Valeria.
Sloane’s power follows the thread. I feel it happening, the careful, methodical unspooling of the connection that ties me tomy sire, traveling backward through blood and intention toward wherever she’s hiding. The candles gutter in unison.
Oracle murmurs something in a language I don’t recognize.
Hades doesn’t move, but the shadows in the corners of the basement deepen and lean inward, curious or hungry, I can’t tell which.
The pressure behind my eyes tightens, like something inside my skull is being forced to make room for a shape that doesn’t belong there. My vision blurs at the edges, light fracturing into sharp, hostile fragments, and when I try to breathe through it, the air seems to snag somewhere in my throat.
The sensation shifts.
It stops being painful in any human sense of the word.
Instead, it becomes dislocated.
As if something inside me has been lifted out, turned, examined, and then forced back into place along the wrong plane. The sire mark burns with cold precision beneath Sloane’s working, resisting every attempt to trace it, and the resistance manifests as pressure that feels disturbingly like touch.
Hands that are not there.
Fingers pressing inward.
I reach for the balance and miss. The world tilts, then snaps back. Too bright, too sharp, every surface vibrating with sensory overload. The room smells wrong, tastes wrong, feels wrong, like my body has been tuned to a frequency I don’t know how to survive.
Something moves in the silence.
Not outside me.
But inside.
It begins as presence, a slow, invasive awareness that seeps into the back of my mind. It spreads, filling empty spaces I didn’t realize existed, threading through thought and instinct with quiet, deliberate precision.
‘Come to me, little scion.’
The voice is devastatingly beautiful, smooth enough to feel like relief, like recognition, like the memory of safety I never actually had. It wraps around the raw edges of my fear with careful affection, and somewhere beneath that gentleness, I feel the unmistakable edge of something lethal.
‘You belong to me.’
Every muscle in my body locks. My spine goes rigid, breath trapped halfway between inhale and exhale, as if movement itself might invite further intrusion. The mark pulses once, violently, and a surge of something that is not entirely my own emotion floods my chest.
Longing.
Command.
Possession.
I understand, with sudden, horrifying clarity, that this is not communication.
This is a claim remembering how to tighten.
Something ancient and obedient wakes up in my marrow, some piece of me that Valeria’s turning installed without my knowledge or consent, some mechanism that recognizes her voice the way a key recognizes a lock, and it responds. My vision tilts. The red of the candles bleeds outward, flooding the room, flooding everything, and the hunger that lives in my chest, the constant, manageable hunger I’ve spent weeks learning to leash, lunges against its restraints like something that has been waiting for exactly this moment to remind me of its size.
My fangs descend.
The sensation is involuntary, immediate, and humiliating, my body being commandeered by someone else’s will while I scream at it from a place that feels increasingly distant. My head turns toward Sloane. Her heartbeat is right there, warm, steady, andevery piece of me that Valeria has touched is suddenly screaming that this is right, this is what I’m for.
I am a weapon.
She is the target.
