An icy vampire corporate heiress and a human software engineer must team up to thwart the saboteur who’s turned their sexy human-vampire dating app into a bloodbath, in this mystery romance romp by USA Today bestselling author Alexandra Vasti.
As heir to HemoCorp Industries, vampire Sophronia Vega has devoted herself to the company her family founded. Most recently, she’s led the creation of Stokr: the wildly successful dating app that pairs lusty vampires with humans they can’t accidentally, er, eat. But when Stokr’s matching technology goes haywire—and vampires start draining their dates—Sophronia’s disciplined life goes up in flames.
Enter Casey Amato, the human software engineer whose team programmed Stokr. Casey knows the Stokr failure wasn’t a glitch—the app’s been sabotaged. To fix it, he’ll have to convince the gorgeous, guarded vampire exec that someone in her inner circle has betrayed her.
Sophronia has never met a human who makes her feel quite so . . . thirsty. But to fix her app and save its users, she must team up with the brilliant programmer. As they hunt the traitor, their attraction burns hotter, and the stakes couldn’t be higher. Because without Stokr, giving in to temptation could be deadly.
Release date:
November 10, 2026
Publisher:
Berkley
Print pages:
384
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Sophronia Vega was in the middle of the most important presentation of her life when the vampire on floor seventeen nearly ate an accountant.
Which, frankly, was ridiculous. It was eleven o'clock in the morning. It wasn't even time for lunch.
She'd just finished the slides on global data-privacy regulations and had moved into a persuasive series of remarks on fiduciary duty to shareholders-at least, she thought they were persuasive; she'd practiced them fourteen times yesterday with Delphine-when her phone started to buzz.
She ignored it, which was her first mistake. She should have known the vibration spelled disaster.
Her phone was set to Do Not Disturb. No one should have been able to get through except Del-and Del knew perfectly well that the outcome of this meeting would determine the future of Sophronia's app, her career at HemoCorp Industries, and her entire life.
She wouldn't have called for anything short of bloodshed.
Sophronia flipped the phone over and turned back to the glossy projections that held a year's worth of app data and also her absolute devotion.
"As you can see," she told the HemoCorp executive committee, "Stokr's US rollout has been an unqualified success on every level, from customer satisfaction to month-to-month sell-through. Each of these global territories has been hand selected as the most promising for expansion of the app. We've begun building teams in Singapore, Brazil-"
"What about insurance?" Octavia Pavo interrupted. Her crisp ash-blond hair made perfect arcs where it lay against her silk blouse, and her lilac lips were set in an expression of calm interest.
Sophronia knew better, of course. Octavia had once called Stokr a breathtaking embarrassment for all vampirekind, and she hadn't even had the grace to look embarrassed when she'd noticed that Sophronia was in earshot.
Sophronia forced herself to smile back. "We've had minimal insurance claims in the past year, mostly superficial settlements. Unlike the rest of HemoCorp's tech"-her smile seemed to be fixed into place on her mouth now, and she hoped it didn't look too much like a grimace-"Stokr isn't licensed as a clinical-grade product."
"I am aware of that," Octavia said blandly. "Our first dating app. What a shining new horizon for our company."
Sophronia felt a tiny throb of blood rise in the direction of her cheeks. Since she was a vampire and had very little in the way of homegrown blood, her flush was, fortunately, invisible.
Not for the first time in her life, she thanked the spirit of Abraham Stoker that she'd been born a vampire and not a human. She would have rather chewed off her own arm than blush in front of the executive committee. She'd rather print out her slide deck and eat every page individually than reveal a weakness to Octavia and the rest of the executive committee.
To-worst of all-August Vega.
Her father. And HemoCorp's CEO.
"Yes," she said evenly. "Stokr is a dating app. The first human-vampire dating app ever created, using HemoCorp med tech. And within its first year on the market, it's revolutionized human-vampire relations and become the top paid dating app in the country."
Ever since HemoCorp had developed artificial blood a century ago, humans and vampires had lived in uneasy harmony. The invention, which had made the Vega family into a wealthy and powerful dynasty, had eliminated the need for direct human feeding. Vampires could subsist on blood bags rather than people-and their unfortunate reputation as serial killers had slowly faded.
But it hadn't vanished entirely. Some vampires still preferred to drink directly from humans-and the humans liked it too. Enough that they'd risk their own deaths to seek it out.
Luckily, HemoCorp had once again come to the rescue. Three years ago, the company's scientists had developed a simple laboratory test to determine if safe direct feeding was possible by matching vampire salivary enzymes and human blood.
