Chapter
One
Ice Rykard’s Caves
Wales
December 29
* * *
Raiden
* * *
“Mathias attacked the Lowery estate last night,” Bram Rion announces behind me. “He burned it to the ground.”
At the news, I whirl to him. Instant terror grips me as I fixate on one question. “The family?”
Solemnly, he shakes his head. “Dead.”
My heart plummets. The cave tilts around me. I stagger, slamming my palm against the nearby wall to stay upright as his terrible words ricochet in my skull.
The entire family dead? Including Tabitha...and the unborn youngling she carried?
My youngling.
Fuck, I never said good-bye to her, never had the chance to hold her one last time.
Pain detonates in my chest, an inferno torching every nerve. My knees buckle as my thoughts rebel against Bram’s news. Maybe he’s wrong. Maybe, somehow, she was magically spared.
As soon as the hope flares, I force myself to snuff it. I’ve seen the aftermath of other such Anarki attacks. My head knows the odds of her still living and breathing—still growing my son in her womb—is zero.
But my stubborn heart refuses to believe she’s gone until I see her body myself.
After recently returning from exile to wreak havoc on magickind, the evil wizard, Mathias d’Arc, has been quiet for weeks, his indiscriminate raping and killing of his enemies among magickind’s elite paused. He claims he commits his crimes against the wizarding upper class, the Privileged, in the name of uplifting the lower class, the Deprived, to power.
Liberation based on blood, pain, and torture? I shake my head. That’s not liberation, but terror.
“I know what you’re thinking, and I won’t let you go alone.” Bram blocks the doorway, his voice flat. Even in the dim light, a darkness simmers under his surface—something coiled and volatile that sends a chill up my spine. It wasn’t there a few weeks ago.
He leads the Doomsday Brethren, a ragtag band of warriors devoted to stopping Mathias. We’ve taken to hiding in a fellow warrior’s caves like damn underground rodents scurrying for shelter. While others above us die.
Like my beloved Tabitha.
Her fiery hair, her laughter, her hazel eyes, her sweetness…all gone?
Anguish and fury assail me at once. It’s all I can do not to charge across the room and rip Bram’s blond head off his wide shoulders. “I have to go. I must know if there’s any way…”
I rake a hand through my hair. I can’t even speak about Tabitha’s death. I tore out my heart and left her behind so she would be safe. Off Mathias’s radar. Hopefully immune from the violence.
Instead, I left her to die.
“The neighbors reported fires. When Caden and Ice”—Bram references two of the Doomsday Brethren’s other wizards—“teleported there to investigate, they found no survivors. You won’t solve anything by going.”
“If someone had attacked Emma’s house, wouldn’t you investigate personally?” I snarl about Bram’s mysterious mate who bonded with him one night, then disappeared the very next dawn.
Bram raises a brow. “It’s not the same. Tabitha wasn’t your mate. In fact, didn’t you spend last night with another woman?”
