If there was any part of this ‘life’ that I hated, it was the meetings, the debating, and the gossiping: court. What an annoyingly meticulous thing to have to endure.

My father, Carlisle Cullen, was in control, and he was the one who decided to hold court here in Volterra. When I became ruler, I vowed to abolish it. I supremely detested it, not only due to the tedious amount of pointless conversation – I read all their minds anyways, what could they possibly say without first thinking it? – but also because Mother insisted on having me meet a number of eligible and ‘suitable’ vampire ladies. Eligible they might be, but they were far from suitable.

I hated all of them. They were all the same: icily beautiful, cutthroat, supremely bitchy, and wholly demanding. If anyone thought the men ran the show around Volterra, they were deathly wrong.

The female dominance was especially evident in the relationships of my parents, or my brothers and sisters. Esme, my mother, practically told my father when to hunt and what, and how to run the city. My ‘sisters,’ – we were not related in any way – Rosalie and Alice, ruled over their husbands, my ‘brothers’ Emmett and Jasper, with iron fists, Rosalie because she was self-absorbed, and Alice because she was overenthusiastic.

So I was the only man of the ruling Cullens who had yet to find himself a bitch wife. The ‘crown prince,’ as I was so affectionately dubbed, with no ice princess!

Aside from bitchy women and the annoyance of court, Volterra was a vampire’s dream: Italy was full of overcurious tourists to feed off of, and tourists always went missing anyways, so they were essentially write-offs and no one ever bothered to think twice about their disappearance. We were the best at our way of life, and had it down to an art.

That’s why the Swans had perplexed me so.

I was sitting, as I usually did, on the smaller throne to the right of my father, slightly behind him – we were thousands of years old and still very feudal and traditional – when I picked up on a certain word in his thoughts: vegetarian. What had he meant by it? Then he said it aloud.