The Vamps Bride

CHAPTER ONE

YARINA-

The last thing I remember from my old life is thinking, with total clarity, that I really should have eaten breakfast before sprinting across four lanes of traffic for a bus I was still going to miss.

The first thing I remember from this one is a ceiling that is absolutely not the water stained popcorn ceiling of my old studio apartment, and a canopy over a bed I do not own, and a version of my own face in a mirror across the room that is somehow both completely mine and completely, unmistakably somebody else's

"Okay," I told the ceiling. "That's new."

I lay very still, doing an internal inventory the way you do after a bad fall, wiggling fingers I did not entirely trust yet, cataloguing a body that felt lighter than mine, shorter than mine, and yet somehow already knew exactly how to sit up and swing its legs over the side of the bed without my input. I thought about the crosswalk. The bus pulling away.

A horn I never actually heard finish. I did not remember an impact. I remembered thinking about breakfast, and then I

remembered this ceiling, and the gap between those two things sat in my chest like a breath I hadn't found the nerve to let out.

Someone started banging on a door somewhere to my left.

"Yara! Are you dying in there or just being dramatic again? I need the bathroom!"

"One second," I called back, and my own voice came out wrong, higher, softer, with an accent I had never owned in my life.

The woman who let herself in without waiting looked exactly like me. Not similar. Identically like me, down to a small scar above one eyebrow I was fairly sure I'd never had before this morning, and she put both hands on her hips with the weary authority of someone who'd had this exact conversation before.

"You look like you saw a ghost," she observed.

"Funny you should say that."

"Branka," she announced, jabbing a thumb at her own chest, like I might have forgotten my own twin sister's name. "And you look like actual garbage, which, respect, because you also looked like garbage yesterday, so at least you're consistent."

"Thank you," I managed, because it seemed safer than the alternatives, and Branka disappeared into the bathroom, leaving me alone with a phone on the nightstand that lit up with a message from a number saved simply as DO NOT IGNORE.

I should not have been able to unlock that phone. I did not know the passcode. My thumb moved anyway, six digits, no hesitation, the same way my legs had already known how to walk this morning without asking permission.

Second payment due Friday. Same amount. Don't make me remind you what happens if you're late again.

I read it three times. I didn't know who had sent it, what the first payment had been, or what happened if I was late again, and every one of those blanks felt more urgent than the blank labeled why do I have a twin sister now.

Branka came out mid conversation with someone on speakerphone, half listening while she did her makeup in the hallway mirror.

"Mom's asking if you're coming to visit today," she mentioned, holding the phone toward me without handing it over. "She wants to talk about the job before she starts Monday."

"What job?"

Branka lowered the phone, and something sharpened behind her eyes. "The nanny job. The Auersperg job. The one she's been prepping for three weeks. Yara, are you actually okay? You're being weird even for you."

"I'm great," I replied, with the confidence of a woman who had died approximately twelve hours ago and had no idea what an Auersperg was. "Just tired."

"You're always tired. You've been tired since the accident."

That word landed heavier than it should have, given I had no memory of any accident, mine or otherwise, and I filed it away with everything else I clearly needed to figure out before I said anything that gave me away.

Mom, it turned out, was in the hospital, a fall down the stairs two days earlier that had left her with a shattered ankle and a recovery timeline measured in months. I sat in a plastic chair beside her bed an hour later, holding a hand that felt achingly familiar in a way nothing else in this life had yet.

"Thirty years I've been doing this," Dagmar began, adjusting her elevated cast with a wince she was clearly trying to hide. "Thirty years, and this is the family I finally get, and I break my ankle two days before I'm meant to start. Do you know how hard it was to get that recommendation? Do you know how many families would kill for that reference?"

"I'm sure it was very hard," I offered, having no idea whatsoever what she was talking about.

"The money alone would have covered the rest of your father's debts within the year." She offered it lightly, but something underneath the lightness pulled tight. "I don't know who else I can recommend on such short notice. Not for that household."

"What's wrong with the family?"

Dagmar's eyes flicked toward the door, toward Branka scrolling her phone just outside it, and back to me, careful in a way that made every instinct sit up. "Nothing is wrong with them. They are simply private people. Old money. Old habits. You do not ask questions in a house like that."

"Yarinko," she went on, "would you consider taking it in my place? Just until I'm back on my feet."

Branka's head came up from her phone at the exact same moment.

"She means the vampire, Yara," Branka cut in, flatly. "Mom's asking if you want to babysit for the actual vampire."

