One
Ronan
The instant we stepped into the hell portal, I knew I’d lost her.
I was still holding her tight against my chest, but it wasn’t her body that’d left us. I’d fuckingfeltit—the departure of her soul. The entirety of the woman I loved violently wrenched away as we’d tried to rescue her from the disaster blackening the skies in the Shadowrealm.
One horror after another, and yet for Gray Desario, they just kept on coming.
After what felt like a hundred years, the portal puked us out into the underground chamber beneath the Vegas desert—same spot where Darius and I had first entered. I hit the ground hard on my back, cushioning the blow for Gray.
I grunted at the impact, pain exploding along every bone-tired inch of my spine. She didn’t make a sound, though.
Blinking the stars from my eyes, I laid her on the ground and checked her over, feeling her head, her limbs, anywhere that might’ve been hurt. She seemed okay—warm and still breathing, heart still beating, blood still pumping through her veins, blue beneath the near-translucent skin at her wrists. But her eyes were—
Wait.Blood…
The thought tugged hard, yanking my attention away from Gray for a split second. Just long enough for me to recognize the wet, strangled gasps emanating from the other side of the chamber, shrouded in darkness. I sucked in a deep breath. The acrid tang of copper scented the air.
Fucking hell.Gray and I had not been the first out of the portal.
He’d beat us here.
“Beaumont?” I called, rising to my feet and creeping closer to the darkness. The shapes before me emerged slowly, revealing the gruesome scene one sliver at a time. A pair of shiny black shoes came first, attached to legs that jerked and spasmed. Clenched fists, split knuckles and pale skin turning white. A chest blackened and wet with blood. A face twisted in shocked horror—a face that had once belonged to the demon thug that’d escorted us here earlier.
And then, almost unrecognizable in his violent, blood-splattered stupor, our vampire came into view, looming over the body and siphoning its blood like a starved newborn.
I stood immobilized, watching with a mix of fear and fascination as this primal beast devoured his prey. All traces of the cool, composed man I’d known and cared for had vanished, leaving in his place nothing but sharp fangs and a deep, desperate need.
It was too late to backtrack, too late to grab Gray and make a run for it. He’d already noticed my presence—I could see it in the twitch of his head, the brief but detectable pause in his wet, incessant slurping.
My eyes darted around for another exit, a weapon, a miracle, anything, but there wasn’t a damn thing I could’ve used to our advantage. Even the darkness worked against me, given vampires’ superior sight.
As if he could read my mind, the bloodsucker formerly known as Darius flicked his cold gaze up at me, not bothering to detach his mouth from the victim’s throat. In his eyes I caught a glimpse of something so horrid, so animal, it would probably give me nightmares for the rest of my long damn life—assuming I made it out of here alive.
His message was clear:
Move an inch, and I’ll devour you next.
I had no choice but to let him finish, and hope to fucking hell the demon guard was enough to sate him. Because if Darius came at me in his current primal, blood-drunk state, I wasn’t sure I had the strength—or the heart—to fight him off. Not with Gray lying behind me, soulless and unconscious. And if I died, she’d be next—slaughtered by the very hand of the vamp she loved. The vamp I was pretty sure loved her, too.
When he finally finished his meal, he tossed aside the body like an empty sack and rose to his full height, wiping his mouth on the back of his hand, his eyes never leaving mine.
“That gentlemen tasted like shite,” he announced.
“That’s because he’s a demon,” I said firmly. The skin on my arm burned at the spot where I’d allowed Darius to feed after he’d turned up wasted and half-dead at Elena’s house. “Vampires despise the taste of demon blood.”
Darius took a step closer, stumbling a bit, then catching himself.
“And who might you be?” he asked, his words slurring together. His eyes were glassy and dark, his lips and chin shiny with smeared blood.
Drunk, lost, and feral. Seeing him like that… It nearly broke me. The beast wobbling before me was so far removed from the Darius I’d known that my brain kept rejecting the images, desperate to convince me that it wasn’t real. That we were all trapped together in some heinous nightmare, or imprisoned by another cruel trick of the Shadowrealm.
But deep down I knew the cold, hard truth. We weren’t lucky enough to wake up from this. It was real. It was now. And unless I figured out a way out of here, it was going to get us all killed.
I swallowed the tight knot in my throat, forcing out my response.
“Me? Just another shite-tasting demon,” I said, but it seemed I’d already lost his attention. Darius’s eyes wandered past me, an unnatural grin stretching across his face.
