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Valentina didn’t move. Her gaze locked onto mine, unyielding. Steady. My mother stood beside her, just as unmoved. Behind them, Bomani’s long body stalked forward in silence, his hulking form close enough to feel in my bones. None of them listened. They stood with me.

There was no time to argue.

Mark’s arms exploded outward. Flames ignited in a wild cyclone, fire lashing through the air—and catching Arianna’s arms in a sudden blaze. She tore herself free as shadowy magic surged up her limbs, smothering the flames into nothing but smoke.

Everything snapped into motion.

Figures poured from the tree line, dark shapes surging from the woods in a vicious wave. In one swift, brutal movement, Arianna seized Mark by his burning arms and swung him like a ragdoll. His body flew. Ribs-first, he slammed into a massive tree. The crack of bone against wood was thunderous. Sickening.

The Elguto rushed us.

Two of them broke ahead, twins. Red-haired women with slim builds, dressed in muddy-brown, worn cotton gowns. Barely twenty, by the look of their fresh faces. But there was nothing innocent in the fury burning in their eyes. Both charged Valentina with a vengeance that felt personal. They would’ve been the first I took down, for even thinking about touching her, before I could move, a heavy force slammed into me mid-air.

An older brunette man, thick with muscle, hit me like a charging beast. The impact knocked the breath clean from my lungs as I crashed into the snow. It drove every ounce of air out of me, my side sinking into the icy slurry beneath my body. My head bounced against the frozen ground, my mouth filling with dirty ice. And for a moment, the world went black.

My heartbeat thundered in my ears, loud and erratic. Not with the weight of the world collapsing, or the expectations everyone placed on me, but with something smaller.

The boy inside me.

The one who sat at the edge of the driveway, waiting for his father to come home. The one who told himself Mark was just late, not that he’d forgotten. The boy who learned not to expect his dad at every game, who taught himself to savor his mother’s single clap in the crowd. Mark had warped me long before this. He had been my hero when he should have been my warning. And my inner child still hadn’t learned how to let that go.

Ungrateful.

The word echoed harder than the blow.

I blinked once, hard, forcing consciousness back into focus. I pushed myself up from the snow, coughing violently as I sucked in air. Before I could process anything, warm blood splattered across my face, yanking me fully back into my body. There was no time to react. Kleitos surged into view, massive hands gripping the attacker by hair. Without hesitation, he drove his fangs into the man’s neck. Flesh tore. An artery split. Blood erupted in long, red fountains across the pristine snow, and across my face.

The copper stench coated my senses, thick and suffocating.

To my right, Arianna had one of the red-haired twins in her grasp, ripping the woman’s arm clean from her body with brutal ease. Bomani was at her side, jaws locked around the girl’s leg, his low, guttural growl vibrating through the air as it tangled with her shrieks. Draco had a younger vampire pinned, snapping his neck with one violent twist. The crack of vertebrae rang through the clearing like a gunshot, sending a chill straight down my spine.

But it was Valentina who stole my breath. Ribbons of violet, red, and blue light surged from her palm like living veins. The glowing tendrils wrapped around the second twin, ankles first, then climbing her legs, spiraling around her arms and torso until they coiled at her throat. They constricted. Hard. Blood burst from every pressure point. The ribbons pulsed tighter, and with one final squeeze, the woman’s insides tore loose, spilling from her like a ruptured fruit.

The only person I couldn’t find through the massacre was Mark. He’d taken off the moment his feet hit the ground. By the time I was upright again, he was already gone, vanished into the woods. Everyone else had been too deep in the execution to notice.

Kleitos found me first. He caught my arm and hauled me from the blood-soaked snow as my eyes raked the tree-line, searching for any sign of him.

“I think he got away,” I said, breathless. I dragged a hand down my face, smearing gore across my cheeks in a useless attempt to clear it.

“Let him go,” Kleitos murmured. His hand settled firm and grounding on my shoulder as he gently pulled me back toward the dome. I let him guide me, though my gaze lingered, counting the dead.

Lord Draco and Arianna were already gathering the bodies, stacking them one by one into a heap like discarded trash. Valentina led a visibly shaken Martha back toward the safety of the dome, her arm steady and protective around my mother’s shoulders.

When the last corpse was added to the pile, Draco reached into his coat and withdrew a single match. He struck it, watching the flame catch, almost reverently, before tossing it onto the bodies.

Amber bloomed violently. Thick plumes of scarlet smoke spiraled into the sky. The scent of burning flesh clung to the air, syrupy, sweet, nauseating. My stomach twisted, bile creeping up the back of my throat as the fire roared higher.

TAINTED| CHAPTER 29

A Pocket Full of Posies

Alexander’s POV

If my mental capacity were a bag of metal coins, then I’d been robbed clean. Emotionally spent. That imaginary loot plucked from the silk pouch I called my brain, bankrupt. The worst part, I felt like I was losing my mind. A little touch from insanity.

The thought of Mark being this delusional, this shortsighted, twisted something in my chest that almost felt immoral. He wasn’t just careless. He was gullible. And for what? To pretend to be a protector, a touch of heavenly light. How did he even come up with the idea to become a vampire in the first place? What made him think he could ever overpower someone like Lord Draco, even as an Elguto? I didn’t need to know the history of an Elguto to know they wouldn’t have been a match to pureblood. It was almost written in the name that they were second class.

The way those people attacked us without even attempting to speak first, without counsel, was vulgar, to say the least. And he chose to align with them. That was the part that truly sealed it for me. He was making friends with people who were clearly, clearly, opposed to the bigger picture. Even if I didn’t know every detail yet, the way those savages acted was all the evidence I needed. They were traitors, in their own right.