I straighten, eyes sweeping over the carnage around me, and there’s… nothing.
No guilt. No remorse. Not even a faint echo of a conscience. Every life I’ve taken in the past few days is just another faceless ghost, fading into the dark.
The only thing that still cuts through the emptiness is the thread tethering me to her—and if I could tear it from my chest, crush it in my hands until it bled out, I would. But that tie isn’t something I can break. No one can.
Kieran better have listened and gotten them the hell out of Velmore. Because once Vespera finds them, there’s nooutrunning what’s coming. Circe’s already been forced to gather every last Emberthorn warrior, the Veilguard, and Vesperas' personal guards to kill them all. It’s not a fight, but a slaughter.
I roll my shoulders, skin pulling and burning where she’s carved into me—punishment for protecting my family. She won’t kill me, though.
All this time, she’s been poisoning me—dripping that inhuman darkness into my veins until it’s become a part of me. I don’t even know when it started, only that somewhere along the way, it stopped feeling foreign.
It's inside me now, in every breath, every thought, coiling tighter with each heartbeat.
And Freckles… she’s always felt it. Always seen through me.
Kill the witch. Rip her apart before she becomes the monster.
The words slither through my head, the same venomous command, over and over, until it’s stitched into my skin.
I press my palms to my head, teeth clenched hard enough to crack. Trying to grind the voice into silence.
You need to kill her.
Kill them all.
Not Freckles.
“Here’s the next one, Wolfe.” The voice grates through the haze, dragging me back from the edge of my thoughts.
The door groans open, and Dean shoves another vampire into the room.
Only… this thing isn’t a vampire anymore.
Its eyes were wrong. The red is still there, burning bright, but where the whites should be, there's only void—an endless black that swallows every flicker of light. Thick, rotting veins crawl outward from its sockets, pulsing under skin stretched too tight over sharp, unnatural bone. Parts of its flesh look warped, half melted, as though it’s been burned and stitched back togetherby something that didn’t understand or care how humans—or monsters—are supposed to look.
The fangs are just longer than they should be, uneven, made for ripping, not feeding.
And then the stench hit me. It wasn’t the sharp copper of fresh blood, but the rancid smell of a corpse that had been left too long. Except this one was standing in front of me. Breathing.
It didn’t move, didn’t twitch—just stared at me. The skin was so pale it was almost translucent, and there was no hair. The head was a roadmap of pain—burns, cuts, and tattoos.
Even Dean, who’s seen just about every nightmare Velmore has to offer, kept his distance. His fingers flexed like he was ready to slam the door if this thing lunged.
My shadows slithered across the stone floor, wrapping around its limbs before it could even think about moving. It bared its teeth at me—not a hiss, not fear, but a low, throaty snarl that said it enjoyed the game.
“You’re different,” I said, almost bored, though my grip on the shadows tightened until they hummed with strain.
It smiled—or what passed for a smile. Lips cracked, eyes glinting with something worse than hunger. “Thanks to the King, we’re not like the rest,” it rasped. “We can walk in the sun.”
I already know that.
I stepped forward, shadows licking at my heels like they were impatient for more blood.
“How is it you can do that?”
Not the question I should be asking, but I was done wasting time chasing answers that led nowhere.
Dean caught my glance and—braver than I gave him credit for—slammed the dungeon door shut from the inside. Trapping himself in here with us. Brave… or stupid. Time would tell.
