My heart pounds harder with every passing second, imagining more headlights cresting the road behind us any moment now. My breaths come fast as I slam the door shut and lurch around to the other side. The driver’s seat feels foreign, too big and too stiff beneath me, the wheel slick under my bloodied hands. The dashboard glows with symbols I don’t understand, a dozen buttons and levers I don’t have time to decipher.
This is a really bad time to not know how to drive, but I can’t haul all three of their bodies at once, and we need to get as much distance from this place as possible.
“Shit,” I hiss, fumbling around until the SUV lurches forward with a violent jerk as I recall brief moments of watching Dante drive from my view in the middle of the backseat earlier. The engine growls loudly, tires squeaking as I mash the right pedal too hard.
From behind me comes the sickening thump and slide of bodies jostling across the back seat. I wince, knuckles white on the wheel, but I don’t dare glance back.
“I’d say sorry,” I mutter through clenched teeth, softly putting my foot on the pedal once more until the car shudders into a smoother acceleration, “but honestly, none of this is my fault.”
The road stretches dark and empty ahead of me, the hum of the engine steadying as I wrestle it to a speed I can control. My white-knuckled grip aches on the wheel, every muscle tight and every nerve braced for headlights to flare behind me.
I swerve once when a distant car barrels toward us in the opposite lane, its horn blaring as its lights flash across my face.My stomach lurches and I wrench the SUV back into place with a curse.
“Wrong side of the road, Briar,” I mutter, breath ragged. “Stay on the fucking right side.”
I force the vehicle steady, lungs tight until the taillights fade and the night swallows us again. The compound has to be many miles behind us now, but the tension won’t ease. I’m not sure how long I drive until a dingy sign flashes in my headlights: Stellar Ranch–Private Property.
My foot eases off the gas, instinct already steering me toward the sign. I crank the wheel, slowing to bump down a gravel turnoff that winds toward a long gate stretched across the dirt road. I slam the SUV into park a little too hard, shove the door open, and stomp to the gate. One sharp kick to the lock sends metal groaning and the chain rattling loose. I shove the gate wide enough to run back and drive through, then get back out to pull it shut again behind us, looping the chain to make it look untouched.
There’s nothing I can do about the tire marks besides hope no one thinks anything of it.
My chest heaves as I slide back into the driver’s seat, heart hammering. I turn the SUV off the dirt path and am instantly jostled all over the vehicle by the bumps hidden in the tall grass. I don’t stop, though, heading deeper until the road is nowhere in sight behind us. The headlights show an empty field near the treeline of the dense forest between the road and us.
I kill the engine and silence presses in, save for the crickets chirping around me as I jump out of the vehicle. The grass is damp and cold beneath my feet as I drag them one by one into the field, the full moon shining against their skin until they almost look ghostly. I lay them all down next to each other, hoping I put enough distance between us and Terrance’s forces.
“I would have liked to go further,” I mutter as I lean over them, my chest rising sharp as I press trembling fingers to their throats. “But I think at least one of you will die if I don’t address your wounds now. Quite selfish of you all, per usual.”
My sarcasm is thick, but my voice trembles with the anxiety that steadily rose as their heartbeats began to grow fainter to my ears during the drive.
Dante’s pulse is weak, but steady enough. Callum’s grows fainter, but it’s there. Elias’s is barely a whisper of a beat beneath cold skin.
My stomach knots, bile stinging the back of my throat at the thought of him dying in some weird twist of him having a savior complex. With my luck he’d turn up in the underworld as a ghost and come haunt me forever, constantly hanging it over my head that he died for me.
Not that I ever fucking asked him to.
Logic slices clean through the frantic haze of my thoughts. They won’t last like this. They need blood, and with no idea of where the nearest hospital is and if they’d even make it in time, there’s only one donor around.
Me and the blood in my veins.
The very thing Terrance wanted to wring from me while they stood by.
Rage claws at me, hot and bitter, that it comes down to this. That survival for them means me offering the same part of myself their family tried to commodify, to drain and sell like I was nothing more than an object to own.
But Callum’s face flashes in my mind, the way he smashed that vat and ruined the stores of my blood, screaming defiance in the only way he knew how in that moment. Dante’s gentle hands ghost across my memory too, softer than they should have been, cleaning my skin after that first session. Then there’s Eliasfalling to his knees with a bullet in his chest because he put himself between me and death without thinking.
The anger doesn’t fade, but it reshapes into determination fueled by it.
I let my fangs lengthen and lift a trembling wrist to my mouth. The edge of my fangs breaks into the soft flesh of my wrist, a small sting of pain searing before the blood wells up, dark and rich under the moonlight.
This time, spilling my blood is my choice, and the thought of that begins to stitch together a wound in my heart that I’m not ever sure will be whole again.
CHAPTER 20
BRIAR
The grass is wet beneath my knees as I sink down beside Elias on the far right of their line, the cool night air sharp in my lungs. My chest tightens as my gaze drags across all of them, landing on Elias last. With his skin losing its warmth, lips tinted purple and parted just slightly, he looks like he’s already half in the grave.
I lift my wrist toward him, trembling still as I tilt it and press the torn skin to his lips. The blood trickles slowly, sliding into his mouth. For a breath there is nothing but silence and the moon watching me.
