If Vex ordered a demon to possess him again, it wouldn’t just be his body they’d destroy. It would be everything he’dfought to rebuild. Every scrap of trust he’d clawed back, every moment of peace he’d scraped together from the wreckage of what they’d done to him. The possession wouldn’t kill him—not physically. But the aftermath? Knowing he’d hurt someone else while trapped inside his own skin?
That would kill him. Slowly and completely.
I couldn’t let that happen. I wouldn’t.
Rocco’s thumb traced a slow circle against my stomach, absent and gentle, and the contrast between that tender gesture and the violence of my thoughts nearly broke me.
I pressed my back harder against his chest, felt his heartbeat steady and sure against my spine, and made a silent vow to whatever god or fate or cosmic force was listening.
No one was taking him from me.
I’d die before I let them take him again.
Chapter Twenty-Four
Rocco
Raven didn’t seem to tire. Hour after hour, her massive wings beat a steady rhythm against the night sky, carrying us over an endless stretch of black ocean. The stars had begun to shift—constellations I recognized from my youth slowly giving way to unfamiliar patterns as we crossed into the Eastern Hemisphere. We were getting closer.
The thought should have brought relief. Instead, my chest tightened. Closer to the shard meant closer to Vex. Closer to the castles meant closer to Costin’s territory—and we were about to break into one of Dracula’s homes while Dracula himself wanted us dead. Every mile Raven ate up was one mile closer to either salvation or a grave.
Selena leaned against me, her body heavy and warm, her breathing slow and even. She’d fallen asleep somewhere over the mid-Atlantic, her head tucked beneath my chin, her fingers still loosely curled around my forearm. Even in sleep, she held on to me.
I tightened my arms around her and pressed my lips to her hair. She smelled like Rose’s shampoo and salt air and something underneath that was purely her—something my blood recognized now on an instinctual level that made my chest ache.
Mine. The word pulsed through me, quiet and fierce. I’d denied it for two years. I wouldn’t deny it again.
So far, no one had followed us. I’d been checking—scanning the sky behind us every few minutes, searching for any dark shape cutting through the clouds.
I glanced over my shoulder again.
After hours of flying, Lucien had given in to exhaustion somewhere over the Atlantic. He was stretched across Raven’s broad back behind the others, his eyes closed, his chest rising and falling with slow, deep breaths. Whatever Anton’s vial had given him, it had burned through his system hours ago. The flight had taken everything he had.
But Darius was still airborne.
He cut through the clouds beside Raven, his dark form tireless and relentless, matching her pace stroke for stroke. He was a Runner—that ancient, inexhaustible energy humming through his body like a second heartbeat, sustaining him long past the point where any normal vampire would have dropped from the sky. His silver eyes glowed faintly in the gray light, alert and watchful, scanning the clouds around us like a sentinel who never stood down.
I envied that. The ability to keep going when everything in you screamed to stop.
I doubted a bat could make this flight, even an ancient vampire in full shift. The distance was too vast, the wind too punishing. A vampire’s bat form was built for stealth, not endurance. Not this kind of endurance.
But Angelo didn’t need wings.
He had a private jet. Resources. Contacts in every corner of the supernatural world. If he figured out where we were headed, he could have people waiting for us before we ever touched down.
The question was whether he knew.
Only Tinkerbell had that information. She was the thread connecting us to Angelo, the one person who knew our destination. Could she remain silent? Could she hold that secret against the full weight of Angelo Santi’s fury?
Another person in danger because of me. The list kept growing—Selena, my mother, Rose, Valentin, Alice, Darius, Lucien, Raven, and now Tinkerbell. Everyone who got close to this mess ended up with a target on their back, and I was the one who’d painted it there.
Angelo could be very persuasive. Creative, even, when it came to extracting information. I’d seen the aftermath of his interrogations—the hollow eyes, the trembling hands, the way people flinched at shadows for months afterward. He didn’t need to resort to violence. He had ways of crawling inside your head and finding the one thing you couldn’t bear to lose, then holding it over you until you broke.
I wasn’t sure even a witch as powerful as Tinkerbell could survive that. Not because she was weak—she wasn’t. But Angelo had centuries of practice at finding the cracks in people. And everyone had cracks.
Selena stirred against me, murmuring something unintelligible, and burrowed closer. I pulled her tighter against my chest.
If Angelo found out where we were going, we’d be walking into a trap. If Tinkerbell broke, we’d have enemies waiting on both ends—Angelo behind us and whatever horrors Vex had prepared at Dracula’s castle ahead.
