That maybe I am stronger than he’s giving me credit for.
“You don’t get to make this decision for me.” My voice drops, goes quieter, but the power in it intensifies. The air around us begins to shimmer with heat. “Ichoseto drink your blood. Ichoseto become this. And I’m choosing to fight.”
“No.” His voice turns flat, immovable. The president speaking now, not the man who holds me when the nightmares come. “Final answer, Sloane. You stay here, where it’s warded and protected.End. Of. Discussion!”
Something inside me snaps.
Not a crack.
Not a tear.
A detonation.
My Bloodfire erupts, no warning, no mercy. Heat blasts through my veins, napalm igniting under my skin, racing outward in a violent tidal surge that steals the oxygen from the room. My lungs lock. My muscles seize. My vision bursts, the world rendering itself in molten color, blood, flame, fear, fury. And beneath all of it lurks something older, deeper, darker, the thing I was bred from, the thing I was always meant to become.
Beneath the fire, the voice wakes.
Lilith’s Voice.
My inheritance.
My curse.
My birthright.
It rises from the deepest part of me, not from my throat but my essence, vibrating upward as something vast and powerful drags itself through my spine. It fills my chest with impossible pressure, stretching me, widening me, turning my body into a vessel far too small to contain the force building inside it.
I open my mouth, and the world breaks.
“ENOUGH!”
The sound hits like a shockwave, an ancient war horn forged from the beginning of time, blasting outward with the raw, unfiltered command of a being who once bent empires to her will. It tears through the clubhouse in a ring of force so powerful the very air ripples, folding and unfolding, reality itself shuddering as it remembers who I am.
The remaining windows don’t shatter.
They explode.
Glass bursts outward in a blinding spray, shards blazing as they tear into the night, each fragment carrying my power with it as they cut through the dark. Every light bulb combusts, plunging us into flickering darkness, before the crimson-gold aura bleeding off my skin lights the room in hellfire shades.
The floor buckles beneath my feet.
Concrete cracks open in a spiderweb pattern that races away from me, dozens of jagged fractures branching outward as the ground recoils. Dust erupts upward in plumes. The walls groan as the force of my voice pushes through them, rattling their foundations.
The air vibrates so violently that my teeth ache.
My skin burns with power.
My magic claws outward in a feral storm, demanding obedience, demanding silence, demandingeverything.
And then, the shadows behind me shift.
Not ordinary darkness.
Not the absence of light.
Something sentient unfurls from the void, smoke given purpose.
A shape takes form—vast, towering, and unmistakably feminine.
