Chapter 26
Chapter Twenty-Six
Rocco
Sanguis Keep. Blood Keep. Perfect name for a place born from the evilest deal in history.
I stepped inside first, putting myself in front of Selena. If anything was waiting for us in the dark, it would meet me before it touched her.
The entrance hall stretched out before us, and my stomach turned.
Dried blood was everywhere. Smeared across the stone walls in long, sweeping arcs—some deliberate, almost ritualistic, others wild and frantic like the markings of someone trying to claw their way out.
It stained the floor in overlapping pools, so many layers that the original stone was barely visible beneath the darkened crust. Black and ancient, centuries old.
And still calling to us.
It should have been dead. Dried blood that old should have been nothing but dust and stain—meaningless, powerless, forgotten.
But this wasn’t ordinary blood. This was the blood that had been spilled when Dracula turned.
The first vampire blood ever shed. Soaked with the magic of Balthazar’s deal, infused with Lucifer’s power, baked into the stone by centuries of dark energy that had never stopped pulsing.
It was alive. Not in any way that made sense—but I could feel it humming beneath the blackened crust, vibrating at a frequency that only vampire blood could hear. Every cell in my body was responding to it. Resonating with it. Like a tuning fork struck against the original note.
This was our genesis. The source code written into every vampire's veins. And standing here, surrounded by it, the hunger wasn't just physical anymore. It was something deeper—a pull toward origin, toward the moment our species was ripped into existence.
My fangs throbbed. My hands shook. Selena gripped my arm, her own breath coming in ragged bursts. Behind us, I heard Valentin swear under his breath and Rose whisper something in a language I didn't recognize—a prayer, maybe, or a ward.
Furniture lay scattered and broken—chairs splintered into kindling, a long dining table split down the center as if something massive had been slammed onto it. Holes punched through the walls, some the size of fists, others large enough to crawl through.
This wasn't just a castle. This was a slaughterhouse. A birthplace. Both at once.
How many people had Dracula killed here? In those first days after Balthazar's deal, when a man became something monstrous and didn't yet know how to control the hunger—how many had he dragged through these halls?
I stared at the blood-blackened floor and felt something I didn't expect.
Pity. For a man who'd sold his soul and woke up to discover what the price really was. He hadn't been evil. Not at first. He'd been out of control. Just like me when I'd been possessed. Just like me when I'd hurt my mother.
Selena's hand found mine. She didn't say a word. She didn't need to.
A wooden staircase rose from the far end of the hall, the steps warped and groaning under the weight of centuries. The scent was stronger here—pulling me upward, tugging at something deep in my chest like a hook on a line.
Then I saw the footprints.
Fresh tracks in the thick layer of dust coating the stairs. Someone had walked up these steps recently. The prints were clear, deliberate, unhurried—whoever had made them wasn’t sneaking. They’d walked up those stairs like they owned the place.
Demon? Or something else.
Selena shifted beside me, trying to step around me. I blocked her with my arm. “Selena, you should wait—”
“Don’t even think about it.” Her eyes flashed, her jaw set in that stubborn line I was beginning to realize meant I’d already lost the argument. “I didn’t fly across an ocean to stand in the hallway, Rocco. We’re in this together.”
I winced. Together. Because of me. Because I’d stolen a shard, bitten her without her consent, and dragged her halfway across the world into a blood-soaked castle that reeked of dark magic and death.
She was here because of my choices—every single one of them—and now she was standing in the crosshairs of enemies who didn’t believe in mercy.
Angelo didn’t always kill his victims outright. Sometimes he made them disappear—quietly, completely, as if they’d never existed at all. Costin was worse in his own way, clinical and patient, the kind of predator who’d let you think you’d escape before pulling the net tight.
But Vex could take it to a level neither of them would dream of.
Possession.
I glanced over my shoulder and tilted my head toward the stairs. The others nodded, their faces grim. Lucien and Darius had their swords drawn. Alice had her bow and arrow ready.
We climbed.
Each step groaned beneath my weight, the wood soft and rotting in places, threatening to give way.
And with each step, the nightmare clawed its way back.
The walls pressed in closer—or maybe that was just my mind, pulling me back to the possession.
The beating. The terror of being trapped inside my own body while something monstrous used my hands to hurt the person I loved most.
I gripped the banister. Breathed. Selena’s hand found the small of my back—a quiet pressure that said I’m here without breaking the silence. I kept moving.
The staircase wound upward along the interior wall, and the castle revealed itself in pieces.
A chandelier hung from the vaulted ceiling above us—massive, iron, dripping with cobwebs so thick they looked like funeral shrouds.
Whatever candles had once burned in it were long gone, reduced to nubs of yellowed wax clinging to the frame like old bones.
Dim light shone through a rose-shaped stained glass window on the landing above.
The colored glass threw a blood-red bloom across the opposite wall—beautiful and grotesque at the same time, like finding a flower growing in a grave.
But even as I watched, the light was fading, the rose dimming as the sun sank lower behind the mountains.
In a few minutes, it would be gone entirely, and this place would belong to the dark.
Then a sound stopped me dead.
Every hair on my body stood up. My hand shot out, pressing Selena flat against the wall behind me. The group froze.
A baby’s cry.
Thin. Weak. Echoing down from somewhere above us, bouncing off the stone walls until it seemed to come from everywhere and nowhere at once. It rose and fell in hitching, desperate wails—the sound of something small and helpless and terrified.
