The coffee was bitter, cheap, and burned.
Didn’t matter. I wasn’t here for the coffee.
I leaned back in the booth, fingers drumming against the chipped table, my eyes fixed on her as she wiped down the counter, careful not to look at me again. She was trying to hide it, the way she was shaken. But I’d seen it—the flicker of nerves when my fingers brushed hers, the way her throat worked when she swallowed, like she was trying to steady herself.
Elena Hart.
Not the loudmouthed, power-hungry bloodsucker her family bred. No, she was… softer. But not weak. I saw steel under the exhaustion in her eyes. Stubborn. The kind of woman who’d survive in a world that wanted her broken.
That fire would make her dangerous if I didn’t harness it.
“Sweetheart,” I’d called her. A test. And the way her
