A vampire and a werewolf who don’t kill challenge the young demon hunter who does.
Rose is an eighty-year-old vampire, and Simon is the sweet werewolf she’s chosen as a companion now that she’s moved to Meridian to join the Alliance, a promise among hybrids like vampires and werewolves that they won’t kill humans, in exchange for demon hunters leaving them alone to focus on more dangerous threats.
However, Lis Song is also new to Meridian, and her mentor, who taught her how to hunt from a young age, doesn’t hold with the philosophy of the Alliance. After protecting the worst parts of town wherever they go, they’ve witnessed no evidence that a demon is anything but a monster.
But when Rose and Simon save Lis from a family of vampires, she’s forced to confront the possibility that the only life she’s known might not be the only way.
Reader advisory: This book includes multiple relationships MF, FF, FMF, the implication of sexual assault, mentions of child abduction, cult-like tendencies, moral absolutism, domestic violence; exhibitionism, public sex, vampiric bloodplay, and scenes of graphic violence.
General Release Date: 28th October 2025
The line out from Sordid didn’t curve around the corner, but it was still ten o’clock before Rose made it to the front. However, once there, the bouncer immediately pulled back the velvet rope to let her in.
Becoming a vampire didn’t make a person much more beautiful but for smoother, firmer skin and the healthiest of hair and nails, which continued to grow after undeath. However, vampires did tend to change humans who fit their ideal of beauty. They preferred not to forge deeper connections with humans, only the vampires they became, and, given their long lives in the dark, they almost always chose a lovely view.
She wouldn’t have been the only lovely view in line for the historic downtown speakeasy, but the way she displayed that view certainly didn’t hurt—nor the way the bouncer’s neck scars stretched up from under his shirt collar as he turned.
Rose’s gold heels were thin and high, but she didn’t struggle on the steps down into the building’s basement. Despite the dim red-tinged light—a staple for bars and clubs, but also a courtesy for Sordid’s more nocturnal patrons—she could see the whole room clearly from its entrance.
She wasn’t old enough to have attended speakeasies in their heyday, but she’d visited a number of dance and novelty clubs around Meridian since arriving a week ago, and already she liked Sordid better than most. A band at the front played low and slow, if not soft, with a torch singer whose voice was so sultry Rose wondered if her blood would taste of smoke.
In dance clubs, there was freedom in losing oneself to the music, to a rhythm so strong she thought her heart might be beating again, but it could also be so many flashing lights and sounds that she couldn’t hear herself think even when she wanted to. Here, the bass provided a gentler pulse, the upright piano tingled emotion over her skin, while the singer’s smoky alto thrummed something deeper, but she could also hear her own thoughts, and other people didn’t have to shout to be heard. Sordid was not a place to discourage whispers or first or second thoughts. As the lights were dimmer for night eyes, the music was more tolerable for those with keen ears. Her senses all let out a sigh of relief as she stepped into the speakeasy.
There were roughly a hundred to a hundred twenty-five people in the relatively small basement, which was the reason for the line, although it was difficult to get a good count due to privacy curtains in the booths and a hallway that would lead to private rooms.
The speakeasy was strict about no money changing hands except between bouncer, bartender, or band. Everything else was barter, which was no different from any other venue that encouraged shallow carnality between its patrons.
She left the bar with a frosted glass of red to weave through the crowd.
One thing that set her apart from the rest was that she’d come alone. Most people in Sordid arrived in groups, from couples to packs, regardless of species. Safety in numbers meant safety for curiosity, with members of one group or couple sometimes breaking away to join another, mingling on the dance floor like tentative watercolors to the hypnotic, evocative, seductive music coming from the stage.
