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My feet stop moving as panic seizes me.

Cress.

Viv yanks me forward, but I dig my heels into the slick cobblestone. “Cress is back there! We have to make sure she’s all right.”

“No.” She whirls on me, dark brown eyes simmering with rage. “We need to get you back to the manor where it’s safe.” Her nails break the thin skin on my wrist, carving painful crescent moons. “We can’t risk the rite.”

“You can’t risk the rite.” I tear out of her grasp, frantic and panicked and desperate to get to Cress. Words I thought I buried deep bubble out of me. “I don’t give a fuck about it.”

Her face shifts into something heartless. “I’m going to pretend like you didn’t just say that. Just like I pretend I don’t find you moping about and dreaming up escapes with the friend you’re so worried about. How do I know this isn’t a planned attack?” She cocks her head to the side. “Hmm? Cress’s husband is a tracker with a spot on Wall Lilium. Maybe he let those creatures in to cause a distraction so they can smuggle you out, and you can reunite at the ocean.” Shock races through me and her grin turns venomous. “Hunters are taught many languages, Sacrifice.”

All this time, she understood what we were saying.

My thoughts are running loose as I stammer, “C-Cress and Tyl wouldn’t do that.” My hands fist at my sides. “You’ve lost your mind. Cress is pregnant, Viv.”

She lifts a shoulder. “It’ll be an easy enough story to spin. And Father will be incredibly disappointed to learn that, yet again, you’re so ready and willing to betray our family, to betray our kingdom, to betray Norica because you’re a frightened little symp.”

My palm connects with the side of her cheek in a painful slap. It stings me, so it must hurt her, but she doesn’t even flinch. Before she can reply, before she can beat the ever-loving shit out of me and pretend someone else did it, I turn on my heel and bolt in the direction of Gild the Lily.

Screams echo around me as I elbow through the crush and push myself to keep going, regardless of the stitching in my side. I’m close. Close enough to take a shortcut through a courtyard not far from the boutique. Just a little further, and⁠—

A fist in my hair yanks me into the darkness as a hand clamps firmly over my mouth.

Chapter 7

QUILL

Not even one of the Seven could gather the stained-glass shards and stitch them back together. I stare at the shattered window. Its jagged edges, the broken frame, the deep dark of night just beyond it.

How have I messed things up so badly?

Rory left with Cress hours ago. However, I remain where I last felt her silken skin, tasted her sweet lips, and basked in every little detail that makes her so exquisite: the light dusting of freckles on her nose, the liquid ring of gold around her pupils, the intoxicating scent of her blood as her face flushes with need, the silhouette of her slight frame as she quakes beneath me, sweat-soaked and begging.

You don’t have to be gentle. I won’t break.

Her words resurface, and my cock stiffens against the laces of my trousers.

When we’d joined, I nearly lost control as she breathed my name, an incantation awakening even the blackest parts of my soul and dusting them off, shining them to a glimmer as polished as Cress’s silver stake.

I’m rooted in place, in knowing, in understanding, in accepting who she is to me.

I should have followed her.

I force myself to settle, to think beyond her scent, her taste, her everything. But it doesn’t help. She’s all-consuming.

A high-pitched shrieking sounds from somewhere in the house.

“Not now,” I mutter, breathing past the tension coiling in my lower stomach.

Only one vampire is bold enough to contact me tonight.

Mihal.

He wants to know if I’ve completed his task, and I need more time to come up with a lie. Beyond our vow of not killing innocents, I will certainly not kill Rory now. Not in this lifetime, and not when I inevitably find her in the next.

The shrieking continues—ear-splitting and piercing and…

Not from a scrying mirror after all. Those are screams. Of terror. They drift through the broken window pane—sharp and terrible and dangerously close. A strange stirring roars in my chest as I tear through the house and race outside into pure pandemonium.