Page 24 of Death Dance

“I’ll make sure you get waffles, but I’ll pretend you owe me a bite anyway.”

I laughed and headed for the conference room.

Once upon a time, I had had a friend, and she had dubbed me Pepper, but life hadn’t worked out for us.

She had died, not from anything nefarious, but from cursed luck and being at the wrong place at the wrong time, being struck by a drunk driver while she’d walked to the store. I had gone to her funeral.

I’d forgotten, but my father had been bothered to take me himself, joining my mother in helping me grieve for her.

We’d been fifteen at the time of her passing.

Not only had my father attended Chrissy’s funeral, he’d paid for the expenses and the medical bills from my friend’s battle for her life. She’d ultimately lost that war, leaving behind a younger sister, who had also been my friend, and her parents.

After Chrissy’s death, they had moved away, and I had thought I’d never see her again.

Now older, Breanna stared at me in wide-eyed shock, her mouth gaping open. I could only assume I mirrored her.

In unison, we pointed at each other and blurted the other’s name.

Emerick raised a brow, as did Darius. My husband considered me with interest. “I see you ladies know each other.”

“Pepper was my sister’s best friend,” Breanna explained, and her smile lit up her face. “Your family helped us so much when she died.”

“My father handled the funeral arrangements and her medical expenses after the accident, and we went to the funeral as a family,” I added, marveling over how the pain of Chrissy’s death had made way for fond remembrance and an odd sense of peace. “Dad didn’t mind them coming over.”

“Of course I didn’t,” my father announced before he strode into the conference room, and he went to Breanna, ruffled her hair, and dropped a kiss on the top of her head. “They were the only reasonable hooligans you had for friends at that age, and I had hoped they would be a good influence on you. It turns out you corrupted them into becoming independent girls. Darius called, and when he told me who was coming over, I changed my schedule. Has Jeremy Breckenan touched you, Breanna?”

I recognized when my father had gone from reasonable to a vengeful parent out for blood.

“I didn’t even know I was in his sights,” she replied. “Darius explained everything to me over dinner.” My childhood friend regarded me with wide eyes. “You’re a vampire!”

Unlike a lot of others I’d known growing up, both Chrissy and Breanna had loved everything about the preternatural. As such, I showed her my fangs and hissed.

She laughed. “And married, too?”

I gestured to Emerick. “We’ll have a proper ceremony soon, but vampires are idiots, so we did the court filings already. So, the job offer is real, you’ll be expected to be my right-hand woman, and you’ll have to herd a lot of cats as part of your responsibilities. Part of your job will involve helping me keep this vampire in line. He mostly behaves, but he tends to have this ego from being the brood master.”

Breanna snickered. “When we were little girls, you kept getting mad because the princes with white horses were wussies and you wanted your heroes to be willing to rip off the heads of your enemies. Honestly, we agreed with you, so we started having dark knights vanquish the wimpy princes with white horses.”

“Then we stole the horses, decided the princes and dark knights weren’t worth the hassle, and ran off to live in little cottages deep in the forest.” When I thought about it, I wouldn’t mind a little cottage deep in the forest with my chosen vampire. “Emerick, we need a cottage vacation home. It must be deep in the woods where we can have some peace and quiet. You better get one for Breanna, too, a tolerable distance from ours, so should she locate a man worth luring off to her cottage, she can do so in peace.”

“I find it interesting you are refusing to call them cabins.”

“When I’m out to kidnap a dark and handsome brood master, it will be my cabin in the woods. I need to have the vibe. A cottage in the forest sounds welcoming and pleasant. A cabin in the woods sounds like I’m going to be doing terrible things to you.”

Emerick sighed. “Just warn me if we’re going out to the woods or the forest, all right? That way I will know whether or not I’m supposed to struggle for your enjoyment.”

“I’ll be sure to do that. So, your job is fairly simple on the surface, Breanna. You’re going to help me do lawyer things, and when you aren’t helping me do lawyer things, you’re going to school to become a lawyer so you can better help me do lawyer things.”

Breanna’s eyes widened. “You became an attorney?”

I pointed at my father, who managed to appear both pleased and smug about the whole situation. “It’s his fault. His little princess needed to grow up to become a vampire queen, apparently, and he thought a legal degree would help me accomplish that.”

“That’s not quite how it worked out, but you’re not wrong, so it’s close enough. I was preparing you for life as my heiress, but if you want to become a queen over all other vampires, I’m not going to stop you.”

Darius, who wandered into the conference room to join our little party, sighed at my father’s words. “I feel like I should be reminding you that we do not stage takeovers of vampire society, but I also cannot blame you. As far as queens go, your daughter would be a tolerable menace.”

I grinned at that. “Vampires will be angelically behaved under my rule, that’s for certain—or they become a terrible breakfast. I do not like the taste the miscreants leave in my mouth. They’re disgusting. If wasting perfectly edible blood wasn’t a crime, I’d skip that part and stick with the staking.”