Chapter 152 [Bonus – ] Vampire Mark On Her Neck

“Brittney…!”

The sleeping girl heard her name, but it sounded distant, like someone was calling her from underwater, and her sleep-addled mind dismissed it as part of a dream.

Then it came a second time, louder and accompanied by another violent pounding.

“Brittney! Open up!”

Brittney’s eyes finally snapped open, her ears registering the pounding on her bedroom door.

“Oh, no!” she exclaimed, stumbling out of bed with sleep still clouding her eyes and leaving her unsteady on her feet. Then the events of the day came rushing back to her all at once, and her eyes widened.

“Venus?!” Her brain finally remembered.

Except when she turned toward the bed, the spot where Venus was supposed to be lying was empty. Brittney stared at it for a second before quickly looking around the room in case he’d shifted back into his snake form without waking her.

“Venus?” she whispered, even crouching to peer beneath the bed. “Are you there?”

Common sense finally caught up with Brittney and told her that he was gone. If Venus were still around, he certainly wouldn’t be hiding beneath her bed. More importantly, with the way those lunatics were pounding on her door, he would have been the first to wake her and warn her that her roommates were outside.

Just like that, Brittney felt her stomach drop with disappointment. Sure, she’d known Venus wasn’t going to stay with her forever, but it would have been nice if he’d at least woken her to say goodbye before leaving.

She was about to straighten when something caught her attention. This wasn’t the same bedsheet she’d had on the bed earlier. Speaking of which, for someone who’d been deliciously fucked, Brittney suddenly realized she couldn’t find a single piece of evidence on her body that anything had happened at all. What time was it, anyway?

Understanding dawned on her. Venus had cleaned her up. He’d even changed the damn sheets before leaving. Just like that, a stupid grin spread across Brittney’s face. That snake just kept getting cuter and cuter.

Except the thought was ripped away when another bang landed against her door.

“Brittney fucking Thorne, are you sleeping to death in there?! Answer the door right now!”

It was Trisha’s voice, and she sounded pretty pissed.

Oh, fuck.

“Give me a minute!” Brittney finally shouted back. Hearing her voice must have reassured them that she was, in fact, still alive because they stopped trying to break down her door.

She rushed to her wardrobe and pulled out a shirt and shorts. She was in the middle of dragging the shirt over her head when her hand brushed against the side of her neck and she winced.

Huh?

Curious, Brittney headed over to her vanity and turned her neck toward the mirror. Her mouth fell open.

“That fucking bastard…!”

Two bold fang marks stood out against her skin. They looked almost identical to the puncture wounds a vampire would leave behind on an unfortunate bloodless victim. What the hell had Venus been thinking? Did this look like a fucking vampire movie? How the hell was she supposed to explain this?

As if that wasn’t enough, another impatient knock sounded at the door.

“What’s taking you so long to open the door, Brittney? Are you okay? Just open up.”

It was Aria’s voice this time.

Damn it! She couldn’t let them see the mark. Brittney could already imagine the judgment on their faces when they discovered she’d slept with a snake shifter. Worse, if they saw two fang marks on her neck, they would naturally assume Venus had attacked or hurt her, and after everything that had happened between them, she couldn’t let that happen.

“I slept naked! Give me time to get decent!” she shouted back, the anxiety and urgency of the situation making her voice sharper than intended.

Brittney immediately began rummaging through her wardrobe, tossing clothes aside one after another as she desperately searched for a turtleneck and prayed to God she’d actually packed one.

She finally stumbled upon one, and no piece of clothing had ever made Brittney happier. She immediately pulled it on and breathed a sigh of relief when the fabric completely covered the mark on her neck. Then she put on her shorts.

Leaving nothing to chance, Brittney looked around the room for anything else that could betray her. She quickly gathered the rest of Venus’s belongings and buried them beneath her clothes inside the luggage in her wardrobe. Satisfied that everything was finally in place, she walked over and opened the door.

The girls must have been impatiently leaning against it because the moment the door opened, they stumbled inside.

“Whoa,” Brittney exclaimed, stepping back in surprise as Trisha, Alek, and Aria recovered themselves. All three of them were staring at her as though she’d committed some terrible crime while locked away in her bedroom.

It was Aria who made the first move, stepping farther into the room and inspecting the place as if expecting to find someone hiding behind the curtains or beneath the furniture.

“Okay, what’s going on?” Brittney asked, her tone turning serious. A nervous part of her wondered whether Aria intended to go as far as searching the wardrobe, but thankfully, she gave up halfway through her inspection and returned to the others.

“Can someone talk now?” Brittney demanded.

Alek, Trisha, and Aria exchanged glances before Trisha turned to Alek. “Well, you were the one who called for this. Explain.”

Alek turned to Brittney. “Well, Aria is having a relationship crisis—”

“I don’t have a relationship, not to mention a crisis,” Aria cut in stubbornly.

Alek waved her off. “Anyway,” she continued, “I thought it would be best if we all sat down and talked things through, considering she’s been behaving like some child…” She deliberately emphasized the last part, earning an irritated eye roll from Aria.

“So I came to your room to get you, and we’ve spent the past fifteen minutes trying to reach you.”

“We thought something had happened to you,” Aria added.

“And we nearly called Maverick, but Aria wouldn’t let us because she’s too shy to face her mate,” Trisha taunted.

At the mention of the word “mate,” Brittney’s interest was immediately piqued.

“All right, color me interested. Now we definitely need to have that conversation.” Brittney ushered them out, deliberately moving everyone as far away from her bedroom as possible before closing the door firmly behind her.

That was so close.