Something inside me snaps into focus. Power surges up from my core, not Bloodfire alone, not magic alone, but the impossible fusion of both. Sloane’s energy floods my veins, answering instinct instead of command, and I thrust my hand out without thinking.
“Stop!” The word detonates, my voice booming with the echo of thunder.
A sphere of compressed force slams into Viktor’s back, a wrecking ball, ripping him off his feet mid-stride. He’s hurled into the air, his body arching as the magic seizes him, lifting him several feet off the ground with brutal, undeniable authority.
He roars, thrashing wildly as the surge of power fights to slip through my grasp, shaking my bones with its weight. I grit my teeth, blood roaring in my ears, my control fraying under the strain.
Then, with a peaceful calmness, Sloane’s presence steadies it. Her magic wraps around mine, not overpowering, not taking over, but guiding. Refining. Crimson-gold light threads through the force I’m holding, shaping it into something precise, unbreakable.
Viktor’s body surges upright, his limbs dragging beneath him as slowly his torso turns.
Forced to face me, his body convulses, suspended in midair, legs and arms contorting as the magic locks his joints in place. He fights it, fangs bare, his veins standing out against his pale skin, but nothing responds.
No strength.
No speed.
Noescape.
His eyes find mine, and everything drains out of them. “No,” he whispers, the word stripped of command, stripped of power. Just the naked realization of a man who understands,finally,this is the end.
“You came here to execute me,” I growl, stepping forward. “You brought an army. Conspired with Thanatos. Wielded an Original-forged blade designed to make my death permanent. You dideverythingright.” I stop directly in front of him, the Hades-blessed stake solid and lethal in my grip. “Everything… except account forher.”
His gaze flicks to Sloane for half a second.
Then back to me.
I see it reflected in his eyes. The centuries, the hunger, the isolation, the endless, grinding loneliness of immortality stretching ahead with nothing but shadow and blood for company.
I was him once.
Maybe I still would be, if Sloane hadn’t walked into my bar and reminded me what it meant to feel something other than the hollow ache of eternity.
“I’m sorry,” I say, and mean it. “For whatever I did that made you hate me this much. For turning you and then leaving you to navigate immortality alone. I was a terrible sire… a worse friend.”
“Crave—” Sloane’s voice carries warning, but I shake my head.
“But I’mnotsorry for choosing her,” I finish. “And I’mnotsorry for what comes next.”
Viktor’s eyes lock onto mine, wide and shining, the fight finally gone. “Draven, we can—”
With a snarl, I bare my fangs before I lunge forward, driving the stake through his heart. The impact is clean and precise. The Hades-blessed wood slides through flesh and bone withsupernatural ease, guided by Sloane’s Crimson Sight, showing me the exact angle, the perfect trajectory, the inevitable path to his core.
Viktor’s eyes go wide in shock, his mouth opens in a scream that never fully forms.
And then Sloane’s Bloodfire ignites. Not from her hands this time. Fromwithinhim. The flames erupt from the stake wound, spreading through his circulatory system, following every vein and artery, consuming him from the inside out.
But this isn’t the mindless destruction of ordinary fire.
This ispurification.
Viktor’s body doesn’t just burn. It’sunmade. Every cell touched by darkness, every fragment corrupted by centuries of feeding on fear and pain, every piece of the monster he became… it all dissolves into ash and light.
The Bloodfire doesn’t just kill him.
It erases him.
Ensures no resurrection is possible.
