Page 12 of Cinderella and Her Vampires (Dirty Paranormal Fairytale Haremlan 5)

I stood and put my knife back into my pocket. I want to give the man some credence to his tenacity and eagerness, but I still was hesitant to betray Silas.

“So, you’ll help me?” he asked.

I laughed. “I said I would think about it. I’m over three hundred years old. There isn’t a lot in this world I still want for.”

His eyes bulged. Probably at the fact I had admitted to him how old I was. I laughed a little harder and turned for the door of the cell.

“Wait!” Collin called out. “Where are you going?”

I glanced over my shoulder at him as the cell door clicked shut. “I have things to attend to. As much as I enjoy our time together, I can’t spend eternity as your company.”

With nothing else to say, I headed toward Silas. I needed to meet with him. But I understood another thing about my vampire father. His curiosity toward the human. He certainly was different from most in some ways. Of course, he was far more stupid than most in other ways. But he was different enough to make him a rarity among my kind. Men like him were few and far in between. And much like those exceptionally few encounters, there was something about the man I couldn’t quite put my finger on.

I arrived on the first floor quicker than I had expected. I rounded the corner to the hall which led to my father’s room. The second I stepped foot into the hall, I stopped and stared at the figure in front of me.

Standing in front of me was another human.

But this one took the cake.

I smirked as I stared at this new development.

5

CINDY

Getting inside the mansion was easy enough. In hindsight, it was probably too easy.

Never in a million years did I think that I could simply walked through the front door. Though I wasn’t sure what to expect, coming up against an unlocked door didn’t even resonate. However, I supposed it wasn’t all too unusual for such a thing to happen. The building was believed abandoned and had been so for years. Much longer than I had been alive. That, coupled with the stories surrounding the place, I figured it all made sense. Why lock a door when you have stories surrounding the property were believable enough no one dared step foot on the stoop much less a toe inside? Or what good was a lock to a property that was believed abandoned?

Once I had stepped inside, I was faced with yet another unexpected revelation. Despite the darkness—with the exception of the few and far in between sconces that shed dim light— that had settled on the place, the sheer… newness… of it all had taken my breath away. Not at all what I was expecting. Cobwebs, dust, and cracked walls? Sure. Dilapidated pieces of furniture, warped floors with holes in them? Definitely. But to walk in and see the interior looked as though time hadn’t so much as even breathed on it? That was the most shocking of all.

If I didn’t know any better, I would have said the place had just recently been built.

I would have loved to have walked through the halls, taking in all the beauty. It was like stepping back in time. There was also a strange pull within me. A pull that reminded me of home. But I had come here for a reason, and I couldn’t allow myself to become distracted by the preservation of the mansion’s interior, no matter how impossible it appeared.

I shook my head to refocus and headed down the main hall. My way was barely illuminated by the sconces that lined the walls ever so often. Though they had shed enough light to see by, it wasn’t nearly enough to chase all the shadows away. There wasn’t enough light to see all the details and beauty the mansion offered. But I wasn’t here for sightseeing.

Being in the mansion, assuming my eyes weren’t playing tricks on me, was challenging everything that I had known to be true. Reality, as I knew it, was unraveling with each step I took. As I continued in awe of everything that filled my vision, everything I believed was hanging on by a delicate thread.

So many questions plagued my mind as I tried to figure out where the basement was. Questions I knew I wasn’t going to have the answers to for some time. I had to let them go and focus.

I took a few deep breathes and stared at the area in front of me. There were few doors in the main hallway. Most of the ones I came across either led to a bathroom, the kitchen, the dining room, or other halls that led to other parts of the mansion. What I needed was a stairway. Preferably one that led to the basement.

Why the basement?

Well, for starters, in most of the movies and shows I had watched, the nappers kept their victims in locked rooms on the top floor or in the basement. And if I had kidnapped a person, that’s probably where I would have kept him. Though I wasn’t sure if that was the case in this instance considering everything else that challenged my perspective.

Regardless, the basement was a good starting point. Then the top floor. And if I still couldn’t find him, I was going to start kicking doors down until I had uncovered every inch of the place searching for him. Only then would I accept he wasn’t in the mansion. Though that didn’t mean whoever lived here didn’t have something to do with his disappearance.

Though it was one of the most difficult things I had to do, I ignored the glamour of the interior and focused on finding the man from my bar. There was only one other hall I hadn’t looked down, and my money was betting on that being the one that led to the basement. I made a beeline for that opening and stopped mid-step as a man rounded the corner and then suddenly stopped and stared at me.

My heart and lungs seized. In my grand plan, I hadn’t accounted for what I would do if I had bumped into a resident.

I managed to get my lungs to work again and focused on keeping my breathing even as I took in the incredible specimen in front of me. He was tall. Easily six feet or more to tower over my five-and-a-half-foot frame. He had platinum hair styled in an undercut with the top left unkempt. Strangely it worked for him. Especially when it came to his impossibly clear, blue eyes. They were almost like staring into crystals. Directly beneath them were his full, thick lips that almost beckoned me closer so they could taste mine.

But bumping into someone other than the man I was looking for wasn’t part of the plan. Of course, I wasn’t sure what to call the person standing in front of me. He was dangerously beautiful, and there was also something strangely familiar about him, though I couldn’t place a day or time where I had ever stumbled into him. He wasn’t the type to forget.

My nerves were in a frenzy. Pulled in all directions, but mostly toward him. I had no idea who this man was or who created him, but I was sure they had to have been some sort of god. Because I couldn’t explain what he was in any other way. He was as beautiful as a god.

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