But his hand released from her arm.
And he slipped back into unconsciousness.
Her heart pounded in her ears as her finger touched the bullet in his chest. Working quickly, she pulled it out and tossed it onto the nightstand. The ones in his stomach were easier—it was fleshier material. But something about him was changing.
The blood that was leaving him waschanging.It wasn’t red anymore. It was turning darker. Black. Thicker.Sludgy.
This was bad. Very, very bad.
Three silver bullets removed. Now, all she could do was clean him up. Do her best to stop the bleeding and hope that Ivan returned quickly with blood for Raziel. Hopefully, in bottled form, and not aperson.She knew they were killers. She knew how vampires fed. But a corpse seemed like an inconvenience they didn’t need right now.
She gathered a collection of washcloths from the bathroom and a bin to put them in, and went to work. They’d likely be ruined when she was done. But that was the nature of his life, she supposed. Raziel likely generated a lot of bloody linen.
She started by gently wiping the blood from his face and his lips. For a moment, a memory snapped into place. Suddenly, she was wiping the blood from her mother’s face. Cleaning the corpse of her father. Of her brother. Readying them for burial in the Wild.
Biting back the tears, it was a useless fight that time.
She let them fall down her cheeks. Clenching the cloth in her fist, she let out a noise that she couldn’t describe, halfway through a choke and a sob. Damn the Nostrom clan to thevoid.Damn them all to the worst kinds of torture she could dream up.
And Volencia worst of all. For if it weren’t for her, maybe Raziel wouldn’t have been sent to murder her family.
Maybe she wouldn’t have been forced to clean the corpses of the people she loved.
Maybe then, he wouldn’t have been turned into a monster.
Maybe then, neither would she.
And maybe then, she wouldn’t be seated at the bedside of the same creature of death, of revenge, ofslaughter,cleaning blood from his body…
Angry. Furious.
But not at him.
No.
At the ones whomadehim. She felt like she was going to lose her mind. Utterly snap like a twig under the weight of everything that had transpired that day.
“You better have been lying when you told him you loved your wife.” She began to clean the blood from his chest. “Or I swear Iwillcut out your heart, Raziel Nostrom. Because I—” Her voice choked off.
She was so glad he couldn’t hear her. So very glad.
But even then, she couldn’t risk it. She couldn’t even say the words to herself. She didn’t even dare to think them. She couldn’t give them that kind of power.
Leaning down, she kissed his cold lips. “Damn you, Raziel Nostrom.Damn youto whatever torment they make for souls like ours.”
Nadi must have dozed off. She had curled up on the sofa near the wall, wanting to give Raziel space. Sleeping in the same bed with him was one thing.
Sleeping in the same bed with a veritablecorpseof him was another.
She was woken up by a crash and the sound of breaking glass.
Instantly, she was on her feet, adrenaline rampaging through her system as she held a pistol aloft. She’d found it in a drawer in Raziel’s nightstand and put it in reach before lying down to sleep.
Searching for the source of the noise, she quickly found it. Her heart dropped.
It was Raziel.
He was half-collapsed onto the nightstand. The crash had been the lamp hitting the ground, the glass shade shattering on the old, lacquered wood floor.
