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Red Stilling is an old compulsion, older than most bloodline commands and granted only to the Five Blood by Morrighan before we understood that every gift from her came with a hook buried in the flesh. It is not the crude, invasive glamour that reorders will. It simply lowers the body into rest with the authority of a sire calling his line to stillness.

I have used it sparingly across centuries.

Tonight, I use it on this precious human who will likely wake and attempt to remove my head with her bare hands.

From beside the bed I watch her breathe, the faint crease between her brows easing at last. Rowan’s potion has quieted the gag enough for the bleeding to stop, enough for her body to rest without fighting the spell every second. Her hand remains curled near her throat, fingers lightly bent, as if even asleep she expects pain to return.

Something inside me shrinks and shatters.

Gods, I did that. By demanding truth from a body booby-trapped to punish honesty, then sent her to the dark when she refused to fall neatly under my command.

I could dress the decision in law and strategy. List every betrayal, omission and dangerous choice she made with my life caught in the consequences. All of it would be true. None of it changes the sound she made when blood filled her mouth.

Eira stirs, restless under the compulsion.

I send the compulsion deeper, fighting the guilt and regret filling my gut. ‘Sleep, little hunter,’ I murmur. ‘Hate me when you have strength for it.’

Her breathing steadies again.

Through the bond, I feel the edge of her determination even now, bright under sleep like a blade hidden beneath silk. She has made a decision. I know it in my withered soul. She is going to do something reckless, brave, ruinous, and entirely hers.

I should wake her and demand the answer before she attempts self-destruction by confession.

But she needs rest.

And I need time.

Since the night I drank her blood and the Tower blacked out, challenges have come at me with the relentlessness of a century of war condensed into a handful of days. My mark advancing, fighting monsters at Kessler’s estate, and the congressman dying under Rafe’s blood gag. Every other challenge from Tavish Drennan to Selphine Rousseau walking through my wards and throwing my sireds across my war room as if they were children.

Even now I suspect that Morrighan has found new paths through my unconsciousness, and the Heartshard Glass now counts down my ending in fractured red light.

Time has become a predator.

I need to re-ward my Tower, assess the damage Selphine left in the stones. Speak with Rowan again before the witch decides to solve my problems with some appalling ritual she will describe as ‘uncomfortable but survivable’. Gather the Twelve, minus the ones I have banished or buried, and plan how to address this latest violation by my brothers and their missing sireds.

But first, I cross the room to the Heartshard Glass.

The broken mirror waits on the wall like an open wound.

Its largest shard pulses as I approach, red light moving beneath the glass in slow, deliberate lines. The five-segment circle appears again, New York blackened at the centre, the other territories dim around it. My reflection fractures across the surface: king, monster, dying man, fool.

Behind me, Eira sleeps in my bed.

The Glass shows her too.

In one shard, her face is pale against my sheets. In another, blood stains her mouth. In a third, her eyes are open, staring at me with an accusation I deserve.

Then the shard darkens, and for a single breath I see nothing but a red-black chrysalis suspended in shadow.

Morrighan.

My hand curls at my side.

The old path has ruled me since the mark awakened. Find Lyra. Bond the mate. Survive the curse. Save New York. Preserve the bloodline.

Simple, brutal, inevitable.

But perhaps that simplicity was the first trap.