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Madeline’s team of full-time gardeners, it’s a long driveway. “They are very good at hiding, not unintelligent, and are good at disposing of bodies without leaving much evidence behind. It’s a fact of the world that those qualities can be very useful.” We pulled into Chivalry’s parking space, which was between Madeline’s gleaming silver Rolls-Royce and my decaying yet faithful Ford Fiesta. The sun was just starting to peek over the horizon, shading the sky with little orange and pink layers. My mother’s mansion is a huge two-story white marble structure with an unimpeded view of the ocean, and it was considered an exceptionally beautiful house even in the heyday of the Gilded Age, when Madeline’s neighbors were having entire rooms from French châteaus or Italian villas stripped down, boxed up, and shipped across the Atlantic to be recreated in their second drawing rooms. It’s the kind of house that you can never really get used to, and Chivalry and I both paused to give it a moment of appreciation as the sunrise hit it.
    After a second, Chivalry checked the car clock and said, “Okay, five a.m. We have time to eat breakfast, then fit in a quick three-hour training session.”
    There is nothing good about being awake at five in the morning. Especially when it’s in the company of my brother.

Chapter 2
    At some point in the past century my mother had the old carriage house on her property converted into a fully outfitted gym for Chivalry. In the past, I’d avoided the gym just as I’d avoided anything that hinted of exertion or some kind of sporting event, but the events of several months ago, plus my new responsibilities within Madeline’s power structure, had forced me to admit that I needed to be less easy to beat up. So, not without a few reservations, I’d gone to Chivalry and asked him to help.
    What had followed was the most physically grueling summer I’d ever experienced. Every day I’d driven down to the estate and spent hours working with various cardio and weight-training devices of torture until I was nothing more than a limp rag on the floor, at which point I then got the pleasure of getting in my car and driving forty-five minutes back to my own apartment in Providence to head off to work.
    Realistically, it hadn’t made much sense to keep living in my apartment, working at whatever abysmal minimum-wage job I could find to eke out a living where I barely made my bills, and even then had to have a roommate. There was a large and luxurious room for me at the mansion, and I was well aware that my mother would’ve started paying my bills and providing me with a more-than-generous allowance the moment that I moved in.
    But I’d spent nine years living in the mansion, from the day my foster parents had been killed until the day I left for college, and I had no intention of going back. I never felt like I could really breathe there—not in the beautifully appointed rooms, not walking around the gorgeous grounds and looking out over the wide expanse of ocean, not even when I was just in the surrounding town of Newport. Everything was wonderful, and every part of it was a reminder that I wasn’t really human. I was turning into something else, my body transitioning, and I hated all reminders of that.
    After all, a vampire had killed my foster parents. It was my own older sister, Prudence, who’d sprayed their blood on the walls of their little house in Cranston, with the same emotional involvement that most people engage when swatting a fly. From what I’d recently seen of other vampires, she was the typical example of our species. There were a lot of reasons why I’d spent years pretending as hard as I could to be human.
    I’d had to give in a lot lately, though. In the old days I’d avoided Newport, coming down only when my biological needs couldn’t be put off any longer. At my age, I