Just a door that absolutely, definitely, hadnotbeen there a second ago.
My stomach dropped. The floor felt unstable beneath my feet, as if the ground itself had betrayed me by allowing this impossible thing to exist. The air pressure in the room changed—subtle but noticeable, like my ears needed to pop, like we’d suddenly gained or lost altitude.
“Huh,” was all I could say.
“Think of a place you have been,” Damien purred. “It must be aplace, not a person nor a time, and it must be a place youdesireto go. Then?” He waved his hand. “Open the door and walk through.”
I thought of all the places I could have gone. I needed somewhere to retreat to, somewhere to feel safe, somewhere I could process the overwhelming deluge of this night’s events.
Home? As in my parents' house, my childhood home, my bedroom. I still thought of that as home, and why wouldn’t I? I hadn’t even been at college for a full semester. But then I thought of Daddy, how he would worry and wonder and pepper me with questions as to why I was home.
Dorm? It was where I’d spent most of my nights since being reborn, where I’d spent so much time plotting and planning my vengeance against Edward. But Alice might be there, which would mean that Natalia might be there, too.
Rowan’s? In the short time since we had become lovers, we had made so many memories in his place. In his bedroom, specifically. I knew that I would feel safe there. But I was still pissed at him, and as childish as itmight have been, I didn’t want to give him the satisfaction of picking his apartment as my refuge.
Then it hit me, and I realized there was only one place in all the world I could go in that moment to settle my heart and calm my mind. It wasn’t even a question, and I felt ridiculous for even entertaining any other destination.
Before I could question it further—before I could demand clarification on how the door worked or refuse Damien’s offer—I thought of where I wanted to go, grabbed the handle, and opened the door.
And I saw grass.
Familiar grass, autumn-brown and damp with the recent rain, stretched out in a field I knew intimately. Had ridden through dozens of times. Had jumped fences in. Had spent hours grooming and training in. Whenever this second life felt too heavy to carry, when the only thing that seemed to make any sense was the rhythm of hoofbeats and the simple joy of speed and movement and freedom.
The Shademore Equestrian Center.
The stables.
Hyacinth.
The intense warmth of Damien’s study collided with the cold night air beyond the door, creating a fog that rolled across the grass. The field was empty, dark except for the distant lights from the stable buildings casting yellow-warm glows that didn’t reach this far.
Yes,I thought, realizing that somehow the door had knownI wanted—needed—to ride Hyacinth. Only rushing through the fields on my baby could help me forget everything, even if only for a moment.
Rowan started to ask, “Is that—”
A soul-wrenching sound tore through the air, a scream shattering the silence. High and piercing andwrong—the kind of sound that reached down into your guts and activated every prey instinct evolution had instilled over millions of years. Not a human scream, but unlike any sound I’d ever heard an animal make. It was a sound of terror and pain braided together into a noise that I knew would haunt my nightmares until the day I died.
It came again, closer and more panicked.
“No,” I whispered as horror ripped into my chest, stole both my breath and balance. My heart stopped, then slammed into overdrive, pulse pounding in my ears, drowning out everything else.
My horse.
Mybaby.
He was screaming.
I ran.
Didn’t think. Didn’t plan. Didn’t slow from Rowan shouting my name behind me, his voice sharp with warning and fear. I justran—through the impossible door, through the space that shouldn’t exist between Damien’s study and the fields behind the stables.
My hands hit earth as I stumbled through, as momentum and portal-physics and my own desperate speed sent me sprawling. Grass met my palms—cold and damp andreal. Blades tickled between my fingers, bent beneath my weight. The ground was soft, yielding, saturated from earlier rain that had turned the equestrian center into a swamp of mud, grass, and horse shit.
The impact jarred through my wrists, up my arms, into my shoulders. Pain sharp and immediate that grounded me, proved this was real, proved I wasn’t hallucinating or dreaming or trapped in some nightmare my brain had conjured.
The smell hit me next. Wet earth and manure and autumn decay—leaves rotting in piles by the fence line, grass turning brown as winter approached, the particular organic stink of a stable that never quite left even when you were fifty yards away. Compost and hay and horse sweat and leather and the sweet-sour smell of grain.
And beneath it all—
