Cheating Sunrise

Cheating Sunrise - Chapter 1

I never believed in love
Until the day she saved me
Take my hand, take my life
It's time to save yourself

StakeHart - "Dark Queen (Of The Night)"

They came for me at night.

Should have been the last mistake they ever made, but they had an arsenal of cutting-edge weaponry and a degree of originality. I'm a sucker for originality.

It happened fast and it happened hard, and it wasn't until I was on my knees, restrained by heavy-duty chains in the windowless back of a moving transit van, that I was able to put all the pieces into some semblance of order.

We walked out of Ded o'Nite together at around quarter past midnight. Cherry was skipping along beside me, taking my hand then letting go of it, and I was watching her and enjoying the way she was completely relaxed, totally and unselfconsciously in love with me. A year had passed since a sniper had shot her while she stood at the window of a luxury hotel on the Stockholm waterfront, when I had saved her life and then taken the lives of those who tried to hurt us.

Time had moved on, not a great deal of time from my own perspective, but enough for Cherry to no longer wake up crying, her hair damp with the sweat of directionless panic, and her sheets shredded by her attempts to flee or fight the faceless assailants who stalked her nightmares.

It had been a Friday night, edging into the first hour of Saturday, so Shawn Horn hadn't been at the club. The end of the week is always an A-list scene night for him, and that one had been particularly entertaining. How did I know? Because he had posted an admirably shake-free few minutes of pop-shot phone footage to my Vamp-Dom Vicebook media page a couple of hours earlier. His face wasn't in the shot, but then his rugged jawline wasn't the physical attribute that had made his name in the industry, or the one that had managed to hold my interest for so many years.

And Conrad, well he has been notably absent from the club for some time now, not that he was ever a particularly frequent patron. I'm not judging, and I'd never dream of offering my older brother relationship advice, but he's dating the geneticist who babysat Shawn while Shawn was recovering from the soldering iron incident. And by babysat, I mean studied him like he was a culture growing in a petri dish. I've been called cold, and several thousand less savoury things, but Saffron Whittaker is one of the most clinically indifferent creatures I have ever encountered, and that's including all vamps and pretty much every human I've ever met.

"I love you," Cherry said, apropos of nothing.

She stopped skipping and leaned against a lamppost under a wash of reflected purple and yellow neon outside an all-night fast food restaurant. She looked stunning in her strappy black dress, with her long blonde hair freshly straightened and her delectable, perpetually nineteen-year-old curves as firm and perfect as the day I had bitten her on the ass and made her mine forever.

"Why?"

She shook her head and shrugged. It was pretty much the cutest and sexiest thing ever. She wasn't the only one who was still hopelessly in love, and I'm not joking when I say that it sometimes shocks me that I can still have feelings that run that deep, after everything I've seen. And done.

"Because you're you. You're Lana V and you're mine. I mean I'm yours." She looked up at the lamppost as if she had only just noticed it. "Which one of us is whose?"

"You're definitely mine, Cherry bomb."

"Cool. I like that."

She was waiting for me to say it, although we've both lost count of the number of times...