As soon as Jay left with Conrad, Ruby started to panic. Jay had already angered Conrad to the point of Scott’s death, and she didn’t trust him not to try some impulsive and stupid scheme again. He’d probably try to get Conrad arrested, or he’d try crashing the car. Her mind was riddled with limb-shaking anxiety as she thought of all the things Jay could do that would stop him from coming back. Conrad should have taken her to the police station.

  Jay wasn’t stupid by any means. Actually, he was one of the smartest people Ruby knew. His intelligence was something about him that she admired. His problem was that he thought everyone else was dumb, that’s what got him into trouble. She could just imagine him sitting behind the wheel, thinking up all the ways he could get the upper hand. He’d be so sure of himself, and he’d be so wrong too.

  After their failed attack on Conrad, Jay would surely have learned his lesson. He wasn’t an idiot, and only an idiot would try something after watching Conrad decapitate a man with his bare hands. Her chest tightened, and the room spun around her.

  She sat down on the carpet and pressed her back up against the wall. She needed to feel the firmness of her surroundings, it helped to ground her when she got anxious. Closing her eyes, she drew in a deep breath, pushing it right down into her lungs. Jay is fine, she told herself, before releasing the air. Jay isn’t going to try anything stupid. She repeated the exercise until she started to feel better.

  Once her nerves had settled enough that her arms had stopped trembling, she inched open the door to the bedroom she’d been put in. She refused to think of it as “her room” since it was not her room. Accepting as such made her think that she might never leave.

  She wanted to see if the others were okay but she wasn’t sure where in the house Simon was. She was certain that he was still here. There was no way Conrad would have left them unguarded; mind control or not, it was too much of a risk to take. She poked her head through the gap and listened intently. She could hear the muffled sounds of the television downstairs. The good thing about being in such a big house was that people couldn’t hear everything that happened in it. Ruby lived with her mom in a house so small they could stand at opposite ends on opposite floors and still hold a perfectly good conversation.

  She crept out into the hallway. The carpet was so soft and springy that it was almost impossible to make the floor creak even with her boots on, which she refused to take off because she never knew when she might need to run. Plus, the silver knife was stashed in her boot, the only defense she had against Conrad.

  The TV sounds carried on undisturbed and she shimmied to the next room down. There was a good chance that Ethan or Tyler was behind the closed white door in front of her. She brought her face up to the wood and could smell the chemical odor of the white paint. “Ethan?” she whispered. When she heard nothing back, she whispered his name again, this time a fraction louder.

  “Ruby?” Tyler said from behind the door. Her stomach clenched in disappointment, and she immediately felt guilty.

  The door creaked as Tyler pulled it open. Ruby held her breath and waited for the telltale sounds of Simon coming to investigate. The noises coming from downstairs remained unchanged and Ruby breathed out in relief.

  “Hey,” she said, offering a warm smile to the sad shadow of her friend as she slipped into the room and gently closed the door behind her.

  “How are you out of your room?” Tyler asked, staring at her like she was an apparition.

  Ruby shrugged. “I don’t know. I guess the blood mind control thing doesn’t work on me.” She took in the defeated way his shoulders sagged from his tightly held body, and her heart squirmed with pity. “You okay?” she asked, knowing that he quite obviously was not.

  “Yeah,” he lied, nodding his head. He made an effort to stand taller and even puffed out his chest a bit. The gesture was both amusing and touching at the same time. “How are you?”

  She let her lips curl into a tiny smile. “You know, as good as a girl can be when she’s being held captive by a vampire,” she said with a small laugh.

  The story has been taken without consent; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.

  She sat down on the edge of the unmade bed, and Tyler came to sit by her side. He sat closer than she would have liked, but she couldn’t begrudge him wanting a bit of comfort considering everything that was going on.

  “We’ll be out of here soon. Once Jay’s back, we can go home and get back to how things were,” Ruby said, hoping it was true. She knew there was no going back to how things were, they’d been exposed to a shady side of the world now and that would be lurking on the periphery forever, but she wanted to try and comfort Tyler.

  “The way things were,” he said wistfully. “Do you remember when we first properly spoke to each other?” He was grinning from ear to ear in a way that made him seem endearingly boyish.

