Her breath catches sharply as our lips meet, the sound swallowed by the heat that detonates between us. She fists the leather of my cut like she needs leverage against the force of it, like the ground might tilt if she doesn’t anchor herself. My hand finds her hair without hesitation, threading deep, pulling her closer with a possessiveness I don’t pretend to temper.
The kiss deepens on instinct alone.
There is nothing careful about it. Nothing measured. It’s hunger, certainty, and the reckless relief of finding something solid in the middle of chaos. Her mouth moves against mine with a fierce, answering urgency, the taste of her sharp and electric, charged with the kind of emotion neither of us has ever learned to articulate.
The mate pull surges.
It isn’t a metaphor. It’s physics.
It floods through me in a violent wave, incandescent and consuming, lighting up every nerve like a system suddenly running at full power. My wolf rises hard and immediate, pressing forward with primal recognition, while her vampire answers with equal intensity. Something ancient and lethal in the way she meets me at the seam where instinct becomes inevitability.
This thing between us, whatever it is, stops pretending to be subtle.
It roars.
Her body fits against mine with devastating precision, every point of contact sending another shock of heat through my bloodstream. I feel the tension she’s been carrying begin to fracture under the weight of the moment, feel her lean into me, as if this is the only place she can exist without breaking.
I taste her certainty.
She tastes my promise.
The kiss becomes less about urgency and more about inevitability, slowing not because the need fades but because it transforms, deepening into something that feels dangerously close to belonging. My hand slides from her hair to the curve of her neck, holding her there as though letting go might unravel something vital.
We only separate because breathing eventually becomes non-negotiable.
The space between us feels charged, the air thick with the aftershock of everything we just said without words. Her forehead rests against mine, the contact grounding and unbearably intimate, her chest rising and falling hard enough that I feel each breath like a physical echo.
Her grip on my cut loosens slowly, finger by finger, like she’s relearning how to release control. “Together,” she says, so quietly the world has no right to hear it.
“Together,” I answer, the promise settling into my bones as something permanent.
And when we finally turn toward the door, it feels less like walking into whatever comes next and more like stepping into something we have already chosen.
Outside, the night is waiting, and Valeria’s church sits somewhere in the dark ahead of us.
I keep Charlie in my peripheral as we walk, and my wolf holds the line steady, alert, certain, and unwilling to consider any version of tonight where she doesn’t make it back.
Chapter Twenty-Seven
CHARLIE
The church, where Valeria is currently located, rises out of the darkness like a wound in the earth. It shouldn’t still be standing. Every rational part of what remains of my human mind knows that—the spire tilts at an angle that defies logic, the stonework blackened by something that has nothing to do with weather or time, the windows long since shattered and replaced with a darkness so complete it seems to breathe.
Ivy has consumed the south wall entirely, but it’s withered and dead, as though even plant life decided against lingering here. The wrought-iron gate at the foot of the path hangs crooked on a single rusted hinge, and yet somehow the whole structure radiates intention.
Malice with a foundation.
Evil that decided to stay.
My vampire senses hit a wall of distortion so thick I stop walking. Rogue’s hand finds the back of my arm immediately, and I feel the golden thread of his presence flood through me like a slow, rolling tide, steady, ancient, andmine. The chaos quiets. Not all the way. But enough.
“You feel that?” Scorch mutters. It’s not a question. He’s standing three paces ahead of us, the cherry of his cigarette gone dark, forgotten between his fingers. The veins along his forearms glow faint and molten in the dark, his dragon senses pushing outward, reading the air the way the rest of us can’t. “Place is warded. Layers of them. Old work. Whoever laid these knew what they were doing.”
“Knew,” Hades says quietly from Scorch’s left, his voice carrying that stillness that belongs only to men who have spenttoo long standing beside open graves. His pale eyes are already glazed at the edges, the Veil pressing close around him the way it always does when death is concentrated in a space. He tilts his head, listening to something none of the rest of us can hear. “Past tense. The witch is long dead. But the wards held. Strong working for a corpse.”
“Can you pull them?” Crave asks.
Hades doesn’t answer immediately. He steps forward, one hand raised, fingers splayed, and I watch darkness unspool from his palm in thin threads, reaching toward the Church like cautious fingers testing the temperature of a stove. The air in front of him shimmers, just faintly, and then something tears, quiet but unmistakable, and the resistance in the atmosphere dissipates in a slow, cold exhale.
