LOGINSAGEMy mouth parted in shock.For a heartbeat, the words Diana had just spoken didn’t register. They hovered in the air, unreal, absurd—like the last echo of a nightmare that refused to fade.Then I laughed.The sound tore out of me, loud, almost violent. It startled even me. The laughter scraped my throat as it spilled, sharp enough to shake loose the remnants of the gray void, the dust, the phantom thirst that still clung to my senses. I could almost taste it—the dryness, the static, the echo of that strange in-between place. And I laughed harder, as though I could dislodge the dream entirely if I just kept going.Diana beamed at me, misunderstanding everything.“Right?” she said brightly, leaning forward, eyes gleaming. “I can’t wait to give those three fools death for what they did to you. Or have you done that already?”Her words sliced straight through my chest.I shook my head, still laughing, lifting a hand to wave her off. “Stop,” I said, though the word tangled with the la
SAGE“How do you feel, Sage?”The voice echoed inside my head, too close, too intimate to belong to the world I knew. And it was familiar, yet unfamiliar at the same time.It wasn’t Darius. And it wasn’t Adam. It was someone else… a woman. Yet, not Makeh.My eyes fluttered open, one lagging behind the other as confusion wrapped thickly around me. For a heartbeat, I thought I was still in Peter’s living room—still slumped on the couch, waiting, listening, breathing in the familiar.But that wasn’t where I was.The couch was gone. Everything was gone.I lay suspended in a gray void, an endless stretch of nothingness that pulsed faintly, like static trapped between worlds. The air looked dry—felt dry—dust particles floating aimlessly, catching on no light source I could identify. It reminded me of an abandoned joint unit, the kind sealed off for decades, stale and forgotten. My throat burned instantly. I was thirsty. Achingly so.I tried to swallow and failed.Panic stirred immediately.
SAGEI heard them before I reached the barren lands. Sounds clawing at me.The ancient blood in me did that, allowing my ears to tremble with it; something that had no mercy in how clearly it perceived suffering, it stripped away the option of ignorance.Darius had been right then.Cries that were no longer voices, screams that had forgotten language, wails stretched thin by torment. Souls, Darius had said. Souls the Queen had chained between worlds, refusing them passage because she was still feeding on what little essence remained of them. Draining them. Hoarding them. Using their agony like fuel.I slowed, then stopped altogether at the edge of the land.The ground here was wrong—I’ve always known, but seeing it through fresh eyes was something else.It was ashen and cracked, as though the earth itself had tried to crawl away and failed. The air smelled like rot and old magic, like grief that had soaked too deeply into stone to ever be scrubbed clean. My chest tightened painfully
SAGEI tore through the pack like breath given purpose.Mist wrapped around me, my body dissolving into vapor and intent as I slipped between trees and rooftops, through wards and shadows, moving too fast for eyes to follow. The night rushed past in fragments—stone, iron, blood, fire—yet my mind burned hotter than any of it.The Queen.The realization clawed at me with every passing second.Claire had not learned that magic by accident—she had been the telling the truth in that regard at least. I had seen it in her mind—the precision, the structure, the discipline behind her spells. That kind of power was not born in secrecy or desperation. It was taught.The Queen had trained her. When? I did not know. But the truth tasted bitter on my tongue.How dare she?How dare that woman touch another life, mold it into a blade, and aim it at me while wearing the mask of inevitability? I had thought I was using her. Thought I was clever, strategic, exacting my revenge with cold intelligence.
ADAMThey were everywhere.Even before I counted them, before my mind could make sense of the scene unfolding in the courtyard below, I knew one thing with absolute certainty—we were outmatched.Not in numbers. In power.At least fifty vampires prowled the open space beneath us, their movements sharp and predatory, red eyes catching the moonlight as they stalked between fallen bodies. My guards lay scattered across the stone like broken dolls, throats torn open, chests hollowed, blood slick and blackening as it cooled.I swallowed hard. At least they hadn’t been turned.That mercy, twisted as it was, settled like ash in my chest. The dead should remain dead.Beside me, I felt Sage’s tension coil tighter, her guilt thrumming through the matebond like a second pulse. It wasn’t subtle. It never was with her. Every loss landed on her shoulders as if she alone bore the weight of the world.“This is my fault,” she murmured again, voice barely audible beneath the distant shrieks and snarls.
SAGEThe world came rushing back all at once.Now in my body, I staggered, my knees giving way beneath the weight of what I had seen, what I now knew. Strong arms caught me before I could hit the floor, pulling me into a familiar chest. Adam.For a moment, I let myself stay there, breathing him in, anchoring myself to the solid heat of his body while my mind reeled. Shock didn’t fade quickly. It clung, sticky and nauseating, eating me out from the inside.The Queen.The realization burned like acid.Through the bond, I felt Adam’s awareness sharpen, felt the echo of what I had dragged back with me bleed across the connection. I knew—without needing to look—that he had seen fragments. Enough. And if the murderous glares hardening the faces of his brothers were anything to go by, he hadn’t kept it to himself.Good. Let them all see.I straightened slowly, easing out of Adam’s arms, though my fingers lingered at his side for a heartbeat longer. Then I turned back to Claire.Rage surged







