Page 161 of Fallen Court

And maybe his was, too.

Roark gave a sharp nod, grabbed the handle, and yanked the door open. It gave without any resistance. Baptiste might as well have strewn the path with rose petals.

“Careful,” Roark muttered, eyes scanning the dim interior as we stepped over the threshold.

An eerie silence hung over the empty booths. No ambush waited.

Baptiste knew she had already won. The blood was spilled. The end was in motion. She was waiting for her prize.

Waiting for me.

“I don’t like this.” Roark strode to a booth in the corner and picked up an abandoned wineglass. Then he froze.

“What is it?”

He plucked something off the table, pain moving across his face.

The signet ring of the Nether Court.

I swiped the finished bottle of wine from the table and sniffed it, nose wrinkling. “She dosed them.”

“That’d better be all she’s done,” he snarled. And I heard it in his rage—something primal and ancient. Something that clawed inside me, too. Proof of what I’d only guessed. There wasn’t time to be surprised.

A muffled cry echoed from the direction of the kitchen, followed by a chorus of shouts, and we were moving. Each step a stolen heartbeat, my pulse quickening. Roark flanked me as we moved swiftly and silently across the dining room, hugging the shadows, as cold laughter shattered the air.

I pushed through the swinging door, and my heart stopped.

I barely processed the scene before me. My sister clutching her bloody leg, a witch standing over her like she was a trophy. Dante watching me with wary eyes from the floor, Channing laid out before him. Channing, who wasn’t breathing.

Baptiste stood in the center of the kitchen, greeting me with a feral grin, demanding my attention. Blood on the floor. Faces I knew. But the only thing that mattered was the woman at her feet, the woman with a gun pressed to the center of her forehead, the woman who even now wore a look of defiance that devastated me.

Cate.

“It’s about time,” Baptiste drawled. “I thought I was going to have to call you myself.” She jammed the muzzle of her gun hard enough that Cate flinched. Her finger twitched on the trigger. “I can’t decide if I want to give you time to say goodbye or not.”

Silent tears streamed down Cate’s cheeks. Our eyes met, and she mouthed one word: Run.

Like hell I would.

I lifted my hand, my fingers working in a practiced motion.

“What are you doing?” Roark growled behind me as his magazine clattered to the ground. “Lach!”

But I didn’t turn toward Roark. I wouldn’t explain. Not while that gun was pointed between my mate’s eyes.

Baptiste’s eyes lit up, a delighted smile twisting on her cruel face. “I didn’t even have to ask. She has broken you!”

But someone like her could never understand. Love didn’t break a man. It built him. Forged him. Love made a man who he was meant to be. “She saved me.”

“Then the pleasure will still be mine,” she said triumphantly.

“Wait.” A sharp voice stopped her. “Allow me.”

A figure stepped from behind her, and the world tilted sideways.

Shaw. My own brother. On the wrong side of that gun.

He was a hothead like me, but working with her? Working with our enemies? Shaw hated me. I’d groomed him to. But Ciara? Cate? How could he do this to them?