Then he shook his head.
“I can’t.” His voice was rough. “Even if—Ebiti would have my head in place of yours.”
“Then kill us now instead.” The words came out flat. Dead. “Spare us the fucking torture and just put us out of our misery. You know what Ebiti is going to do to him. To us. A clean death is the least you can do.”
“That’s not my call to make.” Kalo opened the door. “Stay here. I need to have a conversation with yourvuampihusband.”
“Don’t—” She lunged for him, but two guards were already there, grabbing her arms, holding her back. “Kalo!Kalo!Don’t hurt him! He can’t even defend himself! Don’t be such afi’ticoward,Kalo!”
The door slammed shut between them.
Time moved strangely in that small office.
She didn’t even have the freedom to pace to kill the time. She just sat there and stared down at the floor.
Minutes might have passed. Or hours. Nadi couldn’t tell. The guards had shoved her into a corner in the small room and left her there, watching her with bored expressions while she tried not to think about what was happening in the other room.
She heard sounds. Muffled. Indistinct. But enough to turn her stomach.
The wet crack of something breaking.
A groan that was barely human.
Laughter—cold and cruel and sounding nothing like the boy she remembered.
She pressed her hands over her ears and shut her eyes, but it didn’t help. The sounds seeped through anyway, burning themselves into her memory like brands on flesh.
Raziel.
She should have fought harder. Should have found some way to stop this. Should have?—
Should have what?the rational part of her brain demanded.Killed Kalo with your bare hands? Fought through a dozen armed guards? You’re not a god, Nadi. You’re just a fae in handcuffs.
The sounds stopped eventually. The silence that followed was somehow worse.
When the door finally opened and Kalo stepped through, there was blood on his hands. Dark and thick and smelling of copper and something else—something that made her fae senses recoil. Vampire blood, tainted with silver. Corrupted. Wrong.
“Come on.” His voice was flat. Businesslike. “Time to go back.”
She didn’t argue. Didn’t fight. Just let him lead her back down the corridor, her legs moving on autopilot while her mind screamed.
The room looked worse than before.
There was blood everywhere—sprayed across the floor, smeared on the walls, pooling in dark puddles that caught the light from the bare bulbs overhead. And in the center of it all, crumpled against the far wall like a broken marionette, was Raziel.
Nadi’s legs gave out.
She hit her knees, bile rising in her throat, horror clawing at her chest with ice-cold fingers. Kalo had broken him. The silver stake was still in his leg, but now there were other wounds too—cuts that wept blackened blood, burns that looked like they’d been made with silver implements, bones that bent at angles that made her stomach turn.
His jaw was definitely shattered now. The gag was gone—probably because he couldn’t have spoken anyway, not with the damage they’d done. His crimson eyes were half-open, glazed with pain, barely tracking as she crawled toward him.
“Raziel.” Her voice was a whisper. A prayer. “Raziel, look at me. Look at me.”
Those red eyes found hers. There was still awareness there—still that fierce, burning intelligence that had made him the most feared vampire in the metropolis. But underneath it was something else. Something she’d never seen in him before.
Pain.
Real pain. The kind that went beyond physical damage and sank its teeth into the soul.