The sound hit me like a fist to the sternum. Every protective instinct I had fired at once—not just for Selena, but for whatever was making that sound. Something small. Something helpless. The same way she must have sounded when I—
I shut the thought down hard. I grabbed Selena’s hand and took the stairs two at a time.
Fuck. Vex.
The bastard must have kidnapped a baby—his specialty. Innocence ripped from its mother’s arms and brought to this godforsaken place for one purpose.
A blood sacrifice.
The staircase ended at a landing. A long corridor stretched out before us, lined with heavy wooden doors, all closed. But the crying wasn't coming from here. It was coming from above—another flight of stairs at the far end of the corridor, spiraling upward into darkness.
Every muscle in my body screamed to sprint toward the sound.
I forced myself to slow down—racing blind into a demon’s lair was how people died.
Beside me, Selena’s breath had gone shallow, her eyes wide and glistening.
She’d heard it too. That desperate, helpless wailing that burrowed under your skin and wouldn’t let go.
“Come on.” I tilted my head. “Stay close.”
Selena's hand found my arm, her nails digging in. “We have to move. Now.”
The crying grew louder, more desperate, each wail scraping against my skull like a blade. Somewhere above us, a child was alone in the dark with the most sadistic demon I'd ever encountered, and the Solstice was tonight.
We were running out of time.
I bolted up the stairs, the baby's terrified cries pulling me upward like a rope tied around my chest. Selena was right behind me, her breath fast and sharp against my back.
The stairs ended at another landing that opened into a narrow hallway. Stone walls, low ceiling, the air thick with dust and that ancient blood scent that wouldn't let go. Heavy wooden doors lined both sides, their iron handles blackened with age.
I tried the first one. It groaned open—a gutted bedroom, cobwebs draping everything like a burial shroud. Empty. I moved to the next. Empty.
Selena was already ahead of me, shoving open a door on the opposite side of the corridor.
“Nothing,” she said, her voice strained.
No baby. No Vex.
I shut the door and kept moving. The crying was louder now—raw, exhausted, the kind of wailing that came from a child who'd been screaming so long its voice was giving out.
My chest seized. Every second we spent opening wrong doors was a second that baby suffered. I glanced at Selena—her face was pale, her eyes bright with tears she refused to shed. She felt it too. That primal, gut-wrenching pull toward a child in pain.
Two doors down, something pulled at me. Not the scent this time—something deeper. Instinct. A gut-level certainty that made my hand reach for the handle before my brain gave the order.
I opened it.
A spiral staircase wound upward along the inside of a tower wall, disappearing into shadow above.
The cries echoed down the narrow stairwell, amplified by the stone, bouncing off the curved walls until they filled every inch of the space.
Fresh footprints tracked through the thick dust on the steps—leading up. Recent. Deliberate.
Vex had walked these stairs. Maybe hours ago. Maybe less.
This was it.
Selena met my eyes for half a breath—all the confirmation I needed. We moved.
Footsteps thundered behind us—the others following, their boots pounding against the spiral stairs, the sound echoing up the tower like a war drum.
I reached the top and slammed my shoulder into the door. It flew open, crashing against the stone wall with a boom that shook dust from the ceiling.
The room was round—a tower chamber, windowless except for narrow slits that let in the last dying light of the sun.
The air was thick with the smell of sulfur and something sweeter, darker—incense mixed with blood.
Symbols had been painted on the floor in a wide circle around a stone altar that sat in the center of the room.
The markings pulsed with a faint, sickly glow, like something alive was trapped beneath them.
And on the altar, a baby.
My body lurched forward—but something stopped me dead. An invisible force, thick and suffocating, pressed against my chest like a wall of cold air. The keep itself was holding me back. Dark magic, ancient and vicious, pulsing from the stones beneath my feet.
I scanned the room. Every shadow, every corner, every alcove where a demon could hide. No Vex. Not that I could see. But the absence of him was worse than his presence—it meant he was either gone or waiting for the perfect moment to strike.
The baby’s cries shredded what was left of my composure.
Tiny. Wailing. Its small fists clenched, its face red and scrunched with terror, its fragile body writhing against the cold stone.
Two black candles burned on either side, their flames flickering an unnatural violet that threw twisted shadows across the walls.
Next to the baby, a gold vase sat on the altar, its surface etched with symbols that seemed to writhe in the candlelight.
Vex stood behind the altar.
He was nothing like I expected and everything I feared.
His form shifted at the edges—never quite solid, never quite still—as if the darkness in the room was part of him and he was part of it.
But his eyes were fixed. Burning. Two points of molten gold that locked onto me with a recognition that made my skin crawl.
He smiled.
And in his hands, he held a blade. Curved. Black. Etched with symbols that matched the ones on the floor. It hummed with a sound I could feel in my teeth.
My eyes swept the altar in a fraction of a second—the baby, the blade, the candles—and there, resting on the edge of the stone, catching the violet light like a trapped star.
The shard.
It was right there. The thing we'd crossed an ocean for. The thing that had destroyed my life and dragged everyone I cared about into a war none of us had asked for.
Right there. Inches from a demon's blade and a baby's blood.
Vex raised the blade with both hands high above the screaming baby, the muscles in his arms coiling, the symbols on the floor blazing brighter.
"You're too late."