JENNIE

When i finally regained consciousness someone held my hand once again, but they were warm.

That realization had me frowning as I peeled my eyes open one by one.

Bright sunlight streamed in through the windows. I had to blink several times just to make out the person who sat on a chair at my bedside.

"Jennie …"

Roseann looked so much older. There was a maturity shaping her beautiful features that I couldn't remember having been there before—though, to be fair, I hadn't seen her in nearly four months.

And who knew? Sneaking around a vampire's lair could have aged anyone a few years.

"Belize treated you well," I croaked, but my voice was too weak for the insult to come across.

"I know you're confused, angry even," she said, squeezing my fingers as if anticipating the moment I'd try and pull away. But I felt too drained.

Lisa had already shattered me to pieces. I supposed it was her turn as well to hammer home just how much of a fool I was.

"Jennie, I wasn't in Belize for fun." She paused, letting the words sink in. "I was there for business …a mission."

I raised an eyebrow. Business?

"Is this your way of telling me that you're involved in criminal activity?" I wondered. It was just so much easier if I just ignored the vampire aspect and focused on the typical Roseann drama. "What is it? Drugs? How much money will you need this time—"

"Jennie, you have no idea," her tone caught me off guard. For the first time I realized that she wasn't speaking in her usual high-pitched cadence. Her voice was low and level instead—a stranger's. "Every family has their dark secrets, remember?" She frowned, picking an invisible piece of lint off her jeans. Shocked, I realized that her nails were unpainted, and a few were even chipped. "I don't know how else to say this, so I just will …"

I waited as she sucked in a breath. I could sense her fingers trembling. Every muscle in her slender body seemed tense like a coil ready to spring.

"Our family is nuts, Jennie," she blurted on a shaky laugh. "Even more than you realize. Mother … Father… I don't think they even knew the full truth. But somehow I think even they understood that our family was cursed."

Something in her tone gave me the strength I needed to ask that one, burning question that seared at the back of my brain.

"Why were you in the church?"

"Research," she said tightly. It was a good minute before I realized that she wouldn't say any more than, "I was looking for something."

"You know who lives there?" I couldn't even say her name. Regardless, Rosé's expression hardened with recognition, and I don't know why I was so shocked by the fact. Roseann knew everyone—she was the only Kim that mattered after all …

"Jennie, of course I know her." She raised a blonde eyebrow. "She's one of the most feared monsters in history, second only to one …"

A feral scowl shaped her mouth—an expression that would have never crossed the face of the carefree Rosé I thought I knew.

"Lisa."

"Huh?"

I swallowed. "She calls herself …Lisa." Though I had a feeling that her real name was something else entirely.

"Jennie," Rosé began before I even hoped to put the suspicions running through my head into a coherent sentence. "While we Kims have our fortune, there's another side to the estate that isn't exactly public knowledge."

"Like what?" My stomach churned as I considered the usual skeletons a rich family might have in their proverbial closet.

A secret family living in the attic?

A widespread criminal organization?

Actual skeletons?

But nothing could have prepared me for what Rosé said instead.

"We hunt vampires." She might as well have said we vacation in Spain, her tone was that casual—but her eyes told a different story. "From every generation, one Kim gets inducted ..."

"Into what?"

She wouldn't look at me. Her eyes swept the floor instead. "It's an old society that dates back to the colonial period, started by our ancestor—"

A name came to mind and I blurted it before she had the chance. "James."

Raphael's ominous statement drifted through my mind; I knew your ancestor …

"Yes." Rosé raised an eyebrow, but didn't question how I had settled on that particular long-dead Kim. "James. It was founded by him solely to track vampires and combat their hold on society. He called it 'The Grayne,' and from every generation of Kims, a new member is chosen—must be chosen. Uncle Orwell was inducted from his and father's line, and me from ours."

"Inducted?" My head was spinning. Our family being a cold collection of individuals bound only by money I could understand—but this?

"Only one Kim from every generation is chosen ...usually at the discretion of a member from the last generation," she said. "Orwell pulled me into the fold when I was only fifteen. My 'boarding school' days were really spent in Rome training with the other inductees."

"But I don't understand …" I thought back to the night Orwell had assaulted me—mainly his reaction to seeing me linked with Lisa.

No wonder he'd shoved me into a wall of glass.

"Did mother know?" I croaked. "Father?"

She shook her head. "No. It's forbidden to tell anyone outside of the Grayne—barring any 'extenuating' circumstances of course," she added softly.

Such as finding your sister in a vampire's lair.

"This … This doesn't make any sense—you're Roseann Kim." I said the name as if it were a title: Duchess. Empress. Queen.

"We all have different faces," she explained with a shrug. "The air-headed socialite act gave me an excuse to travel the world and throw off suspicion. After all, no one suspects the rich, blonde bimbo of packing an extendable stake in her back pocket."

I glanced down at her dark jeans, wondering if she had such a thing in her pocket now. The Rosé I thought I'd known couldn't even hold a butter knife properly. Though the fact that she wore pants at all was more than enough proof that her 'air-headed socialite' ruse had been real. My sister, a real life Buffy.

Only why did it hurt so much to know that she had merely 'acted' around me for most of our lives?

