Everything was a blur.
He remembered Braen. The bullet wounds. He remembered Nadi pulling silver from his chest.
Darkness.
Pain.
Starvation. A burning need.
Then…honey. Salvation like nothing he had ever tasted before had filled him. He had been about to die. He knew that much. He had felt it, somewhere, in the back of his mind—calling to him.
But he was alive.
His room was in shambles. The bookcase had been emptied mostly onto the floor. A broken lamp. An overturned table. He had two bleeding bullet holes in his chest that had not been there before.
And in his arms…a dying fae siren. Her long, dark-scaled tail stretched out beside them. Beautiful and foreign, a creature so out of place in his watchtower loft. Her neck was covered in teeth wounds, as if gnawed on by a rabid animal.
One that should have been put down.
She hadtriedto put him down.
Clearly, he had overpowered her. There was a struggle. He had mauled her and ripped open her throat.
Nadi was still alive. But barely. He didn’t know if she would survive. He knew nothing about how to tend to her. What did she need? How could he help her?
Or was it already too late?
Had he killed her?
Had he fallen in love with a woman only to destroy her? Had his family been right? How perfect would that be? How utterly and wonderfully poetic.
“You can’t—you can’t leave me,” he murmured to her, his words still slurring and messy. He was weak. Healing. He had been on the brink of death. “Don’t go, don’t…”
His ears pricked at the sound of the door downstairs opening and shutting. “Ivan!”The shout was broken and sounded more like a cry from a child than anything else. But it was the best he could do. “Help?—”
The sound of thudding footsteps told him that his bodyguard took it seriously. It meant that Nadi’s secret was about to be shared with someone else…but if it meant that she would live, he couldn’t care less.
Ivan burst into the room, carrying a case of glass bottles filled with crimson liquid in his hands. The bodyguard stared down at the scene in front of him with wide eyes. “What thefuck?—”
“No time to expl—” He coughed. It hurt to speak. It hurt to do anything. “Monica. Help her.”
Raziel didn’t have friends in this world. But he had something better. He had Ivan. Because his bodyguard quickly set the bottles of blood on the ground with athudand immediately scooped up the fae siren without a single hesitation—struggling a bit to offset the weight of the woman’s long tail.
“I don’t know wh—where to even start to—” Ivan was already heading to the bathroom with her.
“Try.” Raziel bowed his head, pressing his palms over his eyes, wishing he could curl into a hole and stay there.
And, if she died, perhaps he would. His words were a whisper, more to himself, than anything else. “I can’t do this without her.”
“Drink this, laeiga. You’ll feel better.”
Nadi turned her head away from the cup pressed to her lips, muttering back in fae. “Ni, ni’ha, laetesh.”She hated the taste of the boiled roots and herbs. She always did. Mother told her it was supposed to taste good. Nadi suspected it was a lie. It tasted like soap to her.
“Drink it, Nadi. Please.”
A hand underneath her neck lifted her head. The cup met her lips again. This time, she had no choice. The disgusting soapy flavor entered her mouth and she swallowed it.
Coughing, she whined, sinking into the warm water around her. At least there was that. It was too close around her, too tight—there were walls near her. But she was warm.
