I pulled my duvet over my head and groaned, hoping he would be gone by the time I re-emerged. It was a shame you couldn’t ignore vampires into vanishing, because it would certainly make my job and my life a heck of a lot easier.

“Stop behaving like a child, Secret,” Holden insisted, sitting comfortably in the chair at the end of my bed. “Let’s have a talk, shall we?”

I threw the covers back down but refused to look at him. It had been a month since I’d seen him, and in that time he hadn’t once tried to talk to me. I was also still a little ticked off about the role he’d played in my meeting with the Tribunal. Not to mention how he’d ruined my love life.

“Fine,” I said, inhaling a deep breath. “You want to talk? Where would you like to start? Maybe with why you threw me under the bus with the Tribunal? Or why you haven’t even tried to talk to me in a month? Or, hey, why don’t you start by telling me why Charlie Conaway called you brother?”

I’d expected him to balk on answering but I was mistaken.

“I told the Tribunal the truth. You did put us all at risk,” he began. I let out a protesting grumble, but he ignored me. “And I haven’t spoken to you in a month because the Tribunal wouldn’t allow it.”

There was a long pause as he made a big show of straightening the white cuffs of his dress shirt. I knew he hadn’t forgotten my last question, because Holden never seemed to forget anything. After the silence dragged on for half a minute, he spoke again. “Charlie called me brother because we were made by the same vampire.” He remained calm and poised, and his body language did not change, even when the topic shifted to something so personal.

“He was older than me,” Holden continued. “He taught me a lot about what it means to be what we are. But that was a long time ago.” He smiled a little sadly, and I knew that was all he was going to say.

He reached into his jacket pocket, withdrew something familiar that filled me with a sense of anticipation and placed it on the end of my bed.

“Is that what I think it is?” After going so long without work, I felt a bubbling of unexpected joy to see one of those envelopes again. I hadn’t realized how badly I’d missed my job.

“It’s been a month. You’re no longer blacklisted for work. Time to get up.” He patted my foot lightly.

“The last time I went hunting I had a Coke machine thrown at me,” I groused, trying not to show my excitement.

“Yes, well.” He stood and offered me a hand. “You also diced up four vampires and convinced the world Charlie Conaway became a recluse after his newest action-thriller failed to find backers.”

“But a Coke machine.”

He pulled me to my feet so I was standing next to him. The one thing we hadn’t addressed was our interlude in the hallway outside Charlie’s hotel room. If he wasn’t going to say anything, I figured we must be pretending it had never happened. It had just been one of those things. One of those super-hot, mind-melting, knee-weakening things. Yup, this was me, pretending it never happened.

I picked up the envelope, and we walked out of the bedroom, him a few feet behind me.

“You know what they say,” he said. “If it doesn’t kill you, it makes you stronger, right?”

After breaking the wax seal, I slid the card out and was thankful to not recognize the name. I put it down on my kitchen table and opened the fridge to see what I had in the way of blood on hand.

“They’ll keep saying that,” I replied, pulling out a donor bag of A positive, “until it actually does kill me.”

Holden picked up the card from the table and chuckled with genuine amusement. “Well, there’s always next time.”