The cigarette drops onto the carpet, burning out silently. Adrien doesn’t lower the gun. His chest rises and falls in a violent, trembling rhythm. For a moment, the only sound in the room is the quiet hiss of smoke from the barrel.
Then Adrien finally turns his head toward me—eyes bright, jaw clenched, shaking with a fury that isn’t about Varner at all.
“Lucien is next,” he says quietly.
“Adrien,” I say, looking at him, my head clear now that both of the vampires are dead.
“We can’t go after Lucien. We’d be dead instantly and Natalya would be his.”
We would never survive this. There’s just the two of us, barely adults, against Lucien, his father and his entire Vermilion army.
“But we need to do something.” His voice cracks and his eyes glisten with a hint of tears. “I need to do something.”
He drops to the ground, squatting and gripping his hair, the gun trembling in his hand.
Then he straightens up, catching his breath as the panic attack loosens its grip and looks at me with certainty in his eyes.
“What if we’re all dead?”
?
I clean the blood from my hands and body, then throw on a hoodie, black cargo pants, and combat boots.
Adrien is ripping an old rug into two strips and stuffing the ends into a bottle of whiskey. He grabs a second bottle of something and gulps down about three shots of it before setting it back down and stuffing it with another strip of rug, same as the first one.
I sent the bodyguards home for today. They didn’t ask any questions. They know I don’t like it when they do.
Adrien hands me one of the bottles and falls into line beside me.
We stand in the center of the lobby, staring at the double staircase bowing up and around like cathedral arms, the marble pattern at our feet swallowing the light.
“Things are in the SUV,” Adrien says, his voice low. “Natalya’s already on the jet. Everything she needs with her.”
“She went willingly?” I ask, though I already know.
“No,” he hesitates. “Don’t ask me how I did it please.”
My eyes are fixed on the stairs. Sylvia’s body is lying at the top, a dark stain blooming from her head.
I feel nothing. No guilt. Only a flat, clear silence where everything used to be.
“You know, maybe we don’t have to—” I start, but immediately stop myself.
Adrien knows the plea before it leaves my mouth.
We don’t have to do this.
We could bury the bodies, disappear, and fold this chapter flat. But we have wanted to set this place on fire for years. We’re not stepping back now. And we both know we can’t disappear. Lucien and his father would find us sooner or later, and neither of us is risking putting Natalya in that position.
We are too deep in this.
“Yes. We do,” he answers quietly.
I pull the lighter from my pocket and touch the flame to the rag stuffed in the bottle. Adrien sparks his right after me. He looks at me then, and for a beat his face is softer than I’ve ever seen. Sad.
He’s the only one who would never judge me. He looks so boyish, too young to have done what we do, and that softness in him makes something in my chest ache. I let it be there and shove it down.
We throw the molotovs so they land at the base of the broad, half-round staircase, right where the expensive runner begins. The rug drinks the flame like it’s been waiting its whole life forthis. It climbs, hungry, licking the gilded frames and the silk curtains.