Rose was tempted to ask if the woman was a siren but decided to simply leave a good tip at the stage edge. The singer, with meticulously crafted finger curls, glistening red lips, and a glittering black dress, glanced down over her ribbon microphone and locked dark eyes with Rose. Then her gaze drifted down. Rose stood still, allowing the singer to take her time over the slinky liquid dress the color of pewter, loose enough that the thin straps threatened to fall away from her full breasts at the slightest provocation if Rose didn’t know how to hold herself, or how to be perfectly, predatorially still. In Sordid, there was no reason to pretend she was anything but what she was.
She’d moved down to Texas because she’d wanted to finally enjoy solitude, and space, and rooftops, and beautiful windows that never slanted sunlight onto her bed but still brought daylight into her world. Yet she’d only been in Meridian alone for a week and already felt…lonely. A little over twenty years as human, a little over sixty as a vampire, she didn’t think she’d ever been completely alone.
As a vampire of a vaunted and tight-knit family home, she hadn’t been able to really choose her own company since she’d died—until she’d packed up all her beautiful things and signed away her right by blood to remain or return without going through the same channels as any outsider.
She didn’t think she’d ever return.
That didn’t mean there weren’t things about her decision that were difficult, even frightening, although she was usually the creature in the dark that people feared.
The delicate titanium cuff on her ear and the oath in new ink around her wrist, however, indicated to those who knew what they meant that she was safer than most. And Sordid was an Alliance business. Not a demon club, where humans were victims, servants, slaves, or hunters trying to prove they were badass and unafraid. The Alliance was an agreement between vampires, werewolves, and hunters in Meridian that none would hunt the species of the others, as long as the hybrids were marked well enough for hunters to notice in the dark. Urban werewolf packs could run freely through city parks after dark, aiding the coyotes and bobcats in controlling the rodent, rabbit, and deer populations. Vampires could live peacefully off butcher blood and voluntary donors with a promise not to kill or turn. Hunters could focus their efforts on hybrids more inclined toward carnage.
The Alliance wasn’t universally beloved, even among those who’d agreed to it, as evidenced by the occasional glower between the three camps coexisting within Sordid’s walls. Sometimes mistakes were made or someone tried to use the Alliance to get away with murder. But the last twelve years had been a largely successful experiment, which was why Rose had moved to a completely different city in a completely different state, all by herself for the first time in decades.
And looking for someone who might make this freedom all the sweeter.
The torch singer was sweet indeed, and the shift of her body and cant of her hips suggested she thought the same about Rose in her evening gown, her inked oath and former family crest, her Art Deco diamond and emerald pendant—a gift from her sire long ago, chosen because of the way her cleavage framed it. The lower the singer sang, the more Rose wanted to draw her down to the dance floor and against her body so she could swallow the vibrations.
Rose sipped from her drink, unblinking, enjoying the music both close to the instruments and coming from the speakers and the waves of desire emanating from the singer, rising in something reminiscent of heat low in Rose’s abdomen.
Large, hot hands smoothed over her shoulders, threatening the straps so carefully placed to keep herself as decent as a woman needed to be in a place like this. The man imposed but did not expose, trailed his palms down her arms before he pressed gently behind her.
“Beautiful woman like you shouldn’t be alone.” A subtle growl in the voice shivered like the singer’s alto over and under Rose’s skin. There was something so very alive in the stranger’s heat and scent, heightened by the animal musk entwined with it. “I can see that you can take care of yourself, but you wouldn’t have to with me.”
Rose was tall in her heels, and the man still had to angle his head to rest his cheek on her shorn scalp, where his stubble was rougher than hers. She briefly leaned back in his hold, relishing his scent—all the vitality of a human and all the virility of a werewolf spilling from every pore and responding to the pheromones from hers. Perfumiers of her family home made colognes from both to sell to those who could afford not to ask the price.
He dragged his lips over her scalp and whispered in her ear, “Meet me there.” He pointed to a booth currently occupied by another werewolf–vampire pair, both wearing titanium cuffs on their ears as well. The vampire was buried deep in the werewolf’s shoulder. “I’m going to get myself a stiff drink, and you can get a real drink from me. Someone like you doesn’t have to be alone for long.”
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