Filthy rich vampires for.., p.1
Filthy Rich Vampires: For Eternity, page 1
CONTENTS
Proceed with caution!
Extended Prologue
Prologue
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Chapter 46
Chapter 47
Chapter 48
Chapter 49
Chapter 50
Chapter 51
Chapter 52
Chapter 53
Chapter 54
Chapter 55
Chapter 56
Chapter 57
Chapter 58
Chapter 59
Chapter 60
Chapter 61
Chapter 62
Chapter 63
Also by Geneva Lee
About Geneva Lee
Filthy Rich Vampires: For Eternity
Copyright © 2023 by Geneva Lee.
All rights reserved.
This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the publisher except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.
Estate Publishing + Media
www.genevalee.com
First published, 2023.
Cover design © Estate Books.
Images © lavender time, rodjulian, Csaba Peterdi, NilsZ, helenagl, Roman, wooster, Gluiki. Adobe Stock.
For the Queens
PROCEED WITH CAUTION!
Hello and thank you for reading Filthy Rich Vampires! Before you read For Eternity, please take a moment to make certain you read the most up-to-date version of Three Queens. If you read or downloaded Three Queens before April 18th, 2023, please take a moment to update your downloaded copy as the ending changed ever so slightly and read starting on Chapter 46!
Alternatively, you can read the new ending or refresh your memory in the Extended Prologue, available in this copy.
If you read or downloaded the books after April 18th, feel free to skip straight to book four’s Prologue!
EXTENDED PROLOGUE
THEA
“Nooo!” The moan slipped from me. I reached out as I threw myself forward, struggling against the two strong hands hauling me back onto the throne. My eyes darted wildly over to find it was Lysander! Betrayal barreled down my spine, and I bucked off his grasp. “What are you doing? Let go.”
“Not yet,” he said. His mouth flattened to a grim line, and he nodded in the other direction where a hooded woman knelt by my side, watching.
I turned my attention to her. “Please. You have to let me go.” A sob cracked my words. “My mate.”
I needed to reach him if only to touch him. If only to quiet the pounding in my chest that demanded to be near him. It was the only way to soothe my ravaged soul. But it also might help me find his voice again–the one I’d heard calling through that strange silent world of light and shadow. I needed to know if he was still there. I needed to know if I could still hear him.
Tears threatened to blind me, and I turned my agony toward the stranger, allowing it to show and praying she had a shred of sympathy inside her.
“Guiliano will survive,” she said with a thick accent.
Guiliano. It took me a second to realize she meant Julian. I’d never heard him called that, but it was clear she knew him. The name must be a remnant from a past life. I didn’t really care. Not now. Not with my mate bloodied on the floor at my feet.
“I need to go to him,” I pleaded.
“You need your power,” she said softly. “The throne will help. It’s a conduit to the Rio Oscuro’s magic. Give it a few more minutes to heal you.”
“What the hell are you talking about?” I demanded. They made it sound like they’d plugged me into a magical charging station. But I wasn’t who mattered now. Each moment I felt the memory of his voice slipping further and further away. “I need to get to Julian. I heard him!”
“You heard him?” Lysander asked slowly. I turned to see his eyes skip from the strange woman to his brother’s body.
“Yes,” I said, losing patience. “I was somewhere”—how the hell was I supposed to explain the limbo I’d been in?—“somewhere else. There was music and light and shadows. I could hear him. I could feel him. He’s still alive.”
He had to be. I’d been wrong before—out of my mind, thanks to Willem’s magical interference. I didn’t know what was going on, but Julian was here. He was close. I felt it in my bones, felt it in my blood.
“Light and shadows?” Lysander muttered, and I tensed, expecting ridicule. Instead, he murmured something under his breath, “When light falls and shadows burn, the dreamers will awaken the storm—”
“As above, so below, magic to magic, darkness to darkness, true love to true magic,” the woman whispered.
“I can’t remember the rest,” Lysander said, his eyes wide and watchful and entirely focused on her. “Do you know the grimoire it came from? What it means?”
“I’ve studied it extensively,” she looked down, a faint flush coloring her cheeks.
They were…flirting. A strange urge to break both their necks flashed through me, but I resisted. I didn’t have time for that mess or for them to continue their cryptic conversation. “You said he would survive. How?”
