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She wore only the silk robe she had no doubt pulled on to leave our bed. One now fallen open, pooled around her like spilled milk. Dark blood stained the ancient stone beneath her head, where she must have struck it as she fell. And by her open hand sat a box. Dark, polished wood, the lid thrown back, the inside empty but for a bed of deep velvet.

I did not know what it was. Nor did I know what it had held. But I knew with a certainty that needed no proof that it was the cause of all of this.

The heat came then.

It rose up out of my chest the way it always did, the old and terrible gift in my blood waking with a roar. My aura blazing to life around me until the very chamber began to tremble, dust sifting down from the ceiling, the flames in the sconces leaping wild.

Someone had done this.

Someone had reached into my own castle, beneath my own feet, and laid hands on what was mine. The monster in me wanted nothing but to find them and make them pay. To rip them apart and bathe in their blood. To break every fucking bone and grind it to dust!

I wanted to kill.

To destroy the whole fucking world until I found them.

To burn their entire existence from history.

“Easy, brother.” Lazaros’s warning was enough to know that if I let it loose down here, I would bring the whole weight of the castle crashing down upon us all.

A roar tore out of me.

And then my eyes fell on her face again.

To my anchor.

And the fury faltered.

It didn’t vanish. It never vanished. But it banked, leashed by the only thing in either world that had ever been able to leash it.

Her.

Even now. Even unconscious on the floor, her presence still wrapped its fragile rope around the throat of the beast and held steady. Because what use was the monster to her? What use was bringing down the ceiling on the woman I loved? The woman I was trying to save?

I dropped to my knees at her side.

“Alexandra, my love.” I did not bother to hide the break in my voice. There was no one left to hide it from. I gathered her up into my arms, and she came too easily, too loosely, her head lolling against me. Limp…Far too limp.

And cold. Gods, she was so cold.

Bile climbed my throat. Was she…

No. She couldn’t be. I would know. I would feel it the instant that thread between us snapped. I would feel my world end. And it had not. It was thin, it was guttering, but it was there. She was still there. My fingers found the side of her throat, and relief crashed through me so hard it hurt as I felt it.

A pulse.

Faint. Barely a flutter beneath my fingertips, but there all the same.

I shook her as gently as I could manage with my hands trembling so badly and brushed a fallen strand of that fire-bright hair from her face.

“Alexandra?” Nothing. “Come now, sweetheart. Wake up for me.”

Her head only lolled against my arm again, and it pained me to see. Behind me, at the bottom of the stairs, Aster’s deep voice came, rough and careful. I twisted round to them as I continued to hold her close. They physically flinched, likely at the pain that would be so evident on my face.

Aster and Lazaros stood together at the foot of the steps, keeping their distance, watching me as men watch a fire they are not certain has gone out.

“Atlas,” Aster said. “Is she…” He couldn’t finish it. Couldn’t finish the agony in that question.

“She lives,” I breathed and it felt like a dying man’s last breath.