I didn’t know if vampires ever worked as supermodels. If they did, Esmeralda Jameson would have been really good at her job. She was easily six feet tall, with legs for days and a figure that made me question my own heretofore straight sexuality. Her latest picture showed her in a bikini that was notable for what it didn’t cover, reclining on a lounge chair beneath a beach umbrella that kept her completely in the shade. According to the caption, it had been taken somewhere on Maui. Her long, dark hair was artfully arranged, covering her bare, olive-toned shoulders and half of her angular face.
I clicked through the rest of her Instagram. There were pictures of Esmeralda being stunning in Switzerland in a ski outfit. Pictures of her prettily examining a flower in one of the largest gardens I had ever seen.
Here I am in Costa Rica, swimming with turtles.
It is so beautiful and peaceful here in the Andes.
My garden at home needs tending. The flowers here are beautiful, but I cannot wait to be back home again among my peonies.
There were no funny personal stories or witty hashtags. Nothing to really give me a sense of what she was like as a person. Esmeralda had over one hundred thousand followers anyway—probably people who were as captivated by her beauty as I was.
And then, I saw a post that nearly stopped my heart.
Here I am with Frederick, my fiancé. Isn’t he handsome?
It was a grainy picture, taken from a distance and late at night. Esmeralda stood beside a black stretch limousine as she helped Frederick into the back seat. If it hadn’t been for the caption, it would have been difficult to make out his features enough to realize it was him. But now that I was really looking, there was no question that it was, in fact, the same Frederick I lived with—and had started falling in love with. The angle of his jaw, his dark hair, the way he tilted his face away from the streetlights . . .
It was, beyond a shadow of a doubt, him.
The post was made at ten o’clock the previous night.
I closed my eyes and slammed my laptop shut. I could all but feel my heart breaking.
It was possible Reginald was right and something had happened to him, of course. But those pictures didn’t lie. Esmeralda was everything Cassie Greenberg would never be. Tall, beautiful, self-possessed—and immortal.
He’d told me that he was into me. He’d acted like it, too. But what if meeting up with Esmeralda had reminded him of all he’d be missing if he stayed with a human like me? Surely someone like her—someone who wouldn’t shrivel up and age and eventually die—had to be more appealing than a semi-employed artist with few skills, and with a few more decades left in her at most.
But then a moment later, my phone pinged with new texts from an unknown number.
Cassandra. It’s Reginald.
Frederick is in BIG trouble.
He needs our help.
Meet me at Gossamer’s in an hour and I’ll tell you everything.
NINETEEN
Letter from Mr. Frederick J. Fitzwilliam to Cassie Greenberg, dated November 17, confiscated and unsent
My dearest Cassie,
It has been nearly twenty-four hours since I last saw you. In that time, I have written you three letters—though, if what the guard to my cell just told me is true, none of them have made it out of this dungeon. I shall continue to write you every day I remain imprisoned, however—both because it helps ground me in the here and now, in a place where time has no meaning and one hour bleeds into the next, and because who knows? Maybe eventually the courier will take pity on me and ferret at least one of my letters out of this place before it is noticed by my captors.
To make a long story short: the Jamesons have not taken my refusal of their daughter well. My mother must have warned them of my intentions, because upon my arrival at the Ritz-Carlton a pair of incredibly strong and scary-looking vampires were waiting for me. I tried repeatedly to tell them that I had no reason to believe Esmeralda was anything but a perfectly lovely woman—that the issue was with me, not her—but they didn’t seem terribly interested in talking.
And now I sit, imprisoned in a dungeon in Naperville, Illinois, of all places. Every few hours one of my guards asks me if I have relented and if I will agree to marry Miss Jameson. Each time I tell them that my answer has not changed.
As you and I have discussed, I know what my life would be were I to marry Miss Jameson. It is a life I actively rejected when I came to Chicago all those years ago. My meeting you only furthers my resolve not to give in to my captors’ wishes. I remain hopeful that if I see Miss Jameson again I may speak with her about the situation and convince her to come to an understanding. She was unwilling to talk last night—but then, she’d also been under the watchful eyes of her parents.