“Nathan!” I call, my voice hoarse. “Nathan! Where the fuck are you?”
The living room—if you can call it that—is empty. So is the bedroom and the dry, grimy bathroom. I scream for him again, not caring if I’m waking his neighbors, but I know it’s pointless.
He’s gone.
I’m too late.
He must’ve called me right before he left, probably because he knew I’d try to stop him.
Ice twists through my belly. I’m shaking, and my face is wet with tears, even though I can’t feel them falling. Shit. I haven’t cried in a long time, and I’m pissed off that I’m crying now.
Dammit, Nathan. What the hell could be so bad that you had to go to the fucking vampires?
He’s got piles of paper stacked around the place, mostly scrap paper with notes scribbled all over in his slanted, erratic handwriting. Shopping lists are mixed up with horse’s names, and random dates and dollar amounts are scribbled all over everything. Crouching on the floor of his living room, I riffle through pile after pile until I come across a piece of paper with a phone number written in a beautiful, old-fashioned hand. Of course it’s written in red. Vampires are dramatic bitches. Beside it, Call Mikka is circled twice.
“Okay, but what did you do?” I mutter. “What the hell did you get yourself into, Nathan?”
When I flip the paper over, my heart sinks. It’s an itemized bill from a bookie, totaling hundreds of thousands of dollars. At the bottom, in Nathan’s handwriting, is a dollar amount for slightly more, with Blood Tribute Minimum Bid written beside it.
My hands start to shake even worse, and the scrawled note blurs in my vision as I blink away new tears. I put the paper down before my trembling fingers can accidentally rip it.
“You idiot,” I growl, grinding my fists into the filthy carpet. “You absolute fucking idiot!”
I should have known. I should have stopped this. Certain people in this town talk about vampires the way other people talk about loan sharks or hooking. If you can’t pay your bill, they’ll point at those goddamn monsters and say look, I know you’re not really trying, because if you were, you would have explored all the options. I should have seen this coming, dammit. Nathan already told me he sold sex once to pay a bill, and I’ve already bailed him out from under a loan shark before. This is the final stop on the debt train, but I never thought he would go this far. Never.
My brain is a chaotic mess, and I grind my teeth together, trying to organize my thoughts.
Think, dammit. Come on, Mikka. Focus.
The note says minimum bid, so he’s clearly not selling himself directly. He must’ve pledged himself to the auction house—the place people go to offer themselves up to the vampires of Baltimore as “tributes.”
I’ve never been inside it, but I know where it is. Downtown, there’s a bar. Behind the bar is a strip club, which is a front for the whorehouse in the basement. Behind that basement is another, larger basement which used to be attached to a museum. The museum doesn’t exist anymore, but the security measures are still in place. It’s impossible to get in unseen—and, from what I can tell, it’s impossible to get out at all.
So, fuck it, I won’t even try to get in without being seen. I’ll do the exact opposite.
I won’t be the first woman to offer myself up to the vampires willingly, not by a long shot. It happens all the time. All I have to do is play dumb and pretend I’ve watched too many sparkle-emo movies.
I suppress a shudder as I think about what happens next. If they pick me as a tribute—which they fucking better—I’ll be taken to the palace. Or fortress, whatever you want to call it. You’d be right either way. I’ve never seen the inside of it, but I’ve been down in the old paved-over parts of Baltimore enough times to know exactly where it is. It’s impenetrable from the outside. A massive high-rise made of steel and bulletproof glass sits on top of it, and vampires patrol the sealed perimeter. Waste that smells like spilled blood and old wine trickles between grates too small for a mouse to get through, and too strong to break with anything short of a natural disaster. The only way in is to be brought in.
And the only way to do that is to sell myself.
Wiping my hand over my face, I look around the rest of Nathan’s apartment. I already know I’m going to save him, that I’ll do whatever it takes to get him out of the vampires’ hold in one piece. It’s what I do, whenever I can. Save him. I haven’t had much luck saving him from himself, but I’ll be damned if I don’t rescue him from these vampires.
Scrambling to my feet, I grab the note again and stuff it in my back pocket. Then I glance around the dilapidated space. If Nathan has anything worth anything in this apartment, I should take it back to my place for safekeeping. Knowing this city, his apartment will be occupied again by tomorrow night.
“And he’s never coming back here,” I mutter under my breath, my nails digging into my palms as I curl my hands into fists. “Never. I’ll make him live with me again, whether he likes it or not. I can make it work this time, I know I can.”
Before he moved into this shithole, I offered to let him stay with me, like he’s done from time to time in the past. But he refused, no matter how much I begged and cajoled. He promised me this dump was just going to be a temporary housing solution, a place he could stay rent-free for a little bit while he sorted some things out.
He told me he didn’t want to be a burden, and I eventually
