A/N: Hey everyone! I've been gone for such a long time, I started this story back in university, and I've graduated and went on to working on cruise ships as a performer! But due to covid, I've got a lot of free time! I get messages every other week about continuing the stories I've started, so let's get this done! The Journey continues below, enjoy and let me know what you think!

Hierarchy

Tessa POV

I've been here for two years. Two whole years of my life just wasted underground. I've forgotten what it feels like to have the warmth of the sun on my skin, or the breeze of the wind in my hair. I think back constantly about what I would have done differently if I had just stayed at dorms, instead of walking to the Halloween party at the Sigma Nu frat house in the dead of the night.

I would have graduated that May, and moved to New York where I would try and make my dream come true of being a catalog model. I wasn't tall enough to be a runway model, but my face was something off of a magazine. "Photoshop, without the photoshop," my mother always told me since I was a little girl.

I always knew to use my beauty as power, but down here, it didn't matter. Especially when the vamps down here looked like greek gods. My birthday was next month, and I was turning 24. By now, I should have been somebody in the entertainment field, especially within the modeling community, but instead I was down here in the Mezzanine with a bunch of other people who were just trying to survive.

"I can't believe Erin is going to the developing wing," I heard Ron from the orange team say. "She only got here last year….I've been here for 17 years, when is it my turn?"

"Shhh," said some woman from orange I didn't know the name of. "They'll hear you." That's the worst part of being a "recruit." You could be here for a month and get immortality, or in the case of the white team, be hear for nearly thirty years. They were all in their early to late forties, and by all, I mean there were only 2 left. They arrived here when they were around ten. Children ripped from their parents…they were probably on a milk carton. They didn't seem to mind, because of how brainwashed they had become.

That's when the Mezzanine door opened and a fresh batch of newbies entered in green shirts. Only about ten or eleven of them. I hadn't seen the green shirts in a while….the last people in green were in the age group of around forty. Hopefully they made it to the developing wing, or…I stopped my train of thought.

Whitney, one of the vampires, was leading in this new group. He always had a clipboard in his hand, which was strange, because I once heard Luca teasing him about why he needed it in correlation with his photographic memory.

I've been flirting heavily with Whitney in an attempt to get him to speak to the higher ups into changing me. I'm not stupid. I'm aware that most humans who flirted with the vampires, typically became a cautionary tale, but having a plan b didn't hurt.

I always had a plan b, I would have graduated from Uni with a Bachelors in AeroSpace Engineering. Just in case the modeling didn't work out. But once in a blue moon, a lucky human would get a vampire to fall in love with them, and then they would too become a vampire. That was my plan b

I was about to saunter over to Whitney, when I saw him talking to a short ethnic girl.

I pushed my chest out and went to speak to him, claiming my territory on the reddish blond handsome vampire. I did this often, and all of the women gave up when they saw me as competition.

"….as soon as you become a vampire, they treat you as equals." I heard Whitney saying to short girl.

"Hey Whitney," I said in my most seductive voice. "Tessa," He nodded, not even looking at me. Usually when I greeted him, he at least looked at my face, grateful at whatever trivial thing that distracted him from the mundane of underground living. But today, he kept looking at the girl in front of him.

Reluctantly, I looked at her to see what the fuss was about. Yeah, definitely ethnic. Maybe middle eastern. My dad always said, "After 9/11, I don't know why we keep those people in our country, let alone, allow more to come in. Everybody should just go back to where they came from."

I was raised to have prejudice on people who didn't look like me. White. That's why I was so annoyed when the Kardashians and other shows that featured Middle Easterns as beautiful, became so popular.

I appraised the girl. She was short, maybe 5 or 5'1. She had incredibly large dark eyes, and plump lips. Her skin was tan and clear, and I noticed her nose was unique. It was small, but there was a slight bump on the bridge that made her seem more alluring. She looked like Princess Jasmine come to life.

Her dark brown reddish tinted hair was down to her waist, and her body was slender, but still had curves. I looked back at her face and saw her glaring at first, and then….pity? She felt sorry for me. Ha! What a laugh, this girl who didn't belong here, pitied me?

I felt enraged. "Who are you?" I asked, making my green eyes, my best feature, as cold and steely as possible, and placing my hand possessively on Whitney's shoulder. I felt him tense up underneath my touch.

She just kept looking up at me with those glaring sad eyes. There was a brief silence before Whitney answered for her, "Ara."

I flipped my chest length blond hair over my shoulder, noticing how it didn't compare to hers. This annoyed me very much.

She glared at me, then at Whitney, then back at me again, before she turned around and walked to the snack bar, like she was trying not to be seen.

"She's strange," I said looking at Whitney who was looking at Ara's retreating back with eyebrows raised. It was like he didn't even hear me. I huffed, and he turned his head to me and raised a brow, for the first time actually looking at me.

I smiled and said in my best flirtatious voice, "So when are we going to hang out just you and me?" His mouth became a hard line.

"You know," He said jokingly, albeit a bit strained. "I've already told you this is never going to happen."

"Yes it will" I said teasingly back, and leaned in to him and took a whiff of his scent. He dropped his gaze down to his clipboard and pretended not to hear me. Nobody had ever told me no before, and I saw Whitney as a bit of a challenge. Whitney was the kindest vampire down here. A perfect gentleman.

The only flaw he had was his intense loyalty to the leader of the vampires, Adrian. I once saw him brutally torture a human down here who disrespected Adrian under his breath. He did this without spilling any blood. All the humans in the room learned to never speak ill of Adrian or his mate, Beth in front of him. Even the other vampires in the room were shocked at Whitney's actions. Other than that, Whitney was always vey polite.

He had short blond hair with a very slight strawberry tint that he parted in the side, like one of those old timey movies. He also had warm almond shaped eyes. They were red, but I imagined a hazel or a blue where the red now took center stage. He had nice small lips, and an average nose, but all of this was made up in his jaw line and his tall height. He was probably 6'3, and he was muscular too. He once let slip that before he was a recruit, he was an iron and steel worker. In other words, he was beautiful.

Even the other female vampires tried their hand with him, and he was never interested. I looked over at the female vampires in the room now, and they were looking enviously at the snack bar. I looked over there to see what they were looking at. Ara. She kept grabbing around her face like she was expecting something to be there. Even, Whitney…looking at her too.

That's when Luca came in, talking about the weekly rumble. I had completely forgotten that was today. What better way to teach this girl about the hierarchy around here. She met my eyes then, and I saw shock, fear, and then conviction. She better pray Luca doesn't pair the Purples against the Greens.

A/N: What do we think of Tessa and Whitney? Was Ara description from a different pov what you expected?