Love Lies (Tails from the Alpha Art Gallery #3) - Cynthia St. Aubin

Prologue

I couldn’t breathe.

I couldn’t move.

I couldn’t scream.

It was neither day, nor night, but some hellish unidentifiable interval in between. Not light enough to see, not dark enough not to.

Something cold brushed the soles of my feet and began a slow, sinister journey upward. Gripping my ankles, stalking slowly up my calves, slithering up the insides of my thighs and over my hips.

Mute, suffocating, panicking, I couldn’t so much as twitch as it licked its way up my stomach and settled itself on my chest. Faceless, formless, ancient.

Looking at me.

I felt its regard on my face like the tingling of a numb limb, knowing instinctively when it moved to my hair, my eyes, my mouth.

My throat.

A touch as light as the tip of a feather began at the indentation at the base of my throat and slowly slid upward, ending beneath my chin. There, it grew to the sort of gentle pressure a lover might apply to turn your mouth to theirs.

The chill sank downward, circling my neck like a scarf.

Then, tightening.

Beneath that inexplicable, deadening grip, my heart beat hard enough for me to feel it against my ribs, my oxygen-starved brain beginning to shrink my vision to a single darkening point.

Hot tears leaked from the corners of my eyes and ran down my temples. Pooling in my ears.

The scream I couldn’t release vocally tore loose within my mind. I imagined it echoing off the rough stone walls like a singular, violent choral note as I sank deeper into the circling black.

Chapter 1

One week earlier…

“Ernest Hemingway, get out of my bathtub.”

Hemingway’s heavy lidded eyes met mine, his thick dark hair gone a little wiry at the edges from the steam. Defiantly, deliberately, he reclined further into water that could have boiled the flesh from his bones.

Turns out the vampires aren’t so great at monitoring water temperature.

I mentally added this to the long and mostly horrifying list of discoveries I’d begun documenting in the previous months.

Discovery number one: My boss is hot.

Discovery number two: My boss is a werewolf.

Discovery number three: If I bang my super-hot werewolf boss, I’ll become a werewolf too.

Why?

Enter, discovery number four: Even though I’m not a werewolf, I am the female heir of a super old and infinitely powerful werewolf bloodline.

Weird, right?

Hemingway cleared his throat, disturbing the bubbles anchored in the rugged shoreline of his chest hair. In one hand, he clutched a glass of amber liquid. In the other, a pipe.

“That had better not be the Balvenie Portwood,” I said, narrowing my eyes at the cut crystal rocks glass clutched in his meaty palm.

Hemingway’s eyes, the exact color of freshly turned earth, slid guiltily to the side.

“You can’t even drink scotch,” I said, my hands flying up in frustration. “You’re a vampire!”

Hemingway took a sip demonstratively, then promptly spat it into the bathwater before squaring his shoulders and sitting up straighter. “Drinking the scotch is not the point. Only that I set out to drink it with honest intention.”

“I honestly intend to drag you out by your nostrils if you don’t get the hell out of my apartment immediately, if not sooner.” Snatching the glass, I walked through to the kitchen and paused at the sink. For a brief moment, I considered just downing the remnants myself, but decided against it owing to probable undead cooties.

“Don’t worry, I’m getting rid of him,” I told Gilbert, Stewie, and Stella, my three feline roommates, as I slung the glass’s contents down the sink. They sat poised like gargoyles on the kitchen counter, sniffing at the pear-scented tendrils curling out into the kitchen.

It had been the smell of my best bubble bath that tipped me off when I’d opened the door of my small studio apartment in a converted Victorian home in historic Georgetown, Colorado.

So much for an evening of Netflix and chill.

And cheese.

So. Much. Cheese.

Palming my Gunter Wilhelm butcher’s knife, I stomped back into the bathroom, where Hemingway puffed at his pipe.

An impressive effort, considering vampires didn’t actually breathe.

“Stop that!” I hissed, slapping the pipe from his hand. “You’ll set off the smoke detector.” Bits of charred tobacco flake floated on the water’s surface like autumn leaves on a pond.

“That was altogether uncalled for.” Hemingway sniffed, his impressive mustache tugging upward.

Feeling no particular need for ceremony, I angled the butcher knife’s tip at his jugular. His borrowed blood would quickly make the bath a salty soup should the vein be severed.

“I’m calling for you to get out of here before I give you a second mouth,” I said, pressing