Page 120 of Red Masquerade

She wasn’t giving me a straight answer. And I knew there was more to what she was telling me. Who had called Vince and summoned him away for the morning? Who was so important?

Séra opened her mouth to retort, but her words were drowned out by loud laughter suddenly spilling down the hall. It echoed,jumping from polished surface to polished surface; a man’s laughter, deep in its timbre and dark.

There was a warning in that laugh.

Séra’s eyes widened, hands coming up to brace the doorway on either side of me. Caging me into the room.

“You’re running out of time Vince!” It bounced off the walls, the gleeful lilt of his voice contrary to the unspoken threat.

“Go in the room,” Séra whispered to me, moving closer as though to block my exit.

“Who is that?”

“A scoundrel,” she hissed. “Go.”

But then the figure of a man passed the end of the hall, and though he had no reason to travel down this corridor, he stopped in his tracks and seemed to sniff the air. He was dressed entirely in black, skin pale as the moonflowers outside. And then his head whipped toward me, eyes landing on me immediately, and he grinned a grin so unsettling, that even from dozens of feet away, my blood ran cold.

I recognized him.

I should have listened and escaped into the room. Whatever he wanted, that grin told me it was no good. My pulse quickened in my ears.

“There you are,” he said, as though he were looking for me.

Marcel Brancato.

I swallowed, and in the blink of an eye he had traversed the hall, standing not two feet behind Séra. The vampires I had lived with for the past few days had seemingly made every effort to disguise their differences from me, but this man—who I had thought was just a man—had no such inclination. The closer he got, the more Isaw the blackness of his eyes, the hollow darkness of unrestrained hunger.

How had I not noticed this weeks ago?

Séra whirled around, pushing me behind her. “Back up,” she hissed at him.

He only chuckled at the display of her teeth.

Vince and Veronica turned the corner then, a wall of fury, and there was murder in Vince’s eyes. “I told you to leave,” he said, voice so low I hardly heard him, but not too low a vampire couldn’t hear. Veronica stood completely still, her hands like claws at her sides.

The intruder simply rolled his eyes. “I said what I needed to say to you, Vering.”

Vince’s lip curled at the use of his old name. “And now you will go. She’s of no consequence to you.”

Another laugh. “You’ve been hiding a human, and haven’t even offered to serve her?” Marcel’s eyes flashed. “The lack of hospitality is appalling. Especially from you.”

He was entirely changed, a different personality with the visage of Marcel Brancato. There was no way this was the same man—There was no way I’d dined with a vampire—

I hadn’t seen him eat anything. Only throw back drinks.

Much like Séra had, like they were water—

Vince stalked forward, eyes trained on the vampire, who seemed to know how to push every one of his buttons. They knew each other. There was familiarity there. They weren’t strangers to each other. But how?

I didn’t dare breathe, or move, even though both Séra and Vince now stood between me and Marcel Brancato.

“Relax,” he said, raising his hands. “I’m not an animal.” But he grinned at me again, showing off his teeth. “How does one get their hands on something as lovely as you? I’ve been trying,” he said, pointedly, “but they always run away.”

Vince wrenched his shoulder back. “Out.”

The vampire shrugged him off and made to walk back down the hall. No qualms with giving Vince his back. Cocky confidence.

Much like the man I had met.