Images flash behind my closed eyelids like a broken movie reel—faction wars raging across Celestra, power struggles that make our previous conflicts look like children’s games, and a future where everything I know and love has been torn apart. But the most terrifying part isn’t the destruction or the chaos.
It’s the absence.
My children are nowhere to be found. Eden, Jaxson, Nathan, Barron, Sage—they simply don’t exist in this timeline. It’s like they’ve been erased from reality itself, leaving nothing but empty spaces where their laughter should be.
I finally break away from Marshall, gasping and shaking with my worst fears confirmed.
Candace Messenger isn’t trying to protect our future—she’s trying to rewrite it entirely.
“I entered into a covenant with my mother,” I pant out the words in disbelief.
“You entered into a covenant with hell,” he says sharply as his eyes bore into mine.
It takes a beat for his words to register and for me to realize how intensely he means them. Marshall rarely gets worked up over anything, and he is certainly worked up about this—not in a good way.
“Oh my goodness,” I say, lower than a breath as the reality sinks in. “No.”
“Yes,” Marshall growls back. “Chin up, Ms. Messenger. You survived a war with the Counts. You can certainly survive your mother.” He raises a brow as if he were posing a question instead. And ironically, it’s a question I’m not sure that I have the answer to.
“Skyla?” someone says from behind, and I turn to see both Gage and Logan standing there with a look on their faces that lets me know they’ve seen it all.
Logan glares at Marshall, then at Gage, too, but Gage doesn’t know that.
Poor Gage doesn’t know a damn thing.
Heaven help, because right now I get the feeling I don’t know a damn thing either.
My mother has really done it now.
Sometimes the people you trust most make the best tour guides to Hell—they know all of your weak spots and exactly which lies will get you there the fastest.
34
Skyla
The silence that follows my impromptu smooch session with Marshall is the kind that makes you acutely aware of how badly you’ve just screwed up your life.
The seventeenth-century hookers have stopped their raucous laughter, the ghostly piano has gone quiet, and even the crackling fire seems to be holding its breath.
Both Logan and Gage stare at me in horror, and it seems my lip-locking actions with the sultry Sector seem to have stopped them in their happy-to-see-me tracks.
Okay, so Gage isn’t so happy to see me as of late, but that’s beside the point. He’s here.
Gage stands with his hands clenched into fists at his sides, his chest rising and falling like he’s barely keeping himself from completely losing control. His eyes blaze with a fury that makes the blood freeze in my veins.
“Gage—” I start, but he’s already moving.
He takes three quick strides, pulls back his fist, and clocksMarshall hard enough to send him flying backward into a gaggle of corseted wenches who definitely didn’t see that coming.
“That’s for being you,” Gage growls, then turns on his heel and stalks out of the mansion without another word. He may not have any words for me, but he certainly had an action that showed me that he still cares.
Marshall straightens with one hand pressed to his jaw, his expression carrying that rueful look of someone who’s been punched by angry boyfriends before.
“Well,” he says mildly, “that could have gone better.” He nods my way. “Kindly inform Jock Strap that he just signed his own death warrant—I’m simply choosing the execution date.”
I wince because I know firsthand that Marshall’s threats are more or less promises. And he always delivers on his promises.
In an instant, every woman in the room volunteers to tend to him.
