The headlights of an approaching car shone from below their stopping place several seconds before it crested the hill into view and came to a stop in front of the sedan. Matthias squinted to see inside the silver SUV, his heart speeding up as Stoneface’s words sank in. “What do you mean, start a new life?”
“You’ll see.” Stoneface threw the keys to the handcuffs in a clump of leaves to Matthias’s right and walked to the passenger-side door of the sedan. Ugly had already slid behind the wheel. Stoneface looked back. “You have fucked things up for a lot of people, Matthias Ludlam. Tonight was just a job, but if I ever lay eyes on you when I’m not on the company payroll, I will tear out your fucking throat.”
He got in the vehicle with a slam, Ugly cranked it up, and they pulled away, leaving Matthias to face the mysteries ahead.
Perhaps by “start a new life,” Stoneface had meant a rebirth in the heavenly realm, or whatever afterlife one believed in. But Matthias suspected that maybe, just maybe, he’d gotten a reprieve.
And where there was a reprieve, there was the chance for revenge.
CHAPTER 1
Cage Reynolds sighed in relief when the 727 began its descent to Atlanta’s Hartsfield-Jackson International Airport. Vampires and long red-eye flights made bad companions, even if the vampire in question wasn’t claustrophobic. An unexpected delay that trapped a plane on a runway after sunrise would lead to a very public frying.
Frying publicly in the midst of a planeload of humans would truly suck.
Now that he’d arrived on American soil, Cage let his thoughts travel to Penton, Alabama, his ultimate destination. He’d gone there six months ago to gauge if master vampire Aidan Murphy’s idea of a scathe community that could weather the current “vampire apocalypse” could work in Cage’s native London.
He’d fled like a coward three months later with way more baggage than he’d bargained for, including friends—a scarce commodity for a nomad—and a woman who’d awakened in him a compassion so alien he thought he’d lost it a century earlier.
Penton had gotten complicated.
If Cage had learned anything in his seventy-five years as a vampire, it was this: keep things simple. Caring hurt. Loving killed. The fight—that was what filled the empty spaces of a life that stretched on too long. The adrenaline rush of besting an enemy, of taking down a despot, of feeling a power so strong it filled those voids in his deadened heart.
Now? Melissa Calvert, a human turned vampire barely three months ago, held his future in her small, fragile palm.
When Aidan had called and asked him to return and help shore up security before the upcoming Tribunal elections, Cage had leapt at the chance, even though the idea of facing Melissa again set his heart thumping—whether out of fear or guilt, he wasn’t sure.
All he knew was that he’d found her being held captive, had saved her, had let her transfer all of her gratitude to him, had let her call it love. He’d planned to fuck her and flee; that was his MO, after all.
He’d fled, all right, his reawakened conscience bristling after having done no more than kiss her. Somehow she’d reached inside and touched him. Appealed to the part of him that had been a psychiatrist in his human life. Burrowed past the thick outer shell of the soldier of fortune he’d become since being turned. Brushed gentle fingers against the nerve endings still raw after Paris.
He wouldn’t think about Paris.
So here he was again, moving toward Penton—only this time he hoped to stay. To finally make a home for himself. If Melissa could forgive him. If she accepted his admission that he’d fucked up by letting her care for him, for allowing her to think they had a future. He loved her, but not in that stay-with-me-forever kind of bond that vampires instinctively formed when they met their intended mate.
Cage Reynolds was not a bond-mate type of vampire. And Melissa Calvert was not a casual fuck-buddy kind of woman.
If she accepted the truth and didn’t poison the rest of the town against him, then maybe Cage the Wandering Boy could finally stop roaming. God knew there was enough drama in the vampire world these days to keep even the most jaded adrenaline junkie happy. Starvation. Civil unrest. Political intrigue. Penton was a veritable oasis in that desert of chaos, now that Matthias Ludlam was out of the picture; once Aidan took a seat on the Tribunal, maybe other places could follow Penton’s example.
Then again, the people of Penton might only see Cage as the selfish bastard who ruined Mark and Melissa Calvert’s perfect marriage.
The lights of Atlanta fanned out below him, growing from twinkles to dots to streetlights as the plane lowered its landing gear and approached the runway.