s hands shook at the memory. She’d told herself over and over for years that his death was not at her hands. Adrenaline had bolstered her strength that night. The heart attack was, however, just nature. A defect lying in wait.

And she wouldn’t feel guilty about it.

The boy was a would-be rapist.

What if he’d already raped other girls?

The trauma he’d possibly inflicted or intended to inflict was surely a factor in negating her guilt. All Rose had done was protect herself.

Now that feeling … that feeling of being hunted was back.

Turning, Rose searched the crowd around the bar. Faces blurred into faces, none of them standing out.

You’re being ridiculous.

Her eyes locked with a stranger’s, and her disquiet intensified.

The dark-haired stranger’s gaze sharpened on her. A smirk curled the upper corner of his mouth.

And then he just slipped away from the bar.

Disappearing into the crowd.

The crawling sensation abated but not the awful feeling in her gut.

Yes, it was definitely time to leave Zagreb.

Rose shook herself, willing her heart to calm, as she returned to mixing the cocktail. There wasn’t much of her savings left. Enough to get her to the next place and then she was out of funds unless she got a great-paying job. Maybe she should put that degree in marketing to good use and find a job that would allow her to save cash for the next time she wanted to move on.

The problem was any employer would look at her résumé and see someone who couldn’t settle down in one place for too long, and that was not an attractive quality in an employee.

Finally, the deejay announced the last track of the night and once it was over, Rose saw Ivan and two other security guards ushering the clubbers out. Ivan didn’t look her way at all.

He hadn’t all night.

When she’d passed him to take her break in the staff room, he’d given her a nod but invited no more interaction. Rose didn’t care. It was just an awkward reminder of why she slept with guys the night before she left town so she wouldn’t have to deal with them trying to ghost her.

Or vice versa.

And Rose was definitely ghosting Ivan.

Having slept with all kinds of men—short, tall, stocky, lean, athletic, nonathletic, plain, good-looking, and something in between—Rose had drawn some conclusions. The better-looking the guy in a traditional sense, the more selfish the lover. She imagined these guys thought they didn’t have to work for it. She’d even gotten the sense from one or two that they thought she should be grateful for their attention.

More and more, Rose had found herself drawn to guys who were attractive in a nontraditional way. Masculine, rugged, charming.

Ivan was all three.

She’d expected the comfort she’d been looking for last night. To be taken care of in bed before taking care of him in return.

Unfortunately, Ivan had slam-bam-thank-you-ma’am’ed her and didn’t seem to care if she reached satisfaction or not.

She hadn’t.

It was probably time to take a sabbatical from men. What had been fun, casual sex was becoming depressing. The encounters were growing increasingly disappointing and empty.

Rose looked up from the glasses she was cleaning to see Josip and Kali, her two colleagues for the evening, disappearing behind the Staff Only door.

Seeing the dirty glasses they’d left, she cursed them under her breath and set to cleaning up. Twenty minutes later, Rose was alone in the cavernous club, the bar cleaned and ready for use the next night.

Usually she’d be pissed at getting left to deal with the cleanup herself, but Rose was feeling relieved that it was her last night in the bar. She’d leave a note for her boss, Marko, whom she rarely saw anyway, to let him know she’d moved on.

Yet, where to go, where to go?

Wherever it was, the time was now. The empty club was feeling like a great place for someone to stage an attack.

Rose huffed, chastising herself for acting like a scaredy-cat, but it didn’t stop her from moving quickly. Once she’d collected her stuff and left a note on an old envelope in Marko’s office, Rose said good night to Noa, the security guard who was locking up.

“’Night, Rose.” He gave her a knowing grin, leering at her.

Ivan had talked.

She threw Noa a glower and turned left down the nearly empty street. The club was in Old Town, as was her apartment above the bakery. It was only a ten-minute walk north in the upper area of Old Town, yet as Rose left the club behind, she felt a crawling sensation down the back of her neck and spine again.

Shit.

She flicked a wary look over her shoulder but saw no one.

Heart racing, stomach roiling, she picked up her pace.

As Rose passed the familiar stores in the eerie stillness of the early morning, relief began to build. She was closing in on her apartment. She was almost there. When she got back to her apartment, she would give herself a good talking-to for letting the weird interaction with those siblings get to her. They’d made her jumpy for sure.

And that’s when it happened.

He came out of nowhere.

No footsteps at her back to warn her.

Strong arms, like metal

vises, bound around her, and then the world blurred into dark. Burning pain scored down her shoulder from her neck, and she gasped. Confusion had slowed her but the pain sharpened her focus.

She was in an alley.

Pinned against the brick wall of a building. It smelled of trash and urine.

A man’s head buried against her neck. Her arms caged against the wall by his hands.

Rose pushed against him as the gnawing sensation on her neck grew unbearable—

He lifted his head in a gasp and moonlight revealed him.

The man from the club tonight who had been staring at her.

Hunting her.

His eyes reflected pure, unnatural silver in the moonlight.

Blood smeared his chin and coated his fangs.

Fangs.

Disbelief and horror paralyzed Rose.

No …

He couldn’t be …

There was no such fucking thing.

He stared at her in wonder. “What are you?” he hissed through blood-soaked, long incisors.

Rose felt the blood pumping out of her body and knew he’d hit an artery. She didn’t have much time. If any.

She could stand there, disbelieving, refusing to accept the utter weirdness of the world and her eventual death … or she could fight this motherfucking vampire!

Vampire.

Something inside her, something primal, took over.

The pain receded as Rose snapped against the vampire’s hold with such force, he stumbled away from her. She used that momentum, lifting her right knee to slam her foot into his gut with all the strength inside her.

He flew and smacked against the opposite wall with a sickening thud of his skull.

Unlike Judd, however, he just shook his head and lifted it, preternatural silver eyes glowing in the dark as he bared his teeth and unleashed an animalistic growl. Then he was on her, a blur through the night that took her to the cold ground with so much force, her skull slammed into the concrete.

It was the kind of hit to the head that surely would’ve knocked out someone else, Rose thought vaguely as she blinked, stunned. Yet she had no time to think on this, and not because the vampire was on her again, his teeth piercing the flesh on the other side of her neck.

Tags: Samantha Young True Immortality Fantasy
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