Chapter One
Beckham was dead.
A gunshot pierced the air, and another followed.
Reyna Carpenter ignored it all. None of it mattered.
Beckham was lying on the ground and hadn’t moved an inch since Harrington snapped his neck and dropped him like a sack of potatoes. She’d opened her own wrist to feed him her blood. After all, they were a perfect blood match. She should be able to save him.
Instead, she had watched her soul mate die.
And there was nothing she could do.
Tears wouldn’t come. A sob caught in her throat and buried itself there. She couldn’t think or see or breathe or even feel. Everything was caught up in that one moment. As she stared down at the man she loved with all her heart while it ripped in two.
Harrington had moved so fast. Beyond her ability to even comprehend, and then in that second, he’d ruined everything. She thought she hated him before. Hated him for kidnapping her, stealing her blood to keep himself alive. Abusing her. For the psychological torture.
But all that was nothing compared to this.
Commotion ensued all around her, yet she couldn’t drag her eyes away from Beckham to find out what was going on. Did it even matter?
An arm grabbed at her. She tried to fight the person off. She screamed. She clung to Beckham. No. She wouldn’t move. They couldn’t take her from him.
“Reyna!” Gabe shouted at her. “Reyna, look at me. I just shot Harrington. All the vamps are down. We have to go.”
“No! No. Get off me,” she screamed back at him.
“We’re all going to die if we don’t move now.”
Reyna tried to shrug him off, but it was pointless. Gabe was a fighter, an Irish mob boss, and one of the most fearsome leaders of the rebel organization Elle. She could no more move him than bring Beckham back from the dead.
He grasped her around the middle, then hoisted her over his shoulder. She reached for Beckham. Her hand outstretched into open air. Slowly her brain pieced together everything around her. Harrington on the ground, blood pouring out of bullet holes. Roland next to him trying to staunch the blood loss. The backstabbing traitor Penelope bleeding from a gunshot wound, hysterical. People flooded out of the mayor’s New Year’s Eve party downtown after seeing the chaos and death and destruction.
Beckham.
She needed to be there with him. She fought against Gabe’s hands, trying to get back to him. But Gabe was strong and persistent. He refused to let go as he carried her farther and farther away. Beckham was gone, and Gabe was taking her away from him.
“Put me down. Let me go back to him!”
“Reyna, fucking shit!” Gabe yelled at her.
She kicked and clawed at him to release her. As they moved, her heel fell off and onto the patio floor. She couldn’t do this. Fuck! She couldn’t lose him. She refused for this to be her reality.
Gabe cursed and then dropped her on the pavement, tugging her hastily into a secluded alcove. He grabbed her roughly by both shoulders.
“Snap back to reality, Reyna. There’s nothing we can do right now. Harrington told the snipers not to shoot you, but people will come after us. If you want to live through the night, I needyou to run!”
“But Beckham,” she whispered.
“Live, Reyna,” Gabe pleaded with her, his voice tight. “All you can do is live.”
She hardly saw his sympathetic look as she stared over his shoulder to the patio beyond. Beckham hadn’t moved. Living didn’t feel possible. How could she live when he didn’t? Maybe it was outrageous to even consider, but she felt as if a bomb had detonated in her mind. Shrapnel tore her apart from the inside out.
Then to her horror, she saw Roland stumble to his feet. His eyes caught hers across the divide of people. They promised blood and torment and destruction. Roland was now Harrington’s only remaining second-in-command, and he had always wanted Reyna—to break Reyna. She could see then and there that he would stop at nothing to get what he wanted this time.
Beckham couldn’t stop him. Harrington wouldn’t stop him.
Leaving now was the only way to escape a fate worse than death.