The pretty, confident and somewhat morally scrupulous sister I'd known and tolerated was dead. Left in her place was someone I barely recognized.

"What about the phone calls?" I thought back to the past few weeks. I couldn't remember her mentioning anything about hunting creatures of the night.

"No one can know about The Grayne, Jennie," she said softly. Her eyes met mine warily. "Not even you."

"But what about Belize? What about the man you were with?"

"His name is Gregor," she said, "he's an associate of mine. Sometimes he comes in handy."

She cracked a faint smile that made something inside my chest ache.

"What about the money?"

"That …is complicated," she sighed. "My world isn't like it's portrayed on television. It's more political. Bargains and favors. Getting important information sometimes requires very big favors. One contact in particular is fond of Italian-made sports cars."

Hence the massive transfer. Everything that had happened over these past two weeks was slowly clicking into place, though I didn't like the picture the pieces made.

"So what were you doing there? Why couldn't you come back?"

She'd resisted coming home to an extent that made me positive that she was hiding more from me.

"I was doing …more research," she said finally. "I can't tell you everything—I can't. But there was something in Belize I needed to find. Answers."

"Answers? About what?"

Considering everything I'd already discovered in the past few days, I was sure that there was nothing she could possibly say that would surprise me anymore.

"It's more like …who. I was trying to gain background on a vampire called Raphael," she blurted, proving me wrong. "I have a feeling that you've already learned about the way contracts work."

I could only nod.

"They all belong to him. Everyone connected to that world has a contract either directly or indirectly owned by Raphael. Everyone. He controls it all—but even then there are still rules. If the holder of a contract dies, then ownership of it passes on to their killer."

She paused as if waiting for me to put the pieces of some puzzle together on my own. Then, she continued, "If you want to take out the entire world of the vampires and their cohorts, then you take out the man who holds them all by the leash."

I don't know what was more shocking? Hearing my sister—who, until two days ago I had believed knew nothing about the world outside of a magazine—talk casually about a secret world of vampires, or the fact that I understood almost every word she said?

"You wanted to kill Raphael." I pictured the haunting gaze of the man in question and I had to suppress the urge to shiver.

"Yes," Rosé said without pause. "But I overstepped. While The Grayne make it our mission to destroy the contract system, there are still rules we have to follow, treaties we have to respect. By going into the heart of Raphael's territory …I provoked him."

Her voice was throaty. She wouldn't look at me.

"Jennie …if I had known that he would go after you … I never thought that—" She broke off, and I could see that her shoulders were shaking in the way that meant she was trying her hardest not to cry. Her teeth would be clenched, eyes a dark shade of navy.

Was it sad that I was relieved that not all of her had been a façade? At least some things remained the same.

"It's all right." I reached out with my free hand, brushing her shoulder.

It was then, as I shifted, that I finally noticed the feel of cool metal beneath the collar of my nightgown, and the weight of a distinctly shaped object resting ominously against my stomach.

"It was the only way," Rosé said softly. Her gaze drifted towards the amulet in question, tracing every contour of the silver chain.

A sudden thought occurred to me as a fuzzy image drifted on the edge of my consciousness; her and a shadowy figure standing at my bedside. Only one reason could explain it.

"You made a contract."

She didn't deny it. Her fingers clenched mine so tightly I could feel her pulse throbbing beneath her skin.

"She said it was the only way." It was as if every single word was being ripped from her throat against her will. "I had no choice, Jennie. I couldn't just let you die …"

"What did you bargain?" My blood ran cold at the thought of her making the same deal I had, and I glanced up, scouring her tan throat for bite marks.

"I only had to promise to drop the trail I'd been hunting in Belize and allow his 'business' to relocate without retaliation," she sounded as surprised by that fact as I was. "I thought it was some kind of sick joke, but when she put that necklace on you, it—"

"Who?" A part of me didn't even want to consider the possible answer lurking at the back of my mind.

Raphael? I wondered almost hopefully. It would have been easier to believe that my sister had made a deal with the Devil, rather than …

"Lisa," she said. "She said that it was the only way to save your life—she told me what she did to you Jennie. She poisoned you."

She broke off, eyes narrowed with so much hatred that I almost didn't recognize her as my sister.

"You begged her to save me?"

How she must have enjoyed that, the pretty Rosé on her hands and knees begging for my life…

"No." She slowly shook her head. "She came to me."

"I don't understand ..."

Rosé lifted her shoulders in a shrug. "I don't really care what her reasons were. You're alive and that's all that matters to me."

Before I could blink, her hand was in mine again, holding on so tightly that I could feel her warmth leech into my skin.

"We're family, Jennie."

I marveled over those words. Family.

It was a rare phrase to throw around the Kim household. After all, how could you love anyone who only revealed a sliver of who they really were?

I guess father hadn't been lying when he claimed that money was everything.

But …I doubted that father had ever come across someone like Lisa Manoban, who could throw thousands of dollars into the trash without batting an eyelash and make someone like me feel …

I don't know, alive, even for a second.

I clenched Rosé's fingers just as tightly, staring down at the chain draped around my neck, as heavy as iron.

"Family."