CHAPTER ONE
The keeper is my enemy.
The shock of this discovery is breaking my heart into tiny pieces—each one fracturing and falling away.
More than anything, I don’t want it to be true. I don’t want to believe that the keeper betrayed me.
But there’s no denying the look in his eyes. The truth he has confirmed.
He accepted the name I gave him: Emil.Enemy.
Tears of rage stream down my cheeks as my lips clash against his.
With every stab of pain in my chest, fresh blood spills from the cuts across his face and torso.
I gave him the power in my heart—it’s how I freed him from his realm—and now he feels all of my heart’s pain as if it were his own.
As my heart breaks, his too is breaking.
We’re kneeling side by side on the cold, stone floor of a catacomb buried deep beneath a church in New York City.
I came here to stealThe Book of Dark Magicfrom my father, who believes that I will start a war among dark creatures that will fill the streets with blood.
Instead, I was forced to read the book, which showed me how my mother really died ten years ago.
The images leaped up from the pages and surrounded me as if I’d been part of them.
I watched as the keeper—my keeper, the man who had walked beside me ever since I’d escaped my cage—tore out my mother’s mechanical heart.
Her heart was unique, its delicate, interlocking, metallic parts moving in perfect harmony to athud-thudthat had slowed and finally stopped.
In the vision, he told her that he would take everything from her. And then he took her life.
Now, black dragon scales cover Emil’s skin while inky-dark, leathery wings rest at his sides. Those same wings that once cradled me and kept me safe from harm are torn up and hanging low.
To destroy him, all I have to do is let my heart crack apart completely.
Let it shatter.
But I can’t allow his end to be that simple.
Oh, no.
The mess of betrayal and fury and sadness within me demands that he suffer.
He must pay.
His words, spoken only seconds ago, spiral around and around within my mind. It’s the question that has taken root at the center of my existence and driven my actions ever since I escaped the prison where I spent the first twenty-three years of my life.
My Veda. My beautiful, dark love. Will you have your revenge?
I grit my teeth against his mouth, tasting the warmth of his blood on my lips and sensing it beneath my hands, where I press them to his injured chest.
“Oh, Emil,” I whisper, pulling back to speak. “I promise you: I will fight for my vengeance with every dark fiber of my being.”
Against him.
And against my father, who looms over us both.
