Around the training room. Around the bedroom.
Around her.
“Where the fuck are you, Ember?” I choked, voice raw from the smoke, peering through the furnace-hot air.
Any normal vampire would be ash by now, but I was immune to fire. Immune to heat. I pushed deeper into the churning destruction.
She’d been here when I left. I’d kissed her on the forehead because if I’d aimed any lower, I wouldn’t have left at all. I’d walked out that door thinking she was protected.
Nico had been watching,I told myself. He would have gotten her out.
“Ember!” My voice scraped out again, rough as broken glass. I shoved aside a slab of stone. A pile of swords from the training room was half-buried in the rubble, bent and blackened from the force of the explosion.
No… not blackened from the explosion.
That was blood.
I reached down and touched a blackened, bent blade, my fingers coming away red. Rich, viscous, and clinging to the ridges of my knuckles in deep crimson smears, already beginning to dry.
I didn’t need to taste it to know it was hers. Emberline’s scent hit me a heartbeat later—citrus, lavender, and something sweet only I would recognize. The smell of her sliced straight into the center of my chest.
“No,” I whispered.
She bled. Here. In this inferno. My wards collapsing around her.
Nico would have been close, but… I scanned the destruction.
How could he have saved her from this?
“I told you to stay inside,” I whispered, voice cracking. “I promised you’d be safe.”
My knees gave out completely, dropping me onto the jagged stones. Pain lanced up my legs, but came from far away, muffled, as if my body belonged to someone else. Istared at my blood-smeared hand, at the ruins of the life I’d been pretending was real, when something inside me simply… broke.
The sound that ripped from my chest didn’t feel like it belonged to a vampire. I roared like an animal, the feral beast from the pits, a howl and a plea mixed together. The cry bounced off the broken stones, swallowed by smoke.
Then a different sound cut through my grief—a low, pulsing thrum at the edge of the destruction.
I lifted my head, instincts finally winning out over the shock. The hairs along my arms rose as a familiar, unpleasant vibration crawled across my skin. These weren’t the remnants of my wards coming back online.
This was something older. Crueler.
Horrifyingly familiar.
A circle flared to life around the crater, a ring of pale light that carved itself into the shattered rubble with an almost-surgical precision. Sigils snapped into place, one after another, encircling the ruins at specific points.
A containment field.
I staggered to my feet, those instincts screaming as black-clad figures dropped down from the edges of the crater, boots hitting stone in synchronized formation. Half a dozen, then a dozen more, faces masked, bodies covered in reinforced leather and steel. All with a crude symbol burned into the front of their breastplates.
A symbol I knew all too well.
“Dante Dominico,” the closest guard announced, voice muffled by the mask. “By order of?—”
I didn’t let him finish.
I lunged.
Grief drove me forward, overshadowing the broken ribs and torn flesh. I hit the nearest guard like a battering ram,knocking him back into another. Bone crunched under my fingers as I snapped them in half, dropping them to the ground, necks bent at a grotesque angle.
