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Or a warning?

That thought keeps circling.

If I had forced the confession, spat the name through blood and magic and panic, what then? Valentin reacted to two syllables like my mouth had become a detonator. The Twelve would’ve heard. Aaron would’ve calculated containment options in that pleasant, terrifyingly polite way of his. Luca might have drawn a sword and called it foreplay.

And Valentin…

His fingers twitch, claws appearing, then vanishing. The mark flares brighter.

My own blood answers.

That’s the only way to describe it. A tug beneath my skin, deep in the veins, something turning towards him because he has called without speaking.

I stop walking. Aaron stops with me as Valentin’s body jolts. The other vampires carrying him nearly stumble.

Malachi whips around. ‘Move.’

I stare at Valentin. ‘Did he just⁠—?’

‘Move,’ Malachi repeats, sharper.

‘Don’t bark at me. Your boss is the one acting like a supernatural motion sensor.’

His eyes flash. ‘You’re testing the limits of his command. Be grateful you still possess a throat with which to complain.’

Aaron shifts closer, his tone low. ‘Both of you. Enough already.’

Valentin’s mark pulses again, and this time he makes a sound. Rough. Ruined. A half-formed growl dragged through stasis.

My feet move before anyone can order me again.

Fine. Message received. Walking blood trigger will continue towards the creepy underground vault.

Malachi resumes his pace, but there’s a new stiffness to him now, a fury sharpened by fear. He hates that Valentin reacts to me, that I matter and his sire protected me with his last scraps of consciousness while the men who have served him for centuries stood outside a locked door, useless.

I get it.

Hell, I even sympathise. But I still might stab him if he keeps glaring.

The corridor opens into the Lower Vaults.

I’ve been here once before, when Valentin decided to stage his deeply disturbing blood-buffet-slash-missing-girl search pageant in front of me. It was unpleasant then. Now the chamber looks transformed. The central floor has split open, revealing a circular dais that wasn’t visible before. Black stone steps spiral down into the hollow, and at the centre waits a slab of carved obsidian veined in silver.

A bed, if your interior designer specialises in ritual sacrifice and emotional damage.

‘Oh, lovely,’ I mutter. ‘The emergency murder table.’

Iskander, the seven-foot war hound vampire, snorts, and in other circumstances I would’ve fist pumped for getting a sound out of him.

Malachi shoots him a look that should curdle organs.

‘What?’ Iskander says. ‘It is a little murder-table-ish. And I should know.’

Aaron sighs like a man who has spent centuries being the only adult in a room as they carry Valentin down the steps and place him on the slab.

The second his back touches the stone, the whole chamber wakes.

Red light crawls through the floor in thin lines, sigils igniting one by one around the dais. A low hum fills the air, vibrating under my feet and up my legs. The mark on Valentin’s chest answers so violently I take a step back.