I darted across the foyer, grabbed my satchel, and slipped out into the first blush of dawn. The horizon bled pink and gold, painting the sky like a promise. A soft wind kissed my cheeks as I crept through the courtyard toward the stables.
With shaking hands, I threw a saddle on Balthazar’s prized stallion, tightening the straps. My dagger, journal, and a sliver of my soul were tucked into the satchel at my hip.
I mounted.
The horse surged beneath me, its hooves pounding the earth like a heartbeat. My heartbeat. Furious. Wild. Free.
I didn’t look back.
This was my time. My path.
And no man—no lover, no monster, no god—would take it from me.
Chapter 20
Alina
Iawoke to an obnoxious chorus of birdsong heralding the dawn.
Fucking birds. Always so goddamn cheerful.
I opened my eyes, praying I’d landed in the 1700s—somewhere in the Americas, hopefully near wherever John James might be. Sunlight filtered through the canopy of trees, dappling the grass in gold and bathing the sky in a nauseating shade of peach. Everything around me looked painfully quaint. Pastoral. Like the world hadn’t yet learned to rot.
It always took a few minutes to orient myself after a jump. I sat up, rubbed my eyes, and breathed in the cool, pine-laced air. Dew clung to my ankles, and the morning chill slipped over my skin like a phantom. Fir trees and towering pines surrounded me, swaying gently in the wind, whispering their ancient secrets. They were too serene. They were too untouched.
I walked to the nearby stream and crouched at the edge. The water glided over stones with a soft gurgle, its music annoyingly peaceful. I stared at it, unblinking, as rage began to crawl back into my chest like a long-lost lover.
Balthazar.
The name hit me like a knife. All I could see was his grotesque form and his monstrous betrayal. His secrets, his silence, his insatiable thirst for control. How many times had he left without aword? How often had he whispered ofher, the so-called love of his cursed, endless life?
I clenched my fists until my knuckles turned white.
No more.
I had power now. My own darkness. My own path. I didn’t need to share it with a man who couldn’t even pretend I was enough. I was done being someone’s second choice and done begging for affection masked as punishment.
And yet…
My skin still remembered him.
The way he touched me. The way we burned. Our twisted communion of sex and madness. The way our bodies collided like twin storms—violent, glorious, fucking feral. It made me sick. It made me ache.
I hated him.
I wanted him.
But more than anything, I wanted to become so powerful that evenhewould kneel.
A dizzy wave washed over me. I braced myself against a tree, breath ragged, head spinning.
How was I supposed to live without that heat, without those brutal, soul-shaking nights?
But that was the problem, wasn’t it?
That wasallwe ever were. Rage. Lust. Blood and fire. Fight, then fuck. Repeat.
I stepped into the stream to cool the fever under my skin, but something yanked the second I planted my foot midcurrent. My foot wedged between two submerged rocks, and a web of creek debris curled around my ankle like nature’s noose. I tugged hard. Nothing.
