“First layer,” he says. “There are three more.”
Crave’s shadow manifests independently at his shoulder, a dark spill that moves against the logic of what little moonlight reaches us here, and his expression is the one I’ve come to recognize as his most dangerous, absolute, bloodless calm. “Then rip them apart.”
Hades works methodically, his necromancy unpicking each warding layer with a precision that makes the whole thing look almost clinical, and Dread moves to flank him without being asked, broad-shouldered and radiating that quiet that comes before something violent. The faint golden lines beneath his skin pulse once, his War Sense engaged, reading the dark for threats before they have a chance to form.
Sloane stands behind me, her arms loose at her sides, her veins already tracing faint crimson-gold patterns across her skin, her Bloodfire close to the surface, ready. She’s been ready since we left the compound. So have the rest of us.
But I’m the only one standing here wondering if I’m going to fall apart before we get through the door.
The last ward comes down with a sound like a long, slow breath releasing, and then Crave moves, and the rest of us move with him.
The smell hits me the moment we cross the threshold.
Blood.
Old blood and fresh blood layered over one another in a nauseating form of suffering, soaked into the stone, the rotted wood of the pews, and the cracks in the flagstone floor. Underneath that, the rancid sweetness of starving vampires, a scent I recognize from my own early days, from the animal hunger of it, from the desperation that lives in the back of the throat when bloodlust has been denied for so long it starts eating through rational thought like acid.
My fangs drop before I can stop them.
I clamp my jaw down hard, pressing my tongue against the points, focusing everything I have on the scent of Rogue beside me, his warm skin, his wolf heat, the steadying perfection of him, until the surge of hunger recedes enough to think around it.
As we make our way inside the church, I see them.
Dozens of them.
Chained to the pews, to the crumbling pillars, to iron rings driven into the floor with what I can only assume is deliberate brutality. They’re gaunt in a way that turns the stomach, cheekbones too sharp, eyes too wild, mouths open in soundless keening as their heads turn toward us in unison, drawn by the smell of the living. Their wrists are raw where the chains have worn through skin that should have healed. Some of them have been here long enough that the rawness has gone black at the edges, infected, the vampire constitution too compromised by starvation to repair itself.
“Oh God.” The words come out barely above a breath, and I’m not even certain I mean them to.
These aren’t soldiers.
These aren’t weapons.
These are people who woke up one night unable to explain what had happened to them, who felt the hunger tear through them like wildfire and didn’t understand why, who looked at someone they loved and felt their whole sense of self crack down the middle. These are people Valeria found in their confusion, their terror, and their desperate, raw newness, and she decided were useful.
My chest aches with a weight that has nothing to do with immortality.
“She’s been starving them.” Sloane’s voice is low and controlled, but her veins are blazing, that crimson-gold light crawling up toward her jaw. Her Crimson Sight is fully active, reading the room in a language the rest of us can’t access. “Keeping them at the edge. Hungry enough to be feral, controlled enough to function. They’re conditioned, not just starving.”
“Torture with a purpose,” Dread states, and there’s something in his tone that I haven’t heard from him before, the weight of recognizing cruelty when it’s right in front of him.
The air in the church changes.
It’s not a sound, or a scent, or any single sensory shift I can name. It’s more the way the dark rearranges itself, the way the shadows at the far end of the main hall seem to gain density and intent, the way my skin prickles with the sudden absolute certainty of being watched…
Being assessed.
She steps out of the darkness with the unhurried grace of someone who has never had cause to rush, who has watched centuries turn and learned that time is the only real power anyone ever holds.
Beautiful in the way old things sometimes are refined, like something carved deliberately from stone, every line and angle serving its exact purpose.
Dark hair, pale skin, a stillness that makes the ruined Church feel like a stage built specifically for her entrance.
And beside her, two male vampires, not bloodthirsty, completely still, completely trained, almost standing like her eternal bodyguards.
Her eyes find Crave first.
Of course they do.
