“Rogue…” Her voice has changed again, steadier, determined. “We have to get them loose.”
“Then let’s move.”
We work our way along the wall together, while the battle rages around us. Charlie reaches the first chained scion, a young man, barely more than a boy, pressed flat against the stone and snarling from somewhere beyond rational thought. She drops down in front of him, low, making herself smaller, her voice shifting into something I’ve heard her use before, something that carries the frequency of I know exactly what you’re feeling.
“Hey…” She waits until his wild eyes skitter to her face. “Hey… look at me. I know the hunger is everything right now. I know it feels like there’s nothing else, like you’re drowning in it. But you’re still in there. I can see you in there. You can fight it! I promise you can fight it, because I did, and I’m standing right here.”
The scion snarls, and he lunges against his chains. But Charlie doesn’t move.
The snarling slows.
I work the shackle mechanism, old iron that takes force to move, and the chains drop away. The scion’s legs give out beneath him, and I catch his weight before he hits the stone, holding him until he steadies. “Good,” I tell him, making my voice quiet but solid, the tone I’d use to talk a wolf back from the edge of feral. “You’re all right. You’re out.”
Sloane arrives through the chaos with the kind of focused inevitability that makes the violence around her seem briefly irrelevant, her movements calm and deliberate despite the wreckage still unfolding in every direction. Crimson-gold light pulses visibly beneath her skin, heat radiating from her in waves that carry the sharp, metallic scent of burning iron as her power rises to meet the need in front of her.
The freed scion staggers where he stands, eyes blown wide with feral confusion, his body caught between the compulsion to attack and the dawning realization that something has shifted inside him.
Sloane doesn’t hesitate. Her palm presses flat to his chest with firm, grounding intent, and the moment contact is made, Bloodfire ignites between them. It is not the devastating inferno she wields in battle. This burns differently, a surgical flare of supernatural heat that threads inward rather than outward. Light crawls across the scion’s skin in branching veins of molten gold, sinking through flesh and bone to reach the buried structure of Valeria’s command.
He screams.
Not from injury.
But from rupture.
The sound tears out of him raw and disbelieving, like something inside his skull has just split open under unbearablepressure. His hands claw at the air, at Sloane’s arms, at nothing, as if trying to hold together a mind that is being forcibly rewritten.
“It’s going to sting,” Sloane tells him steadily, her voice anchoring even as the fire consumes the foreign influence threaded through his nervous system. “Let it.”
The scion’s body convulses once, violently, then stills, and the light recedes. For a suspended heartbeat, he stands there, chest heaving, eyes unfocused as the last remnants of compulsion burn away like ash in a sudden wind.
Then clarity crashes into him.
I see it in the way his posture shifts, in the sharp inhale that seems to scrape his lungs clean from the inside out. His gaze moves from Sloane to Charlie, then to me, recognition dawning in stages that look almost painful to witness.
“I…” His voice fractures, unused and disbelieving. “I can think.” The realization lands harder than any blow. His knees buckle, but he catches himself before falling, instinct reassembling into something recognizably his own. Hunger still hums through him, loud and demanding, but it no longer owns the direction of his body.
“I don’t feel her inside me anymore!” he declares, like this is the greatest gift we could have ever given him.
Charlie smiles weakly, but behind it, I see the fracture, the agony that she still feels. Still feels her. “Go,” Charlie urges, breathless but steady.
Gratitude flickers across his expression with startling intensity, something raw and deeply human surfacing beneath the ruin of what he has been made into.
“Thank you,” he says hoarsely, the words torn free as though they might dissolve if he waits too long. “All of you. I… I feel like I can breathe. If I actually needed to, that is.”
Charlie reaches out, lightly pressing her hand to his. “I completely understand, but you’re free of her now. You should go.”
Then survival takes over, because he turns and runs.
Not toward blood.
Toward freedom.
The rhythm of the battlefield shifts, and we move.
Sloane advances with relentless precision, each liberation of the locked scions a controlled act of defiance against the structure Valeria built to hold them. Around us, the club adjusts seamlessly. Reyna’s shout cuts through the chaos, sending Ronan spinning to intercept a newborn barreling toward a chained scion too weak to defend herself. Hades repositions with skeletal efficiency, his presence carving out a protected corridor along the wall where the freed can stagger toward safety.
Above us, Seraphine’s voice alters its resonance, the unsettling harmonics that once disoriented the attackers softening into something that steadies instead, a sound threaded with quiet reassurance rather than fear.