The woman paused before answering me. “You. You can heal him.”
“I tried. I tried to give him my blood, but he wouldn’t drink.” I fought the rawness rising in my throat like the ache growing inside me. That couldn’t be it. I hadn’t already failed him.
“Not your blood. Your magic,” she told me. “You will need strength to summon the song of the living and call him back from limbo.”
“Limbo?” I repeated. It couldn’t be. I heaved a breath. “That’s where I was?”
She nodded. “Did you hear the music of life and death there?”
But Lysander said in an incredulous voice, “You were in limbo?”
I ignored him and twisted my hands around the carved arms of the chair. I’d heard music there, but I’d had no idea what it was. I definitely had no idea how to channel it.
“Yes, you do,” she said as though reading my thoughts. “It will be easier, though, if you call your sisters here first. Their magic will boost your own.”
“My sisters? I don’t…” I shook my head.
“Le Regine are your sisters,” she explained. “They have been—”
“Waiting for you,” a female voice interrupted.
I lifted my head to find two vampires approaching. The speaker’s black hair cascaded down her back, catching the light from the lanterns overhead and glinting like seawater. Next to her, the other female was silent like a statue carved from black stone, except for the silver platinum hair that waved past her shoulders. They both wore high-necked gowns of ivory chiffon, but each had different crowns resting atop their heads.
“I understand now why the visions told me to invite Guiliano back to our court,” she continued. “I assumed it was to make peace with his mother—to offer her our empty throne. It wasn’t until tonight that the veil lifted, and I saw the truth. It’s you we’ve waited for, sister.”
Sister? I lifted an eyebrow, glancing to Julian’s brother to see what he made of all this. He only stared at the Queens.
And I didn’t care. “I don’t give a shit about your visions,” I snapped. “All I care about is saving my mate.”
“And what price will you pay?” the silver-haired queen asked. Her lips barely moved as she spoke.
I knew my answer as surely as I knew the heart beating inside my chest. “Anything.”
There was no price I wouldn’t pay to save him. I would give up my soul, my very life, if it meant saving him.
“Your mate experienced true death,” the other queen told me as she climbed the few steps to the dais where the thrones sat. “To save him, you must offer him your own life.”
“I will,” I said quickly—too quickly because Lysander clamped a hand around my wrist.
“Think of what you’re doing,” he said quietly. “Julian would not wish to live without you.”
“And he will not,” she interrupted us. “She must offer he
I swallowed. It couldn’t be that easy. “We’re mates,” I said, adding, “and we are tethered.”
“Yes, you are mates.” She inclined her head as she came to stand before me. “But you are no longer tethered. A tether cannot survive death.”
Her words hit me with a fresh wave of grief. It swelled inside me, and I fought to keep breathing. Even though we had never wanted our tether, it had linked us together. And Julian had never abused that power over me. But that power…that power had killed him.
“How?” I finally asked. “How do I do it?”
“To bring him back, you will call upon the song of the living and offer it to him. If he accepts, his life will be bound to yours.”
“What do you mean by bound?” Lysander asked suspiciously.
“As she lives, he will live.”
“And if she dies?” he demanded.
“Julian will die as well,” the silver-haired queen continued. “But there are other things to consider. You will grant him access to our magic.” There was the bitter edge of distaste in her tone, and I wondered if it was because she didn’t want to share her power, or if Julian had pissed her off in the past. Probably both.
“I will pay any price,” I said fiercely, tears swimming in my eyes. “Any.”
“You are too weak,” she replied, her lips finally moving into a slight sneer. “You will require our assistance, and I am not convinced he is worthy of using our magic.”
“Zina,” the other said, her voice full of warning. “This is not the time.”
“I believe it is a perfect time, Mariana. We do not know this siren. She is not like us. Will she sit on the throne? Will she reign?” I opened my mouth to protest, but her next question was like a blow to my stomach. “Will she give up her life to this court?”
“I already told you I would,” I said hotly. How many times would she make me say it, wasting precious time?
“Do you even know what it means?” she snarled, her stone-like features contorting into that of a beast.
“Anything. I will give you anything,” I swore again, and as I spoke, I felt something heavy circle my head. I reached up and felt a crown—one that came from nowhere—now resting on my head.
Lysander’s eyes widened at the sight of the crown, and I knew what it meant before Mariana spoke again.
