And he threw the head into the flames.
The scream that erupted from the fireplace was unlike anything Raziel had ever heard. It wasn’t a sound—it was aforce. It spoke of a millennium of accumulated rage and thwarted ambition and the absolute refusal to die.
The sound was ancient. Primal. It carried within it the echoes of every scheme Lilivra had ever crafted, every life she had ever manipulated, every dream she had ever crushed in pursuit of her vision.
It was the death cry of something that should never have existed in the first place—a creature that had lived so long it had forgotten what it meant to be mortal.
What it meant to be a vampire.
What it meant to befae.
But die she did.
The ancient flesh caught fire immediately, burning with a strange silver-white flame that seemed to devour rather than simply consume. Lilivra’s white hair turned to ash in seconds. Her opal eyes—those terrible, knowing eyes that had watched civilizations rise and fall—burst and ran like liquid starlight. Her perfect features melted and twisted and finally,finally, crumbled to nothing.
The flames consumed everything. The schemes she had woven for a millennium. The prophecies she had whispered into the ears of frightened children, turning them into weapons for her own use.
All of it—turning to ash.
The screaming stopped.
And then there was only silence.
* * *
Nadi’s legs gave out the moment she was certain Lilivra was truly dead.
She hit the marble floor hard, the silver sword clattering from her grip. Every muscle in her body was screaming. Every nerve ending felt like it had been set on fire and then frozen solid. The blood bond had dragged her to the very edge of death and then yanked her back, and the whiplash wasexcruciating.
But she was alive.
Against all odds, against all reason, against the machinations of an ancient monster who had been pulling strings for longer than civilizations had existed?—
She wasalive.
“Nadi.” Raziel’s voice was hoarse, ragged, but he was there—collapsing to his knees beside her, gathering her into his arms with hands that trembled almost as badly as hers. “Nadi, Nadi,Nadi?—”
He kept saying her name like it was a prayer. Like it was the only word he knew anymore. His arms were wrapped so tightly around her that she could barely breathe, but she didn’t care. She clung to him with equal desperation, burying her face in his chest and breathing in the scent of him—blood and smoke and something underneath that was uniquelyRaziel.
They had done it.
Moons help them, they had actually done it.
“I told you.” She managed a weak laugh that turned into a cough. “Fae magic. Not just superstition.”
“H—how?” he stammered uselessly.
“Maybe the tree wasn’t a bad omen, but a sacrifice. Maybe it was in our blood…you being a vampire. I…I don’t know.” She laughed again, astonished. “I’m not one of the elders.”
“Youdied.” His voice cracked on the word, and when she looked up at his face, she was shocked to see something glistening in his crimson eyes. Raziel Nostrom—the Serpent, the monster, the creature who had laughed while families were slaughtered—was crying. “I felt your heart stop. I felt you leave me?—”
“Almost.” She reached up to touch his face, her fingers leaving smears of blood on his cheek. Whose blood, she couldn’t even tell anymore. There was so much of it. “I almost died.” Wincing, she groaned in pain. “Might still die.”
“I thought I’d lost you.” His forehead pressed against hers, his breath hot against her lips. “I thought—for that moment, when your heart stopped—I thought I’d finally lost the only thing in this world that mattered.”
“You can’t get rid of me that easily, vampire.” She smiled weakly. “Told you. You don’t get to die until I say so, and I meant it. You’re stuck with me now. Forever.”
He stared at her like she was something impossible. Something miraculous. And then he was kissing her—desperately, frantically, with all the terror and relief and love that words could never express. She kissed him back with equal fervor, tasting blood and ash and something that might have been tears.