Before hemoenzymatic analysis, direct feeding had been a matter of bloody trial and error. If a human and a vampire were a match, the tiny wounds made by the vampire's fangs closed instantly, with no effect on the human beyond a powerful sense of euphoria.
And if the human and vampire were not a safe match-
Well. Thus the vampire reputation for mass murder, et cetera.
"The med tech is sound," Sophronia went on. "We've never once had an error in the lab. And over the past fifty-six weeks that the app has been available to users, its safety record has been perfect."
Happy human-vampire pairs were feeding and frolicking all over the country, and though she knew it was ridiculous-it was a dating app named for Bram Stoker, not dermal grafts and fibrin gels-she was proud of Stokr anyway. Of all the projects under her purview as VP of digital products and solutions, Stokr was the one she was most excited about.
She couldn't help herself. Her eyes shifted to her father, tall and spare and silent in his seat at the head of the table, his blue gaze cool and measured.
This was a good presentation. She knew it down to her bones. It didn't matter what Octavia said-August Vega was going to approve the app's expansion, and Octavia and Kriti and Titus and the rest of the executive committee would fall in line.
And though it had never yet happened in the duration of Sophronia's thirty years of life, it seemed possible that this time her father would tell her he was proud.
She felt the bare trace of heat in her cheeks again, and she forced down her stupid childish wishing. Vegas didn't need human things like familial affection or paternal pride. They had HemoCorp; they had control. Emotions were nothing more than an invitation to ridicule.
Her phone buzzed again, and her gaze flicked down from August Vega. She fumbled to silence the device, and then-
And then all the phones at the conference table were buzzing.
For an instant, Sophronia's mind went blank. All the phones-surely Del couldn't be calling all the executives' phones at once.
And then the truth dawned, slow and chilling.
It wasn't a call, this tiny angry buzz that filled her ears.
It was an emergency alert.
She had just a moment to feel a wash of ice down her back, to feel her spine go stiff and straight and her fangs tighten to an ache, when a human burst through the conference-room door.
He had stubble and black-rimmed glasses, and for a split second, she didn't even recognize him as one of her software engineers. His expression was wild, and his dark curls were so disheveled he looked like he'd stuck his finger in a socket. He smelled-
Abraham's eyeteeth. Sophronia felt her fangs tighten further, a hot throb. He smelled delicious.
"Ellery Klein," he gasped, "in accounting. She's bleeding out in the conference room."
At his words, Sophronia's whole body went cold.
Before she realized she'd moved, she was across the room, at the door, her fingers around the human's upper arm. She was fast-all vampires were fast-but desiccation could happen in minutes-she'd seen it before.
No.
Not in her office. Not at her company. Not if she had anything to say about it.
"Where?" she snapped. "Show me." And then, behind her, she shouted, "Get a blood patch!"
The human engineer clapped his hand over hers and towed her down the hall-toward comms, not accounting, where the hell was he taking her-
"I used the blood patch already," he said. His voice was a rough-smooth rasp. "She'll live. But you can get emergency services up here with a transfusion faster than I can."
He pulled open the conference-room door just as Sophronia made sense of his words. She had top-level security clearance. She could open every locked door from the ground floor up to the seventeenth. With a quick tap into her phone she did it all, then punched the code for HemoCorp EMTs.
As her fingers flew across the screen, her adrenaline-spiked brain took in the scene in the conference room.
On the floor lay Ellery Klein, her red hair pulled back into a high ponytail and a pool of blood rapidly congealing around her. Her head was cradled in the lap of one of the vampires from comms.
The vampire had blood smeared on his chin and a look of gobsmacked horror on his face. His shirt was untucked, the top three buttons undone.
Sophronia quietly thanked the soul of Abraham Stoker that the human engineer had thought to slap a blood patch over the bite. The blood patch-one of Octavia's team's most significant innovations-had been designed for precisely this purpose. As it soaked up freely running blood, the thin fibrin mesh grew thicker and spongier, hastily coagulating into a tough, flexible membrane. The seal it made was perfect: stronger than new flesh.
"Ellery?" the vampire said dazedly. "Oh shit. Oh shit."
Sophronia slapped her phone down on the conference table. Her fingers were shaking. Humans died so easily. She knew that they did.
But anger was safer than fear, and so she reached for it like a shield. "What," she hissed, "is going on here?"
The vampire's gaze snapped up to her, and he blanched visibly, the skin paling around his big, dark-lashed eyes. "Oh shit. Ms. Vega. I'm sorry. I'm so sorry. You have to believe that I've never-"
Her gaze dropped to his ID lanyard, tossed on the ground with Ellery's bra, and she found his name. "That you've never what, Mr. Helarctos? Decided to dine upon one of your colleagues in the office? Or failed so completely and utterly to take precautions that you nearly killed a human?"
