“Am I?” Braen raised an eyebrow. “She came to me, you know. The night before you and I…” He trailed off, letting the implication hang in the air. “She showed me reports of your ‘episodes.’ The bodies. What you’d done to your former lovers. Told me how you’d been manipulating my emotions all along. That nothing I felt was real. That was why she told me I had to drive you away. She told me I needed to betray you. To make you feel like it wasyourchoice.”
Nadi’s mind raced. What was Braen talking about? She knew Volencia was cruel to Raziel, but this sounded like something more manipulative. More subtle.
“She lied.” Raziel’s voice was tight.
“Perhaps.” Braen hummed, deceptively lighthearted. “Or perhaps you’re the one lying now. Who can say? Volencia certainly made it impossible to tell.” He moved closer, until he was mere inches from Raziel. “I think she couldn’t stand the thought of you having connections outside the family. Someone who might see beyond the Serpent to the man beneath. So she severed them. All of them. Can you imagine my surprise that youturnedyour new wife? Tell me. Did you do it to spite your cunt of a mother?”
Raziel hesitated, frozen solid, as if he were one of the statues in the garden. “No.”
“For power, then?” Braen laughed. “The cowgirl can’t have any kind of leverage.”
Raziel stayed silent.
Braen’s eyes went wide in shock. “You’rekidding me.Tell me you’re fooling me! Oh, Raziel,Raziel.My handsome, cruel, wonderful Raziel…you can’t mean it.” Reaching up, the smaller man took the Serpent’s face in his palms. “You can’t possiblyloveher.”
Silence. It echoed. Nadi’s ears rang with it like they had after a grenade was thrown into the middle of her wedding.Raziel, do something—say something—why aren’t you talking?
Raziel’s control was slipping. Whatever had passed between the vampires long ago was too personal, too volatile. Too dangerous.
“Why are you telling me all this now?” Raziel deflected from the topic of Monica, and for the first time, Nadi heard something like uncertainty in his voice.
“A shame. I wanted to hear you say you loved her.” Braen’s smile was almost gentle, a stark contrast to the hardness in his eyes. “As for why now? Because I want you to understand why I’m going to enjoy killing you.” His hand moved in a blur, and suddenly he was holding a gun. “It’s nothing personal, old friend. Just survival.”
Three shots, muffled against fabric and flesh.
That was all it took.
Fuck. No. No!
Raziel staggered backward, crimson blooming across his white shirt. One shot to the chest, two to the stomach. The shock on his face was genuine as he fell to his knees, blood spilling between the fingers he pressed to his wounds.
That was too fast. Braen had broken the script. Raziel had allowed himself to get suckered in.
Nadi froze, her heart hammering in her chest. This wasn’t how it was supposed to happen. Raziel was supposed to distract Braen while she moved in for the kill—clean, quick, untraceable.Not this. Not Raziel bleeding out on the ground with Braen standing over him, gun still raised.
“Do you know what the worst part was? About being with you?” Braen asked, crouching down to Raziel’s level. “The uncertainty. Never knowing if what I felt for you was real or just another one of your mind games.” He pressed the barrel of the gun against Raziel’s forehead. “In the end, I suppose it doesn’t matter. The result is the same. Now…are you trulyyou,I wonder? Or your little fae shifter pet? Time to find out, I suppose.”
Nadi was moving before she’d fully processed her decision, her form shifting as she stepped from the shadows. No longer a servant but a predator, sleek and deadly. The knife she’d kept hidden was now in her hand, its blade gleaming in the moonlight.
“I have to admit,” Braen chuckled down at Raziel, “if itisyou, I’m a little disappointed. I expected more of a fight from the Serpent. Any last words before I send you to join all those humans you’ve commanded to their deaths?”
Raziel was too good to give up her approach. Too good to reveal that Nadi was already in action. He merely smiled up at him, his teeth already stained with his own blood. “I thought I loved you, once. That wasn’t a lie. But now I know what loveis,Braen”—he coughed—“and I love her with an intensity and passion that you have never known in your life.”
Braen tensed, beginning to turn, but it was too late. Nadi was already in motion, her blade finding its mark between his ribs with surgical precision. She drove it in between his ribs. Once. Twice. She had six strikes before he even managed to register the first, putting the full force of her body behind each of the thrusts.
Braen made a strangled sound, more surprise than pain. The gun fell from suddenly nerveless fingers as he crumpled to the ground, eyes wide with shock.
“You…” he gasped, blood bubbling between his lips as he looked up at Nadi. “The shifter…?”
She leaned in close, letting her glamor slip just enough for him to see a hint of her true nature—the opalescent gleam in her eyes, the faintest tint of green to her skin. “I’m the face of every single fae you have tortured and sold,” she said softly. “And I am yourfuckingreckoning.”
With a final, vicious twist of the blade, she severed the connection between heart and body. She watched the light fade from Braen’s eyes, waiting until she was certain he was dead before turning to Raziel.
He had slumped against the base of the fountain, his blood staining the white stone crimson. His face was alarmingly pale, even for a vampire, and his breathing came in shallow, ragged gasps.
“Raziel—” She rushed to his side, pressing her hands over the worst of the wounds to stem the bleeding. “How bad is it? I—” A choked quiet laugh came out of her as she babbled out, “I’ve never tried tosavea vampire?—”
“It’s bad enough,” he managed, his voice barely audible. “The bullets…silver.”
