Something shifted behind his eyes. He felt it too.
He just hadn't let it knock him down.
No one else answered. No one needed to.
I followed behind him, staying close enough that my shoulder nearly brushed his back. “Do you think Vex knows we’re coming?”
He shook his head. “I don’t think so.”
But I wasn’t so sure. From what I’d heard about Vex, his heart was blacker than Balthazar—if that was even possible. Balthazar brokered deals. He had rules, twisted as they were. Vex had no rules. Vex had an appetite. And creatures with an appetite always kept one eye on the door.
The sun was beginning to sink behind the mountains, dragging long shadows across the keep like dark fingers reaching for the entrance. What little light remained caught the broken windows and died there, swallowed by whatever waited inside. The castle that had looked menacing in daylight was transforming into something far worse as dusk crept in.
The thought of being inside after dark made my skin crawl.
I braced my shoulders and followed Rocco through the entrance. The massive oak doors hung wide open — no lock, no resistance, no barrier of any kind. As if the keep had been expecting us. Waiting for us. The way a mouth hangs open before it swallows.
A draft crawled out from the darkness beyond, carrying the stale breath of centuries — dust and stone and something underneath that smelled like death.
Chapter Twenty-Six
Rocco
Sanguis Keep.Blood Keep.Perfect name for a place born from the evilest deal in history.
I stepped inside first, putting myself in front of Selena. If anything was waiting for us in the dark, it would meet me before it touched her.
The entrance hall stretched out before us, and my stomach turned.
Dried blood was everywhere. Smeared across the stone walls in long, sweeping arcs—some deliberate, almost ritualistic, others wild and frantic like the markings of someone trying to claw their way out. It stained the floor in overlapping pools, so many layers that the original stone was barely visible beneath the darkened crust. Black and ancient, centuries old.
And still calling to us.
It should have been dead. Dried blood that old should have been nothing but dust and stain—meaningless, powerless, forgotten. But this wasn’t ordinary blood. This was the blood that had been spilled when Dracula turned. The first vampireblood ever shed. Soaked with the magic of Balthazar’s deal, infused with Lucifer’s power, baked into the stone by centuries of dark energy that had never stopped pulsing.
It was alive. Not in any way that made sense—but I could feel it humming beneath the blackened crust, vibrating at a frequency that only vampire blood could hear. Every cell in my body was responding to it. Resonating with it. Like a tuning fork struck against the original note.
This was our genesis. The source code written into every vampire's veins. And standing here, surrounded by it, the hunger wasn't just physical anymore. It was something deeper—a pull toward origin, toward the moment our species was ripped into existence.
My fangs throbbed. My hands shook. Selena gripped my arm, her own breath coming in ragged bursts. Behind us, I heard Valentin swear under his breath and Rose whisper something in a language I didn't recognize—a prayer, maybe, or a ward.
Furniture lay scattered and broken—chairs splintered into kindling, a long dining table split down the center as if something massive had been slammed onto it. Holes punched through the walls, some the size of fists, others large enough to crawl through.
This wasn't just a castle. This was a slaughterhouse. A birthplace. Both at once.
How many people had Dracula killed here? In those first days after Balthazar's deal, when a man became something monstrous and didn't yet know how to control the hunger—how many had he dragged through these halls?
I stared at the blood-blackened floor and felt something I didn't expect.
Pity. For a man who'd sold his soul and woke up to discover what the price really was. He hadn't been evil. Not at first. He'dbeen out of control. Just like me when I'd been possessed. Just like me when I'd hurt my mother.
Selena's hand found mine. She didn't say a word. She didn't need to.
A wooden staircase rose from the far end of the hall, the steps warped and groaning under the weight of centuries. The scent was stronger here—pulling me upward, tugging at something deep in my chest like a hook on a line.
Then I saw the footprints.
Fresh tracks in the thick layer of dust coating the stairs. Someone had walked up these steps recently. The prints were clear, deliberate, unhurried—whoever had made them wasn’t sneaking. They’d walked up those stairs like they owned the place.
