Igniting Cinder (The Lost Girls, #3)

by Holly Roberds

“How did you know it was me?” she asks in a low tone. How did I know it was her? The veil she wears hides half her face, and she is dressed as any of the kingdom’s aristocrats. Yet I knew. She stood out as clearly as a blaze of fire amidst a sea of ice cubes. Something in the way she holds herself, something in the way her eyes burn me from behind her face covering, or perhaps it’s that perfect cupid’s bow of a mouth that catches my attention, reminding me of a certain human girl I once knew. The daughter of my father’s close personal friend. His only human friend. While we didn’t interact very often, Cinder was always in my sphere, orbiting around the edges until her father died. I sometimes weirdly felt our situations were opposite sides of the same coin. Then I never saw her again or knew what became of her. It niggled at me until one day I asked around and got various versions of a rumor that she’d been sucked dry and left for dead by rogue vampires in the woods. That night I didn’t sleep. For even longer, I’d be visited by intrusive thoughts imagining her discarded drained body just lying in the woods. Nobody seemed to care, but I did. If no one else would, I would be the one who remembered the girl who was always dotted or smeared with paint stains and often sat on the cliffs, humming to herself when she thought no one was around. Instead of confessing any of that, I shoot the very alive and warm-blooded human girl a cocky grin. “I know everyone of course.” “You mean...