  “Yes,” Ruby said, smiling back. They both worked in the same office, Ruby was an admin assistant and Tyler worked in the mailroom. She’d seen him plenty of times when he delivered the mail, but they’d never exchanged more than a couple of words. Then, one day, Tyler had given her the wrong mail. “You went into a meltdown after you accidentally gave me Sandra’s mail.” Sandra was the head of accounts and had a fiery and unforgiving reputation.

  “Well, you didn’t have to open it!” he said and laughed.

  “I assumed it was for me.” She bumped her shoulder into his playfully, and he did it back. It hadn’t been until she’d seen the huge bonus figure in the letter that she realized it couldn’t possibly have been for her. No admin assistant ever saw that many zeros on their bonus. “I helped you cover up your fuck up.” Ruby had taken the letter back to the mail room and transferred it into a fresh envelope, so Sandra was none the wiser.

  “Yeah,” Tyler agreed. “You saved my job. And, hey, my mistake gave me the chance to ask you out, remember?”

  “Yes,” Ruby said awkwardly, sensing that the conversation was turning in the wrong direction. They’d gone out for drinks. Tyler had been funny and charming when they’d first started spending time together outside of work. As they spent more time together, he even developed a confidence that he hadn’t possessed before. They became close friends, but Ruby never saw him as anything more than that. She thought maybe she did feel something for him, so she gave him a chance, but after a week of fooling around, she realized there was nothing there.

  One night, they’d got blind drunk on Tyler’s mom’s liquor, and Ruby had relented and slept with Tyler. She hadn’t enjoyed it, and the very next morning, she was riddled with regret. She told him that it had been a mistake and she was sorry, but she didn’t want anything to come between their friendship. He was disappointed, but he accepted her decision, and things returned to how they were.

  Then Tyler had invited her to come shooting with him and his friend. That’s when she’d met Jay, and that’s when Tyler had changed. The presence of another man, even one Tyler was best friends with, made him insecure and waspish. Whenever Jay would make Ruby laugh or pay her a compliment it was met with resentment from Tyler. He made snide comments and positioned himself between Ruby and Jay as often as possible, like an animal guarding its mate. Except, Ruby was not his mate, and his behavior only drove a wedge between them. Tyler stopped inviting Jay to join them, but even without Jay around, Tyler was still territorial and possessive. It was obvious that their friendship had changed forever.

  Ruby and Jay started meeting up by themselves, and she found herself falling in love with him. She couldn’t remember how they’d ended up as a group again, but she did remember the broken look on Tyler’s face when he’d realized they were an item. The guilt had hit her like a tidal wave, and no matter how much she told herself she’d done nothing wrong, it had never fully left.

  “I should go and see how Ethan’s doing,” Ruby said, standing up from the bed.

  “I’m sorry,” Tyler blurted out, stopping Ruby halfway to the door.

  She turned back to him. He was hunched over, his face twisted in sorrow. “For what?”

  He shrugged helplessly. “For whatever I did to drive you away. That night we spent together was so perfect and pure, and it was everything I’d ever dreamed of, but in the morning, everything was different. I must’ve done something to change your mind.” His eyes were wet.

  “Tyler,” she said in a whisper. That old guilt rose up like a creeping vine to tighten around her. “I am so sorry that I gave you the wrong idea. I shouldn’t have slept with you; that was wrong of me. I shouldn’t have given you false hope. The truth is, I can’t remember a lot of that night — I was so drunk.”

  “I wasn’t. I didn’t drink nearly as much as you, and I can remember it all,” he said. “It was the best night of my life.”

  A sour taste filled Ruby’s mouth, and she scratched absent-mindedly at her arms. She took a backward step toward the door, suddenly wanting to be out of this room. “I only want to be friends with you, Tyler. That’s all.”

  Sensing that she was about to leave, he stood up, desperation filling his face. “But I love you. Please, Ruby. Is there really no chance that you could ever love me back? You must have felt something, or nothing would have happened between us in the first place.”

  “No,” she said. And that one word slapped him so hard that his face slackened like she’d hit him for real. An apology came, but she clamped her lips closed and refused to let it out. She slipped out of the room and as soon as she entered the hallway she froze. Standing at the top of the stairs, staring at her with cold wonder, was Conrad.