Emerald green eyes studied us from a face that could have been sculpted by one of the classical artists I so admired. Shocked, I dismissed the comparison as soon as it popped into my head. This was a vampire, after all. It was ridiculous to admire him the way I would some hot human guy.

Dimitri Belikov had arrived.

You remember our talk about purpose and meaning?" he asked me, the smile disappearing. "Well, I think this might be mine. I think this is what I was meant to do, Georgina.

Who’s she? Just another Ivashkov. There are tons of them. Probably because all the guys like Adrian and have all sorts of illegitimate children." "Adrian doesn’t have any children." "That we know of.

Melbourne, I always knew you'd need to learn about this kind of thing. I 'd just kind of hoped you'd learn it on a real guy.

Yeah? Can you draw a skeleton riding a motorcycle with flames coming out of it? And I want a pirate hat on the skeleton. And a parrot on his shoulder. A skeleton parrot. Or maybe a ninja skeleton parrot? No, that would be overkill. But it'd be cool if the biker skeleton could be shooting some ninja throwing stars. That are on fire.

She probably gave up and started playing Minesweeper." [...] We reached the cafe and found Sydney bent over her laptop, with a barely eaten Danish and what was probably her fourth cup of coffee. We slid into seats beside her. "How's it—hey! You ARE playing Minesweeper!