“Sweet Michael.” Dracula gives me a harsh grin, playing it off as though he doesn’t care, but I can hear it, the jealousy sizzling in his voice. “I don’t understand you at all, Lucy. You leave me and a kingdom and a castle, and for what? Him and that sad little drive-in?”

“I said stop.”

For once, he does what I ask, and we linger here on the bridge, the only ones on the walkway. Cars never stop passing by, but we might as well be ghosts, our bodies obscure in the fog.

Dracula puts out one hand. “Dance with me,” he says. “The way we used to.”

My lips part, but he doesn’t wait for me to answer. I’m in his arms in an instant, not because I want to be, but because he wants me to be, everything about him as oppressive as the summer heat. He twirls me in a circle, and my hands tighten around his shoulders, trying to steady myself, trying to break away. I should expect this by now. This is the only way he’s ever known how to hold me.

“I never liked dancing with you,” I whisper.

At this, his eyes cloud over. “That’s not true,” he says, almost wounded. “You loved it that first night. Just the two of us in the dark. Away from your family, away from the world.”

“That’s because I didn’t know you then.”

He smiles. “Pretend you don’t know me now.”

Together, we turn faster, my head gone dizzy, my fingernails piercing his skin, disappearing inside him. The pain alone should be enough to stop him, but he doesn’t even wince. He only clutches me closer. A lover’s embrace he’d call it, but I’ve got another word for it.

His hand presses against my back. “Come away with me,” he whispers, and this is it, what we’ve been building toward ever since he opened the passenger door. An invitation. A proposal. Something I want. Something I won’t take.

“I’d rather die,” I say.

Grief twists for a moment across his face. “I’m so sorry, then.”

One final turn, the world a blur around me, and he dips me backward, hard and fast. I brace myself for it, the blaring of a horn, the cavalcade of headlights, my head hitting concrete. Only that’s what I’d do to him—it’s not what he’s planning for me, not what he’s ever been planning—and I don’t even have time to scream before it happens.

Before my body topples over the outer railing and I plummet toward the water.

thirteen

It’s a long way off the Golden Gate Bridge. A full four seconds of free fall before you’re in those icy depths, an embrace almost as unforgiving as Dracula’s.