Twenty minutes later, we cloistered ourselves away in the office space above the club. When we’d arrived, we found a DJ was performing for the majority of the night. The mood was upbeat, exciting, and loud. Matthias ordered our drinks and took me upstairs to a suite of offices used by club management. As a partial owner, he had access and it was much quieter, even with the thumping music bleeding up through the floors.

The office wasn’t large, but had enough space for a desk, a series of bookshelves, and a couple small couches. I’d taken one couch and kicked off my shoes before getting comfortable. Matthias took over the opposite couch and placed his glass on the low-profile table between us.

“I’m sorry it didn’t go the way you thought it would,” he said.

I sighed and leaned back against the couch. “I thought seeing Cara would make me feel better,” I mused, swirling my glass. “That doing something was better than sitting around wondering. But now I feel worse than before. Now I know she’s in danger, and there’s still nothing I can do to help.”

“Maybe Cara was wrong,” Matthias countered. “I’m still not sold on her whole magic powers thing.”

I leveled a glance at him. “Your mouth dropped just as fast as mine did when she brought up Jupiter. How else would she have known that’s why we’d come? Wouldn’t she assume that my visit would be about the tournament or my sister, something else? I doubt many people at Court or elsewhere would even remember that Jupiter and I are friends.”

I frowned into my glass. “Trust me. I wish she was wrong. But that was real. She saw something.”

“Does your father still have people looking for her? That was part of the deal, right?”

“He says he does. I’d like to think he’s telling me the truth, but with him,” I finished the thought with a shrug. “He won’t let me speak to the investigators and all I got from the household staff was they think Jupe was some kind of gold-digger just hanging around long enough to find a pair of coattails to ride to nobility.”

Matthias looked like he caught a foul scent. “Jupiter?”

“Yeah,” I scoffed. A flicker of a memory danced at the edge of my mind and I considered Matthias. He still looked disgusted and angry at the second-hand accusation. “How was it that you and Jupiter met anyway?”

“There’s a book club at the Sleepy Hollow library. She’d gone for years. I started going when I first got back to town. Before I leased the condo, I was staying at one of the Hartford properties in town. My mother was always hanging around and I started using the library as a temporary office. They advertised a book club and I figured, why not. I expected mostly humans, actually. Which was just fine with me.” He paused and something about the lines of his mouth formed a question mark in my mind. “Jupiter was there and we got to talking afterward.”

“Did you … like her?”

Stars, I’d never even gone to high school and I sounded like I’d reverted back. What was next? Asking him to give me his letterman jacket?

“We have a lot in common and always had good conversations, but I wasn’t in a place to really think about her as anything more than a friend.”

“What does that mean? Not in a place?”

Matthias hesitated, his eyes fixed on the table between us. “There are pieces of my past I haven’t told you about, Lacey. Parts that I don’t tell anyone about.”

“I see.”

I’d sensed Matthias’s walls before, but hadn’t run my face into one head-on before. The impact of his words stung but I offered a slight smile and gave an affirming nod. “It’s all right. I get it. Believe me, I understand what it’s like to be the girl with the complicated backstory. Back in Beechwood Harbor, the town where I hid out the last five years, I only just got around to telling my roommates who my father is.” I laughed, the sound dry and brittle. “I was so determined to leave it all in the past and reinvent myself that I think I turned myself inside out a little bit in the process.”

Matthias lifted his eyes. He didn’t say anything, but it was clear he was listening.

“I never let anyone get close to me because I always knew I was living on borrowed time. As much as I wanted to pretend I was out of my father’s reach, there was always a little voice in the back of my head, or a prickle on the back of my neck, reminding me that I don’t belong to myself. My life was mapped out from the first day, and while I could deviate a little, in the end, I’d be placed back in my so-called rightful place. I mean, you were there, you heard what my mother said. She loves me. I know that. But even she doesn’t try to fight for my freedom. To her—and everyone else—I’m a Legacy Bearer. My only job is to make sure House Vaughn is secure and retains control of the Eastern Court.”

“Maybe more than just the East,” Matthias said softly.

I looked at him and tilted my head.

“I won’t pretend to know your father’s plans, but it hasn’t escaped anyone’s notice that several of the suitors he selected are from the other Courts.”

He was right; the Falcon twins were from the North. Leo Parrish, Matthias’s next opponent, was of the South. Ivan had been from the East. I’d noticed it, but hadn’t attributed any weight to it. Not until Matthias put the framing in place.

“You don’t think—” I stopped short when Matthias nodded.

“It makes sense,” he said. “Something is going on, Lacey. I wouldn’t be surprised if this entire tournament was just an elaborate set of smoke and mirrors.”

“But what is he trying to hide?”

“I don’t know.” Matthias looked away for a long moment. “My gut tells me it has something to do with all the newly turned vamps running around the haven.”

I chewed on my lower lip. When Matthias’s eyes returned to mine, I whispered, “He told me he’d kill Jerrod if he advances past the next fight.”

Matthias didn’t look surprised. Which only made me feel sicker. I really was the daughter of a monster. Did everyone expect me to be the same? Was that the only path I had to follow? One of brutality and tyranny?

“What if the whole thing is already decided?” I asked, knowing there wasn’t a good answer. “If he’s got some kind of plan lined up, he wouldn’t leave the winner to chance, would he?”

“I don’t know, Lacey. Considering I’m one round from the finale, I’d like to think I have as much of a chance as any other competitor, but I also know how your father operates.”

Bitterness twisted his last words and kicked my curiosity into a new tailspin. “Why don’t you just leave? Lose the fight before the stakes get raised.”

