The Vampires #2: Heroux and Odette

Prologue 1 (Odette): Marry My Daughter

Copyright © 2024 by GroveltoHEA

I was one of those things that's not like the other in my family. Our family name said it all.

Vautour.

Vulture.

I belonged to a family of vultures, ready to swoop in and pick at the carcasses of the fallen, the desperate, the needy. A family that watched and manipulated and maneuvered chess pieces around the board, sometimes successfully, but many times not. A family known for its cut-throat instinct and a drive to do whatever it took to achieve whatever we wanted.

Of the Twelve families, ours was just about the lowest, but we were still one of the Twelve, so that gave us clout, and members of our family traded on that. They also traded on the family good looks. The Vautours were known for producing incredibly beautiful people.

That gene skipped right over me, as everyone in my immediate and extended family was fond of pointing out. In a gene pool of beautiful and bad, I was ignored because I was ugly and good.

We Vautours were all judged by the family reputation. When girls in school heard my last name, that was the end of friendly overtures. Even the girls who were not from one of the Twelve families snubbed me. Since my own family ignored me and reviled me, I wasn't surprised.

I wasn't born with that cut-throat gene, either, so my siblings and cousins tormented me while my parents treated me like an afterthought, the shadow sibling who didn't count. The disappointment. The embarrassment.

Until this moment. Until I had a use.

I looked over at Heroux Alarie, whose face was impassive but his eyes were not. Right now, they were angry, and that anger was aimed at me, so I wondered what my father had told him about me.

"Marry my daughter for three years," my father said to him, "and at the end of three years, I'll tell you where the woman you love is."

Copyright © 2024 by GroveltoHEA