All of me.
The crimson bleeding through the vampire layer because the shadows respond to honesty by becoming more themselves.
The fear I’ve been hiding about the Command. The exhaustion of performing ordinary for months while theextraordinary thing inside me gets bigger and stronger and harder to deny.
They let me see them.
Constantine’s fear — the real fear, the one that lives beneath the professional control, the knowledge that he is thirty years old and human and mortal and everything he has to offer the woman he loves comes with an expiration date that the ancient being behind her doesn’t carry.
Bael’s grief — the millennia of watching this bloodline live and die, the weight of loving something temporary with the full depth of something eternal, the specific sorrow of a man who knows that even if they survive the school and the Hunters and the binding team, time will eventually do what the enemies could not.
The vulnerability makes the intimacy devastating.
Every touch carrying the truth beneath it — hands that tremble not from desire but from fear, mouths that whisper not endearments but confessions, bodies that press together not to forget the danger but to acknowledge it and choose each other anyway.
The triple circuit carries it all.
The fear and the love and the truth of three people who are running out of time and using what’s left to be honest with each other in the only room where honesty is safe.
When we come together — the release traveling through the shadow network the way it always does, one body’s pleasure becoming three bodies’ experience — what makes this time different from the others is that we’re crying.
Not sobbing. Not breaking down.
Just the quiet, steady tears of people who have taken off every mask and found that what lives underneath is worth loving even when it’s scared and flawed and becoming something none of us fully understand.
Three bodies on the stone floor of an underground chamber.
My head on Constantine’s chest. Bael’s arm across both of us.
The triple bond humming quietly — not with desire or urgency but with the simple, steady warmth of connection sustained by honesty.
“Three days,” I say.
“Three days,” Constantine confirms.
“Then we stop hiding,” Bael says.
The same words from the night the crimson spread.
The same certainty.
The same ancient patience of a being who has survived everything and intends to survive this too.
Three days. And then whatever comes.
Together.
CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE
Ashley
The Light Nephilimstudent is following me and I don’t notice until it’s too late.
I’m coming back from the east wing bathroom at eleven PM — a necessary trip, because even women hiding from detection grids need to pee — when my shadows pick up the presence behind me.
Not close. Three corridors back.
A faint, bright signature that my darkness registers as light-aligned energy moving at the careful pace of someone who doesn’t want to be heard.
