LITMIR.BIZ

      Larissa Kinley stared at the wide, slowly moving river, felt the night breeze gently tug at her hair, and allowed herself a rare moment of satisfaction.

      It was not an emotion she was particularly prone to, at least not since the night she had lost herself in Grey’s glowing crimson eyes and woken up changed forever. She had spent her years with Alexandru and his gaggle of violent sycophants, alternately disgusted with herself and genuinely terrified for her own life, and her time with Blacklight wracked with guilt as she again participated in something she could not justify.

      She would not dispute that she had done some good in her time as an Operator; she had helped destroy both Alexandru and Valeri Rusmanov, had saved the lives of dozens of innocent men and women, and had fought as hard as anybody to prevent a true monster from entering the world. But did that make up for the harm she had done? For the innocent vampires she had destroyed for no better reason than what they had been turned into, in a great many cases against their will? Jamie, Kate and the majority of her former colleagues clearly believed so, and she did not begrudge them that conclusion.

      Sadly, it had not been enough for her.

      But now, as she stood in the place she had created and looked out across a river on the other side of the world, she was almost content. A hundred metres out from the bank, one of the river cruise boats chugged slowly south towards the distant lights of New York. The captain sounded his horn, and the tourists on the upper deck waved enthusiastically in her direction; she returned the gesture, a broad smile on her face, and watched until the boat slipped round the bend in the river. When it was out of sight, Larissa turned and walked up the gentle slope; her stomach was rumbling, and she was suddenly keen to see how dinner was coming along.

      Spread out before her, extending for several hundred metres in either direction along the riverbank, was the property that Valentin had told her about on that awful night, now more than six months past, when she had stumbled into the cellblock on the verge of tears, desperate for a way out. It was a vast piece of land, running up from the river for almost a mile, so big that many locals believed there were several large estates behind the pale wooden gates that opened on to Highway 9.

      The houses that overlooked this section of the riverbank were grand, garish, multimillion-dollar mansions, the rural refuges of Manhattan bankers and actors and rock stars. But when Larissa had arrived on the piece of land that had become known to those who lived on it as Haven, the only standing structures had been a row of sheds and a large antebellum house, two neat storeys fronted with white pillars and a small veranda, surrounded by towering trees, at the centre of the estate.

      Now, it was also home to the row of wooden cabins that she was walking alongside as she climbed the slope. They were simple enough, their walls, floors and ceilings constructed of wood from the ash trees that filled the sprawling property, but they were comfortable, and they were warm, thanks to the stoves and metal chimneys that Callum had installed. Most had two occupants, although some had as many as five or even six, family units who had arrived together and refused to be separated. A handful had only one person living in them, which several of the community’s earliest residents had suggested was wasteful. Larissa had disagreed, saying that people who wanted to live on their own had every right to do so; they could always build more cabins, which was exactly what they had done.

      There were another dozen in the woods surrounding the huge lawn that stood in front of the main house, where the trees were younger and less densely packed together, and another

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