The Vampire Games: A Dystopian Paranormal Romance
Phillip’s initial safe haven.
    No matter how I mentally framed it, Marc was the whole reason I was there.
    Everything I did was infused with his spirit.
    How was I supposed to forget about that?
----
    T he days wore on .
    I was alone, haunted, determined.
    My body grew lean. I was fed well, but not in overabundance. When I was awake, I was training, even if Alisyn wasn’t there. I battled invisible enemies and imagined that all of them looked like Lord Hector, while the ghost of the old slave woman watched, judgmental and angry.
    There was no day or night. Sometimes I was asleep. And when I wasn’t, I was fighting.
    One day—one night?—I was alone in the training room, slamming my fists into the wall. My heart pounded. My lungs strained.
    I should have been alone.
    But then I felt a breeze. The air stirred my hair, like a soft breath gusting across the sweaty back of my neck.
    I whirled, fists lifted.
    And he was there.
    Prince Phillip.
    He hung back against the opposite wall, as he always did, with his eyes fixed on my feet. Just like the first time we had met. There was no lack of confidence in his posture, though. He was fierce and tall, shoulders thrown back, every inch the predator. He was just a predator doing his best to control himself in front of his prey. Trying not to kill me.
    How long had he been watching?
    My fists wavered. The tension drained from my muscles. When Phillip was around, there was no fight within me—nothing but the urge to move toward him, sucked into his gravity, like a black hole waiting to crush me into an atom.
    So many questions lingered on my lips.
    He spoke before I did.
    “He’s in training.”
    Phillip may as well have spoken Latin for all that I understood the statement. My brain had been so focused on training that I simply couldn’t wrap my brain around the total shift in atmosphere.
    “What? Who’s in training?” I asked.
    “Marc. He’s been bought by a Sponsor, and he’s in training like you are.” His face betrayed some emotion for a minute, something like discomfort, and then it was blank again.
    Phillip left, and I was left gaping at the place where he had been standing.
    Marc was alive.
    And Phillip had found it out for me.

12
    H ow long did I spend honing myself into a weapon?
    There was no way to know.
    Time was no longer measured in days and nights. It was measured in the growth of my muscles, the loss of body fat from my thighs, and how quickly I stopped caring about the surface.
    After all, my mother, the beautiful perfect housewife in pearls, had been the one to tell me I needed to leave with those men. The vampires that Alisyn told me were called “Harvestmen.” They had betrayed me. Instead of warning me what was to come, my very own mother had let me get dragged into the underworld.
    My friends who had been going to college—they would end up here, too.
    Everyone would.
    That was the world that I had lived in, and I’d had no idea.
    Now my life was training. Preparation.
    I kept my eye on the goal.
    Soon, I would be strong. Soon, I would be powerful.
    Soon, I would break free of these dim caves underneath the world I had always known, and I would warn the people above so that we could fight back.
    And, hopefully, I’d be able to take Marc with me.
    That was the thought that made me get up every morning.
    So time passed, just like that.
    At the end of one session with Alisyn, Phillip approached me again. My trainer had already peeled off for the showers. I had my towel slung over my shoulder and was ready to find a shower of my own.
    “No training tomorrow,” Phillip said. “You can look around the fief, if you want.”
    “Dawn Hold?”
    “No, Shadow Keep,” he said, totally straight-faced. He was making a joke. The vampire prince knew how to make jokes. “Yes, Dawn Hold,” Phillip said after a moment of gaping silence on my part.
    According to Alisyn, Dawn Hold was Phillip’s kingdom. There were multiple fiefs throughout the entire system

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