The Vampire Lord's Substitute Bride

Hazel Sterling POV:

"Hey, kid. You sure this is the place?"

The driver watched me in the rearview mirror while his wipers fought the rain. Mud ran down the glass. Past it, the pines went up in black columns and did not stop.

"Yes." I let go of my cuff. The wool was frayed along the edge. "This is it."

"If you say so. Nobody lives this far out unless they're hiding from the law. Or something worse."

He shifted into park and hauled my suitcase into the rain. The trunk slammed. His tires spun in the mud and he was gone, gravel spraying behind him, as though something had already started after the car.

I stood alone in the cold, holding the lapels of a cashmere coat that wasn't mine. It belonged to my half-sister, Chloe. So did this entire arrangement.

Thirty thousand dollars.

That was the number on the hospital notice folded in my back pocket. My mother was dying in a ward fifty miles south. The Sterlings had named their terms without once calling it a price. If I took Chloe's place and married the man they had exiled to the woods, and stayed a full year, they would clear the medical debt.

I breathed in pine and wet stone, squared my shoulders, and dragged the suitcase up the rotting steps.

I raised my fist to knock.

The door swung in before my knuckles touched wood. It had not been latched at all.

"Hello?" I pushed my voice up into the pitch Chloe used on service workers. "Is anyone here? The porch is a swamp."

One iron lamp burned in the corner. The room beyond it was bare timber and exposed stone. No television. No clutter. A long table, a shelf of heavy books in dark leather, and cold coming off the walls like the inside of a cellar.

A man sat on a leather sofa by the dead hearth.

He did not move. He did not speak. He was so still that for one bad second I was certain I was looking at a body.

Then he stood.

I stopped breathing for a moment, and it wasn't the cold that did it.

Duskport said Julian Beaumont was a scarred brute, a drunk who fought in bars and had been thrown out of the world. The man coming out of the shadow was none of that. He was well past six feet, broad through the shoulders, in a faded black shirt and worn denim. His jaw was sharp. His hair was black and wet from the rain.

His eyes were the problem. They were dark to the point of no color, and there was nothing in them that had ever needed anything from anyone.

He looked at me the way a man reads a ledger. I felt stripped down to the numbers.

"What are you staring at?" I said, chin up, doing my best impression of Chloe. "Haven't you seen a girl before?"

The corner of his mouth moved. It was not a smile.

"Bring your bag inside."

His voice was low and it carried through the floorboards. Something in my spine answered it before my head could weigh in.

I dragged the case over the threshold. The cabin was spotless. There was a long wooden table, the shelf of books, and a silence with weight to it.

He picked up a sheet of cream paper and held it out.

"Read it. Sign it."

I stepped in and took it. My fingers brushed his knuckles.

I pulled my hand back fast.

His skin was not cold the way winter is cold. It was cold like stone that has never once been warm and never planned to be. My heart went loud in my chest.

"What is this?" I asked, keeping my face flat.

"The terms. One year. No physical contact. No questions about my affairs, and I won't ask about yours. You keep the house. At the end of twelve months the arrangement ends and you go."

I read it twice. Sharp, elegant handwriting. It was exactly what I needed. I picked up the pen and signed the name I had been paid to wear: Chloe Sterling.

His eyes rested on my hand for half a second. He took the paper back without a word.

"The bedroom is through that door." He nodded at the only closed door down the hall. "It's yours. I sleep here."

I blinked. "You're giving me the bed?"

"Take it before I reconsider."

I didn't wait. I grabbed the suitcase, went into the bedroom, and threw the iron bolt.

The room smelled of cedar and something older underneath, like air after lightning. I put my back to the door and listened.

Nothing.

No footsteps. No creak of the sofa. Not even breathing.

Ten minutes. Then twenty. The silence got heavier the longer I stood in it.

I crouched and looked through the gap under the door.

He was at the tall window, standing straight in the dark, hands behind his back, watching the rain come down. He wasn't sitting. He wasn't lying down. He wasn't doing anything a man alone in a house at midnight does.

His chest did not move. Not once.

I got back into the bed and pulled the quilt to my chin. I lay there for hours, waiting for one sound of a human being on the other side of that wall.

None came.