“She didn’t dress for the occasion. How embarrassing,” Rad says in my ear. He sighs heavily and sets a hand over his heart. “Tragic what happens to omegas who don’t obey, isn’t it?
“What have you done to her?”
The omega’s eyes, blood-red from whatever they’ve done to her, glow a sickly purple-black, the color of the Soldiers’ dark magic.
The color of the ember. It pulses at the bite in her neck—not Jaime’s but another’s. Rad’s?
“Grace!” an alpha with a red band around his bicep calls out, breaking free of the Soldier holding him at scribe point, dashing toward his captive omega. He makes it three steps before he’s struck down.
Dead.
The guests around the ballroom shuffle, soft cries and whispers spreading around the ballroom like wildfire.
At the edge of the crowd, Jaime Brentwood weeps, a broken alpha, destroyed by the severed mating bond between him and the love of his life. All the love that once flowed through their bond… gone. But Trinity’s been gone to him since the Soldiers first took her, dragging her far beyond the reach of her mating bond before they burned Jaime’s bite from her body. He goes for his scribe, but he’s too late. Two Soldiers bind his wrists with a hex and shove him to his knees.
And my own father? His gaze is calculating beneath a veneer of fear I see straight through.
“You’ll never get away with this!” Professor Cadigan shouts, but he’s stilled by a scribe at his throat and a growled warning from the Soldier beside him.
Rad looks me in the eyes and I’m ready to fall to my knees in front of him, to beg for Trinity’s life.
Until Trinity draws a gun from behind her back.
Rad brushes a curl away from my face, still facing me, his back to the spectacle in the center of the ballroom. “I’ll protect you, beloved.” He shields me, but still provides me with a perfect view of the tableau before me.
Trinity’s arm shakes as she raises the gun, and she whips her head back and forth, trembling and sobbing. Her words are lost to her garbled cries, but she begs, not for her life, but for Grace’s.
He takes my hand in one of his and I don’t fight him, even as he presses it between his, as he sets his hand over his heart.
No. Not his heart.
His Mark.
The Mark ignites with heat beneath the silk of his tux, beneath our joined hands.
There’s pity in his eyes—for me—when he orders Trinity to kill Grace.
“No!” I shout.
Trinity looks past Rad to me, a plea in her eyes.
Saints, he’s controlling her through the bond.
“Blood magic,” Rad tsks. “The most powerful magic there is. She’ll do anything I tell her to.”
More powerful than an affinity?
I reach out to Trinity with my mind and connect with her easily—both of our emotions are running high.
Her mind is chaos, her thoughts desperate. She doesn’t want to kill Grace. She’s trying her hardest to resist, just as she resisted their bites, their blood magic, but she’s tired. She’s so very, very tired.
All she wants is peace.
Save me,she cries out to me.
Saints, in all my affinity lessons, I’ve never trained for this. I brace myself, standing my ground, and I draw on all of my power, find the font of it inside me, and I let my intention and affinity flow through my connection with Trinity. My awareness slips down our connection until I’m mired in Trinity’s mind, in her thoughts. I see the world from both my eyes and hers—the sight before her clouded red with blood.
A desperate, shrieking Grace, beseeching her pack to save her. Begging them not to. Begging them to live.
