Page 6 of The Rogue's Curse

After checking the hallway, Misha locked the door and opened the insulated bag. Inside were two sealed bags of blood with labels indicating they’d come from a hospital.

His stomach rumbled with hunger as he took out one of the bags, already anticipating the warm, tingling slide of blood over his tongue. He carefully opened the seal and took a long drink. It would have been far more satisfying to drink right from the vein, but it was much too risky in unfamiliar territory.After a grueling hunt and a bloody evening, even this was a blessed relief.

As if she’d sensed him daring to enjoy pleasure before business, his taskmaster rang. Misha’s phone danced across the nearby dresser with the name Ophelia flashing across it. He took another long drink, set the bag aside, and hit the speakerphone. “Volkov,” he said.

“Misha,” she purred. “You accepted my delivery six minutes ago, but I haven’t heard from you. Is everything all right?”

“Everything is fine,” he said. Sometimes he suspected that Ophelia had a crystal ball, with which she scried upon his every move.It had been nearly fifty years that he’d worked for them, and all that trust still hung by the tiniest thread.

“Care to give me a report?”

Care to let me have ten fucking minutes to myself?

Thankfully, he was not on video with the dhampir woman, as his face would surely say what his mouth did not. “Targets Marguerite and Valther are clear,” he said.

“Why did you alter your plan?”

“They got paranoid and altered their routine. I didn’t want to lose them and be set back weeks,” he said.

For ten minutes, he forced himself to be polite as he answered Ophelia’s endless questions. On a good day, he knew that she was not accusing him, but instead was painfully thorough, aiming to scrape every detail out of him so she didn’t miss one single drop of information. She did not care about his fatigue or discomfort, as there were no blanks on her report to rate Misha Volkov’s current exhaustion.

But at two hours before sunrise, when he was tired and hungry and nursing broken ribs, he was not so charitable, and he found himself growing increasingly short and testy with her endless questions.

Yes, he had dealt with their Vessels.

Yes, everything had been thoroughly disposed of, except for the standard blood samples.

No, his identification hadn’t been compromised.

No, he wasn’t considering turning into a psychotic rebel vampire like his unfortunate Maker.

The last question tickled only in the quiet of his mind. He knew better than to shoot off at the mouth with Ophelia Klein.While her dhampir blood made her physically weaker than Misha, she was also the assistant to Zehra Demirci, head of the Sanguine Crown. Any intelligent person would recognize that sort of power.

He supposed he couldn’t complain, given that he’d had a few months of peace and quiet at home in London. His modest flat was bankrolled by the Sanguine Crown, who had every right to call him back to duty when needed. A court of courts, the Sanguine Crown ruled over all vampires in the world and enforced their laws with an iron fist. And wielded in that fist were investigators like Misha Volkov, who jumped when Lady Demirci looked in his direction.

When several young, attractive tourists went missing in Berlin, international papers had immediately run with a salacious story of sex trafficking. The lurid story ignited on the flames of a social media video of both victims with an attractive man who looked quite sober compared to their glazed, tipsy giggles.

But then a pretty brunette turned up in the Landwehr canal with her throat torn out. The story had launched a thousand speculative social media posts and amateur podcasts about a serial killer operating in Berlin. Misha Volkov and the Sanguine Crown knew better, and he had come to investigate. He’d begun with young Amelia’s body—definitely vampire bitten—and retraced her steps. Fortunately, Misha’s targets were arrogant enough to think they were untouchable. Days after Amelia’s body was found, another vampire returned to the exact same club to hunt a new victim.

Three weeks of investigation and good magic had turned up a small cluster of Untethered vampires, two more dead humans, and the long-decayed remains of the other missing woman. It was an ugly scene, but easy enough to clean up.

The trickiest part was convincing the human authorities that Valther Gebhardt had, in his soul-rending guilt for his crimes, somehow killed himself by beheading after writing a thorough and clear confession. Several other investigators from the Sanguine Crown would visit the Berlin police to ensure that the story stuck, and that no one paid too much attention. They would also work to seize Gebhardt’s assets and deliver a payment to the victims’ families, with the implicit expectation of silence.

The laws of the vampire world were simple: maintain secrecy, and uphold peace with one another. While Misha found wanton violence wasteful and unnecessary, they had no law against murdering humans. Reckless bloodlust had fallen out of favor. With a computer chip in every pocket and cameras on every corner, the world had become extraordinarily small, and it was hard to make people disappear as they had centuries ago.

Vampire laws were simple,and yet, vampires kept finding a way to stomp all over them. Valther and Marguerite’s sloppy kills had drawn international attention, and that meant the Rodzina would surely notice before much longer. Vicious vampire hunters needed no further motivation for their zealotry, and they would likely be more than happy to come out of their retirement to eliminate anything with fangs. Misha’s cleanup would hopefully satisfy both curious humans and keep the Rodzina off their backs.

“And you confirmed that there are no more Vessels?”

“Indeed,” he said. While Valther Gebhardt’s blood was still soaking into his shoes, Misha had used a powerful spell to ignite the vampire’s blood and find more connections. They were all dead ends, as he’d suspected.

Finally, Ophelia seemed satisfied with her interrogation. “Lady Demirci has another job for you,” she said brightly, as if this would be good news.

He gritted his teeth. “Should I assume I’m not going home?” God, how he was looking forward to sleeping in his own bed.

“Unless you’ve recently relocated to Atlanta, then no, not just yet,” Ophelia said. “You need to be at the airport in two hours. It’s all arranged under the name of Mr. Ford.”

“Ophelia—”

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