“I can’t.”

I narrowed my eyes at him. “I don’t get it. Sure, your mother would be angry if you left the haven, but what could she really do to make you stay? Take away your shiny penthouse and luxury car? Is that what’s holding you here?”

Flames sparked behind his eyes, the emerald green ringed with dark grey. “You don’t know anything about me or my ties to this place.”

“Then tell me,” I hissed. “Instead of always telling me what I don’t know about you, try telling me why you hang around, doing her bidding, to the point of risking your own life and future. Hartford is a powerful House, but she doesn’t have the ability to send a horde of guards after you if you just disappeared. So, there has to be a reason, and I can’t see one. What happened to you, Matthias? Where were you? You always talk about coming back to Court. Where were you before that? Why did you come back?”

He met my eyes and the anger radiating from them made the breath catch in the back of my throat.

“I don’t owe you an explanation,” he snarled.

I shot to my feet, not taking my eyes off him for even a fraction of a second. “I’m out of here. I would say ‘enjoy your last weeks of freedom’ but I’m starting to think you like captivity.”

Spinning on my heel, I whipped around lightning-fast and stalked for the door. We’d taken Matthias’s car, but this time of night, it would be easy to find a vamp-cab and with enough money, I’d easily talk one into taking me back to Tarrytown.

I didn’t need Matthias, and I’d decided I didn’t want him either. Whatever nudging and wondering my brain had been doing was clearly to be chalked up to temporary insanity, brought on by my homecoming.

Right. That made sense.

Completely.

It was ridiculous how much I’d let my imagination get carried away. Matthias was just another vampire. I should have listened to my first gut instinct and ignored him from the start. What had I really expected? Dumb, dumb, dumb.

Resisting the urge to turn back and tell him exactly what I thought of him—which would have totally interrupted my dramatic exit—I flung open the door of the office and started down the hall.

I missed the sound at first, too consumed with my own internal ranting, and a second too late, heard Matthias’s footfalls behind me. His hand clenched my wrist and spun me back around to face him. Heat and fury seethed from his every pore. “You want to know why I’m here? Why I came back?”

“Yes!” I shouted.

He leaned in, dropping his voice to a harsh growl. “I was blackmailed. It was either come back and be the good son, or watch the woman I loved get killed.”

A sharp knife plunged into my chest, stealing my breath. “Wh-what?”

“Two years ago, I left Court life. I left the haven. I went to California for what was supposed to be a three-month business trip. At first, my mother was fine with it, happy even. But when I kept pushing my return out farther and farther, she started to get irritated. Eventually she sent two of my cousins out to see what was going on. They showed up at my hotel room and I wasn’t alone.” Matthias bit out the words, each one of them clipped and hard. “I’d met a woman during my time there. She worked at the hotel bar. But, she wasn’t a vampire and I had no intention of turning her into one.”

“Did she know about you?”

Matthias’s jaw tensed and for a moment he didn’t answer, he just stared, his now nearly black eyes boring into mine. “No. I cared about her. There was a part of me that wanted to tell her, but every time I tried to think of how to bring it up, I’d get lost and give up.”

“What happened to her?” I whispered, almost sure I didn’t want to know the rest of the story. From the hate and pain in Matthias’s eyes, it was clear the story didn’t have a good ending.

“My cousins went straight to my mother and told her what was going on. She went to your father. They paid me a visit a few days later and told me that if I wanted to turn Sylvia, I could keep her. That’s how they said it, like Sylvia was a stray cat.” He ground his teeth. “When I refused, your father told me that it was time to come back to Court and made it clear that he wasn’t above permanent measures to get the human out of my life. My mother said it was her job to keep her children from playing with fire and that sometimes the best way to do that was to snuff it out herself.”

He didn’t need to spell it out. Old Houses like ours weren’t concerned with fitting into society—human or otherwise. My father and Matthias’s mother were two peas in a terrifying little pod. They didn’t care if their children loved them—only that they obeyed them.

“I’m sorry,” I said, my voice soft.

Matthias looked away, his jaw tight. “I hate this place. I hate everything about it. The rituals, the blood, the hierarchy and the Court. Sometimes I—” He stopped and swallowed hard. His eyes shifted, the hardness fading. “The last thing I would ever want to do is enter myself into some blood tournament and parade around as free entertainment for the Court’s benefit, but I didn’t have much of a choice about that either, and at that point, I didn’t much care anymore. I figured win or lose, what difference did it make?”

“And now?” I asked, barely taking a breath.

“Then, I met you, and you were … different. You’re nothing like your father.”

A bitter smile twisted my lips. “A compliment if I ever heard one.”

He moved in closer, his own expression still firm, but no longer blazing with barely checked anger. “I never thought I would meet another vampire who was like me. Who thought like I did. Then you showed up and I’ve been questioning everything ever since.”

“I didn’t think I would either,” I replied softly.

“It’s hard for me to be around you,” he said, the words pained.

“Why?”

“Because I’m falling in love with you and I know that there’s a chance you’re going to get taken away from me before we ever get to see what might be.”

My heart lurched, unable to quite believe the words that were still echoing in my mind.

Matthias’s hand settled on my hip and I took a half step forward, until we were inches apart. “This isn’t what I planned on, but standing here with you, I don’t think there’s another one I want to take.”

There were dozens of questions and worries and possibilities, but they all went silent when Matthias lowered his mouth to mine, capturing my lips in a delicate kiss that drove out everything else.

Nothing remained but the sound of our heartbeats racing down the unknown road ahead.