"I don't understand," Bastian Helarctos said. His gaze dipped down to Ellery and then back up. "I don't-I don't understand."
People were starting to crowd around the entrance to the conference room-Kriti, Titus, more executive-committee vampires-and Sophronia's gaze flickered to the blood on the ground.
It was an unpredictable combination: vampires and blood and adrenaline.
She knew it was.
"Back up," she snapped at the vampires in the door. Fear cracked her voice, and the sound made her furious. She wanted to tear Bastian Helarctos's throat out with her teeth. "We need space for the EMTs when they get here."
The software engineer-Casey Amato, she thought-moved from her side to the doorway, putting himself between Ellery's body and the vampires. The air beside Sophronia went cold.
"It doesn't make sense," Bastian Helarctos mumbled.
She felt her fangs brush razor sharp against her lower lip as she turned back to him.
"What doesn't make sense?" she inquired silkily. "That you drank from your human colleague and nearly killed her? Or that you did so through sheer mind-numbing carelessness? Truly, Mr. Helarctos, I wonder how it is possible that you secured a job at the most prestigious medical-technology company on the planet and did not think to use its groundbreaking product-"
"But I did!"
Sophronia went very still. So did the vampires peering in from the hall.
"What?" she demanded.
Bastian scrubbed the back of his wrist against his bloody chin and gave her a plaintive look. "I did use Stokr. We were alone in the conference room-and one thing led to another-but I checked Stokr before I even touched her."
"You used Stokr," Sophronia said flatly. "And Ellery was a match."
"Yes! We paired our apps, and the screen turned green." His lashes came down, and he stared at Ellery's unconscious face. "I've used Stokr a thousand times since it came out last year. It's always worked."
"It does always work," Sophronia said. "It has to work. Every time. One hundred percent of the time."
That was the only acceptable percentage. Stokr was hers, and it was perfect.
It had to be.
"Not this time," Bastian said. "What the fuck."
As if in punctuation, a torrent of HemoCorp medical personnel flooded past the vampires in the door. A handful clustered around Ellery, laying out transfusion bags and plasma kits. One of them tucked a shock blanket around Bastian Helarctos's shoulders.
Another EMT offered Sophronia an emergency single-serve artificial-blood pack, and she bared her fangs so fast the EMT went white and stumbled back.
Bastian's words seemed to revolve in her head, an endless loop of incomprehensible disaster.
I checked Stokr before I even touched her.
What the fuck, her brain echoed. What the absolute fuck.
She was still thinking it when the press arrived.
Chapter 2
TMZ: BLOODBATH IN INCARNARE . . . HEMOCORP TO BLAME?
Breaking news / July 2 / 8:46 AM PDT
Emergency rooms in Incarnare, California, were on alert last night after eleven-yes, eleven-cases of vampire-induced exsanguination were brought in for treatment. All of the humans survived . . . but our sources tell us that one of the cases came from inside HemoCorp itself. Is there trouble in human-vampire dating paradise? Watch this space . . . and your necks.
CNN: SECOND STOKR INCIDENT SENDS FORTY TO HOSPITAL
Updated 5:58 PM EDT, Sat August 7
For the second time in as many months, a glitch in Stokr, the pioneering vampire-human dating app developed by med tech giant HemoCorp Industries, has led to a string of exsanguinations and hospitalizations. HemoCorp spokesvampire Delphine Gaius said in a statement: "I want to assure the public that all humans involved are safe and recovering due to prompt use of HemoCorp's blood patch technology. As always, we urge humans and vampires engaged in relations to keep blood patches with them at all times."
Comment left by @peppermintpatty11: I for one have never deleted an app so fast.
Reply to @peppermintpatty11 by @ucialessiab: girl same. fleeing like an h-corp investor rn
CNN: STOKR FIASCO LEADS TO 183 HOSPITALIZATIONS
Updated 12:03 AM EDT, Sun August 29
A complete lapse in functionality for HemoCorp's human-vampire dating app, Stokr, led to chaos across the US last night. Watch NYU student Idrie Yang, 21, describe the scene in the East Village.
Idrie: "The app just started flashing. Normally it turns red if you're not a match-if you could get eaten, right?-or green if you're good to go. But it kept turning, like, blue and purple and yellow, like a kaleidoscope. And then suddenly there were sirens and blood literally everywhere. Thank God my roommate had, like, sixteen blood patches in her bag, or things could have been way worse."
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