I picked apart his words and tried to understand what he was warning me about. The second period started, and the noise surged again.
Donn leaned closer, his voice calm amid the chaos as his shadows curled around my ankles. “But as you insist on jumping the gun, this will hurt.”
My breath caught. “Donn?—”
He pressed two fingers lightly to my wrist, over my pulse, and pain tore through me. It wasn’t sharp; it was invasive, like something being unwound from inside my veins and dragged through every branch of my bloodline. A scream tore free from my throat and was swallowed by the roaring crowd.
To anyone watching, it looked like I was reacting to the fight on the ice. Inside, I was unraveling. I tasted copper. My vision tunneled. I felt something tear free, a thread snapping back through time.
“There,” Donn murmured. “Another strand removed from Eloise.”
My heart hammered as the pain receded, leaving a hollow ache in its wake and an uneasy feeling that I’d let something in. “What did you do?”
“The borrowed power your grandmother wields has to be filtered somewhere else.”
“Yes, back into you.”
“No, that is not how this works. She bartered for that power. To take it back directly would unravel my original oath, and given I’m not ready to leave this world, I can’t do that.”
Oh, fuck no. I absolutely didn’t want to receive an answer to the following question, but I forced myself to ask it anyway. “Where are you channeling it?”
He tucked a lock of hair behind my ear, his eyes shifting between mine with affection that hadn’t been earned. “I gave your grandmother my oath that my power would feed the Roberts bloodline.”
“And now she’s not of that bloodline.”
“Indeed. It was a little unexpected, but if you had come to me with your thoughts, we could have worked this out. However, it’s no longer a trickle of power from her to you. It’s more of an excessive dump. She may not have even realized it was happening before, but now she will have felt it.”
“My grandmother,” I whispered. “She’s?—”
“Thinning,” Donn said. “What she is doing is unsustainable. Harvesting souls corrodes the vessel.”
My stomach dropped at the memory of the hundreds of jars. “You knew.”
“Yes, at the moment of death.” Donn’s gaze remained on the ice. “She’s capturing them before the veil can claim them.”
Ice cracked under a skate, and a goal horn blared.
I twisted my trembling fingers together. “Will they be freed once you remove her power?”
Donn glanced at me. “No. Only the taker can release what they’ve claimed.”
The words settled like a stone in my chest. “She’s not just holding them hostage, she’s warping them,” I snapped. “And whatever comes out the other side won’t be human or sane.”
“No, they won’t.” He leaned closer. “I could remove more if you let me in deeper.”
I met his gaze, fury burning through the ache. “You don’t own me.”
“Ownership is such a human word.” His dark and seductive voice wrapped around me while his eyes held a promise to end everything. The chaos, the dread I felt every time I worried if I was fucking up the world.
The air shifted. Pressure rolled through the arena, subtle but unmistakable. The lights flickered, and the glass vibrated. Donn leaned back in his seat and stretched his arm behind my shoulders to toy with a loose curl. “He’s here.”
“Who?” I demanded.
“Your mate,” Donn drawled. “He dislikes being excluded.”
The ice cracked, and the crowd screamed, but this time, it wasn’t because of the game. Hudson appeared like a force of nature at the edge of the rink, eyes blazing gold, power rippling off him in violent waves.
“Get your hands off my mate,” he snarled. The hockey players slammed into the boards, making way for the true predator.