She smiled at me, and the crown felt heavier like a weight confining me to this throne—to this life. “Magic has chosen you. Welcome, sister. Now let’s bring your mate back to life.”
JULIAN
Death was not peaceful. Not that I deserved peace. I’d done terrible things in my life. I deserved worse than the shadow world I found myself in now. Vampires never worried much about heaven or hell or the underworld. Not when we lived millennia. But I’d always secretly thought it might be peaceful, unlike living.
That was before her…before I had a reason to live. Before I knew what I would lose when death claimed me. Now? Eternity stretched before me—a realm of darkness and shadows deprived of any light, even her light.
I might as well be in hell. I’d prefer physical pain or torture to this nothingness. Because the lack of her—the lack of her light, her smile, her existence—that was hell.
I continued into the shadows, searching for signs of anything or anyone, but I was alone.
And then I heard a soft melody in that vacuum of nothingness and saw, for just a moment, a sparkle of light flash in the distance before billowing black clouds swallowed it again.
I opened my mouth to call her name, or I tried to. I tried to look down. I tried to lift my hand. I wasn’t really here. At least, my body wasn’t. I’d become something else. I’d become a memory, but I didn’t care. Something like hope wrapped itself around me. The light. The music.
She was alive.
And nothing mattered if I could cling to that. I could find my peace in this neverendingness and maybe sometimes I would see that light glinting or hear her music to remind me that not all of me was lost. Not if she lived.
Even…even if she had forgotten me. Even if that tether that had tied us together had been sundered.
And so, as I became darkness and shadow, I faded into memories of her.
THEA
“It’s not working.” I resisted the urge to cry as I knelt over Julian’s body. Cold stones bit into my knees, but I barely noticed. There was so much blood, even now after it had stopped seeping from him, his heart no longer pumping it through his veins. It covered my hands and my dress, mixing with my own.
“Listen,” Mariana coaxed. She stood beside me, her shadow falling over his body. Her sister—or, according to them, our sister—Zina, had not left her throne nor spoken since the crown had chosen me.
“I’m trying,” I said through gritted teeth, straining to hear the song she spoke of.
The one I’d sensed while in limbo.
Lysander moved into view, and I lifted my head to meet his eyes. What I saw there twisted like a knife in my stomach. Pity. He didn’t think it would work, and with each minute that passed, I was beginning to agree with him.
“Thea,” he said my name softly, “if you don’t—”
“Out!” Mariana commanded, no hint of softness to her now. “She needs to concentrate.”
“Why?” Zina called from her throne. “He’s not the first vampire to die. He won’t be the last.”
White-hot anger boiled inside me, threatening to unleash itself on her—needing to find an outlet before the rage and guilt ate me alive.
“Perhaps if you helped,” Mariana replied carefully.
I felt my control slip, but before I exploded, there was a commotion in the distance.
“Aurelia.” My companion turned to the cloaked woman. “Make sure no one gets in here. And take him with you.”
My eyes met Lysander’s as Aurelia approached him. He nodded slightly, shadows catching the sharp planes of his face as if to promise he would be nearby and ready to help.
But he couldn’t help me. No one could, it seemed.
When they were gone, Mariana relaxed. “It will be easier now.”
“I doubt it,” I grumbled, because I was running out of what I needed to keep trying. Not magic. Hope. Each second stole more of it from me and soon there would be nothing left at all.
When that happened, I didn’t know what I would do. I’d tried to follow him into death, only to be hauled back here—the real hell.
“Listen for the music,” she said for the hundredth time.
I closed my eyes and tried, but the melody I’d heard in limbo was unlike any I’d ever heard before. I didn’t know that song. Taking a deep breath, I tried to fade back to limbo but there was nothing but silence now. Disappointment swelled inside me as I looked back at her. “What does it sound like?”
She paused, her eyes pinching at their edges. “I don’t know. Only sirens know that music.”
And I wasn’t a siren. Not really. I bit back a scream of frustration. Only half my blood contained the magic that I needed to call upon. The other half…
“I can’t do it.” My voice sounded hollow even to my own ears. I dropped back and pulled my bloody hands from Julian as the last glimmer of hope began to fade. In its place grief threatened to overwhelm me. It dragged at me like a hidden current, and at any moment, I would be pulled under.
