No.I wasn’t losing myself. I wasfinding her.
There’d once been plants in the house, too. I could tell because even inside here, there was the scent of rot. The plants were all in wild tangles. They hissed softly, some releasing smoke. The air stank of dead magick and neglect.
Tabitha hissed under her breath. “That bitch alwayswassloppy with consequences.”
Tasia stepped closer. “This place feels wrong,” she whispered.
Zara gagged. “I feel like I just walked through a sewer.”
Krusk muttered, “Pleasant.”
But I barely heard them. The bond was thrumming so loudly it strained inside of me.Fightingfor attention.
Hanna was here and she was terrified. She was tied down by something magickal and cruel, but she was alive, and she knew we were coming.
Alive.That was the only word I needed to keep from falling apart completely.
My vision sharpened, my breath leveled into something lethal, and the bond inside of me sang with her direction.Enka moved to my side.
“Sav,” he said quietly. “You’re okay.”
“I’m not,” I whispered.
He nodded, understanding. “But you will be.”
Dristan raised his hand for silence. The clan formed a V-shaped wedge around him. Tabitha, Zara, Tasia, and the coven spread behind, palms raised, hands glowing while Krusk and Enka flanked me.
“Savla,” Dristan said quietly. “Point us.”
I lifted my hand toward the staircase like something ancient was guiding it.
“She’s in the east wing,” I whispered. “Upstairs. Alone.Scared. Glamored. Bound by something—somethingwrong.”
The words nearly broke me.
Krusk’s jaw flexed before he muttered, “Then that’s where we go.”
Dristan nodded once and Tabitha’s voice boomed like thunder, magic vibrating the air, “On my mark!”
My pulse roared in my ears, Krusk squeezed my shoulder, and Enka exhaled a pent-up breath beside me.Ribbon croaked from the back ranks—heartbroken but resolute. Dristan raised his fist.
“Now!” Tabitha screamed.
The coven unleashed a shockwave of magic that shattered the glamor in a screaming burst of light. And I charged.
Not as a son following his father’s footsteps or as a monster losing himself. As a mate—a male.Driven by something so fierce, so true, so unbearably powerful that it nearly brought me to my knees. I ran forher.
I ran like fate was sprinting with me. And I ran with every intention of tearing down the world if it meant she breathed another second.
When I reached the door that I knew she was behind? I didn’t knock or wait.I roared her name—”Hanna!”—and broke it open with my bare hands.
Chapter 31
Savla
The manor swallowed us. Wards screamed as we crossed the threshold into the room—dying, crackling and fracturing like bone under too much pressure.
The air inside was suffocating. Magick was being broken—the remnants of spells that were festering. There was potion vapor in the air that clung to my lungs like mildew.