I laughed, because obviously that was a joke, and neither of them laughed back.

"I'm kidding," Branka offered finally, rolling her eyes in a way that didn't quite reach the rest of her face. "Mostly. He's just, you know. Intense. Rich people are like that."

"Intense how?"

"You'll see Monday, if you actually take the job." She grabbed her bag off the back of Mom's chair, already halfway to the door. "I have a shift in an hour. Are you coming, or are you going to sit here interrogating Mom about a family you've supposedly met a hundred times."

I had met them zero times, as far as I was aware, but I stayed quiet, because admitting that felt like the fastest route to a conversation about doctors that were not for my mother's ankle, and I followed Branka out into a corridor that smelled like antiseptic and old coffee, my phone heavy in my pocket with a threat I didn't understand and a job offer from a family my own mother wouldn't fully describe.

I did not sleep that night, running through it all. A mother who needed this job's money more than she'd admit outright. A twin sister who called a client family vampires as a joke that didn't quite land like one. A blackmailer who wanted money by Friday, for reasons I had no context for, from a life I hadn't lived a single day of before this morning. And a first shift, in three days, in a body that at least, mercifully, seemed to remember how to do the actual job, even when the rest of me had no idea what I'd just agreed to.

I spent those three days the way you spend the days before a test you haven't studied for, cramming information about a family I was apparently already supposed to know. Branka, it turned out, was a surprisingly patient teacher when she wasn't distracted, walking me through the Auersperg name over reheated leftovers like she was quizzing me for an exam neither of us fully understood the stakes of.

"Old money," she began, counting points off on her fingers. "Older than old money, actually.

Nobody really knows what the family business even is anymore, just that it's the kind of money that doesn't have to explain itself. One kid, a little girl, no mother in the picture, though nobody ever says why not, and a housekeeper who's worked there since before either of us were born."

"And the dad?"

"The dad is why everyone in this city lowers their voice when his name comes up." She offered it lightly, but something underneath it wasn't light at all.

"Mom's worked for families like this before. Not this family specifically, but adjacent. People who pay in cash, who want discretion above literally everything else, who you don't ask follow up questions with. She always comes home fine. Tired, but fine."

"That's not actually reassuring."

"I'm not in the business of reassuring you, I'm in the business of making sure you know what you're walking into." She stole a piece of bread off my plate without asking, an old habit apparently, my body recognizing the gesture before my brain caught up to being annoyed by it. "You could still say no, you know. Tell Mom you found something else."

"I haven't found anything else. I have a blackmailer and a due date and exactly zero other job prospects in a city I apparently used to live in and don't remember

at all."

"That's the other thing I wanted to talk to you about." Branka set down the bread, her voice dropping into something more serious than I'd heard from her yet. "The blackmail thing. Have you thought at all about just telling someone? The police, maybe, or at least a lawyer."

"And tell them what? I don't even know what I supposedly did. I don't have any memory of whatever this person thinks they have on me."

"That's not actually true, is it." Branka's eyes were sharp, assessing, in a way that reminded me uncomfortably of our mother. "You don't remember it because you don't remember anything before the accident. That's different from it not existing."

I didn't have a good answer for that, mostly because she was right, and we sat with the uncomfortable shape of it for a while, the leftovers going cold between us, until Branka, apparently deciding the conversation had gotten heavy enough for one evening, changed the subject to something considerably more useful, exactly what I should wear to a first day interview for a job I was clearly going to be underqualified for no matter what I put on.

The morning I left for the townhouse, she walked me to the door with a nervous energy she was trying and failing to hide behind her usual bluster.

"Text me when you get there," she instructed. "And text me when you leave. Every day. I don't care if it's one word."

"You already made me promise this once."

"I'm making you promise it again, because apparently I have to keep saying things twice in this family before they actually stick." She pulled me into a hug that felt, despite everything strange about the last three days, entirely, uncomplicatedly real.

"Be careful, Yara. Whatever's actually going on with you, whatever you're not telling me, just be careful."

I promised.

I meant it, too, standing there on our narrow landing with my whole borrowed life balanced on the edge of a decision I'd made half out of desperation, and it was that promise, more than anything else, that I carried with me on the drive out to the Auersperg estate three days later, along with a growing, nagging awareness that everyone who actually knew this family seemed to be warning me about it in careful, half finished sentences, and that I had exactly no idea yet what the other half of any of those sentences actually contained.