Chapter 33
Chapter Thirty-Three
Selena
Rocco.
My eyes flew open. My heart slammed against my ribs so hard I thought it would crack through bone. The fog that had swallowed my mind was gone — burned away by the sound of his voice, raw and desperate, still echoing off the stone walls.
I turned my head.
Black smoke poured into Rocco's mouth, his nostrils, his eyes — forcing its way inside him like a living thing burrowing into flesh. His dark eyes bled to red. His face twisted, the muscles contorting into something that wasn't him. Something wearing his skin.
No. No, no, no.
I remembered that look. The same dead red eyes. The same wrongness in every line of his face. I'd seen it in court two years ago when his fists had shattered his mother's cheekbone while something monstrous laughed behind his eyes.
He was possessed.
Vex strolled between the altar and Rocco like a conductor admiring his orchestra. "Kill Lucien."
Rocco's body turned toward Lucien — stiff, mechanical, a puppet jerking on invisible strings.
"No!" I screamed. "Rocco, stop! It's me! Listen to my voice!"
Nothing. Not a flicker of recognition.
Vex glanced down at me, his golden eyes bright with delight. "He won't listen, girl. And you know it. Lucien is as good as dead." He tilted his head. "Oh, you're awake. Just in time to watch Raven Acosta die. The strongest supernatural in the world will soon be dancing the rumba down in hell."
I tried to move. My arms, my legs — nothing responded. As if my body had been nailed to the stone.
Think. Think of something. Anything.
Rocco stalked toward Lucien, his fangs extended, his red eyes empty of everything that made him Rocco. He was going to drain him. A Golden Demo—drained by the man who'd had just fought by his side.
Balthazar! I screamed it inside my mind. Help us!
Silence. Nothing.
Of course. He said he wouldn't help us. Couldn't help us.
But then I thought — maybe he had.
Rocco lunged. He moved so fast Lucien didn't even have time to flinch before Rocco's fangs tore into his throat.
Lucien screamed — a raw, animal sound that bounced off the stone walls — and blood sprayed in a hot arc, painting the floor, the walls, spattering warm across my skin where I lay pinned to the altar.
He was dying. Right there, just feet from me, Lucien was dying.
The spell. The spell.
I arched my back against the cold stone and screamed the words at the ceiling. "Cruor meus, clavis tua. Aperi!"
Vex whipped toward me. His hand cracked across my face, snapping my head sideways, and the world fractured into white-hot light. My teeth sliced the inside of my cheek. Blood filled my mouth. The back of my skull bounced off the altar, and for one terrible second, everything went dark.
But something shifted. The air itself seemed to exhale — a pressure I hadn't even realized was crushing me suddenly released, like a fist unclenching around my chest.
The invisible weight holding me to the stone—gone.
I could move.
Vex raised the blade over Raven.
I shoved her with everything I had. She flew off the altar and hit the floor with a heavy thud, and Vex’s blade came down into the empty stone. The crack echoed through the chamber like a gunshot.
But the blade was intact. Still razor sharp. Still deadly.
“You bitch,” he snarled.
I swung my legs off the altar and kicked the golden vase. It toppled, struck the floor, and the lid popped free, spinning across the stone.
Two things happened at once.
Vex howled and recoiled, turning his face away as if something inside the vase burned to even look at.
And across the room, Rocco wrenched his fangs from Lucien’s throat and screamed—a guttural, inhuman sound, his body convulsing, hands clawing at his own skull.
Whatever was radiating from that open vase, the demon inside Rocco felt it too.
Lucien crumpled. He hit the floor like something boneless, blood sheeting down his throat, pooling beneath him in a widening dark stain. His eyes were closed. His chest didn’t move.
No. No, no, no.
Vex ran around the altar in three swift strides, grabbed Raven by the shoulder, and rolled her onto her back. He pressed the blade to her throat. “Put the lid back on.” His voice shook. “Now. Or I kill the bitch.”
I looked at him—really looked at him. The tremor in his hand. The way his eyes kept darting to the open vase like it was a lit fuse. The sweet beading on his skin.
He was going to kill her anyway. We both knew it.
That’s when I knew. The shard was inside the vase—and he couldn’t touch it.
I smiled.
I plunged my hand into the vase and my fingers closed around something that felt like a heartbeat. I pulled it free, and the shard pulsed in my palm—warm, alive, furious. Raw power flooded up my arm, into my chest, behind my eyes.
It blazed pure white. The entire chamber erupted in light, searing every shadow from the walls, the ceiling, the hollows of Vex’s horrified face.
Across the room, Rocco’s mouth tore open in a silent scream. Black smoke poured from his throat, nose, his eyes—thick and oily, writing like something alive being dragged out against its will.
Vex plunged the blade down toward Raven’s chest.
“No!” The word ripped out of me, and I raised the shard. It burned like a star in my fist. “I send you back to hell.”
The air split open.
A portal through the center of the chamber—not light, not darkness, but something between, something that hurt to look at, its edges crackling and bleeding crimson.
The blade wrenched itself from Vex’s grip as if an invisible hand ripped it away, and it spun end over end through the portal, swallowed whole.
Vex stumbled back. For the first time, he looked small.
Fire roared inside the opening. Not normal fire—it moved wrong, churning and clawing upward like something starving.
And within it, shapes. Figures. Dozens of them, hundreds their mouths stretched open in soundless screams, fingers hooked into claws as they scrambled and tore at each other, trying to climb out of a pit that had no top.
Hands reached through the flames toward the portal’s edge, and something below kept dragging them back down.
Then I saw him.
He stood at the edge of the pit like he owned it.
Like he owned everything. Tall, impossibly beautiful, with long red hair that moved as if caught in a wind that touched nothing else.
His skin was pale and flawless, his features so perfect they were wrong—the kind of beauty that made your brain scream to look away even as your eyes refused to move.
His black wings unfurled. They stretched wide, wider, filling the space behind him like a cathedral of shadow and bone. Each feather gleamed like an oil slick.
His eyes opened, and they burned red—not glowing, burning, like twin coals pressed into that beautiful, terrible face.
Every cell in my body went cold. Not fear — something deeper, something older, something carved into the marrow of every living thing that had ever existed. A knowing. The way prey knows the predator before it has a name. The way the dark knows the light.
I knew what he was.
My hand holding the shard trembled. My lungs forgot how to work.
I wanted to fall to my knees — not in worship, but because my legs simply refused to hold me in the presence of something this ancient, this vast, this wrong.
The air around him didn't just feel heavy.
It felt like standing at the edge of an ocean that went down forever, and somewhere in the black depths, something was looking back.
He didn't look at me. He didn't need to. I could feel his awareness pass over me like a hand brushing across the surface of water — brief, disinterested, absolute. I was nothing to him. Less than nothing. A heartbeat. A flicker.
He looked at Vex the way you’d look at something stuck to your shoe.
"You failed, Vex." He lifted one hand and curled his fingers inward. A lazy gesture. Almost bored. "Now you'll pay the price."
"No — no —" Vex's voice cracked into something I'd never heard from him. Not rage. Not cruelty. A wail. Wind erupted from the portal, hot and reeking of sulfur, and it seized him like a fist. His feet left the ground. His fingers clawed at nothing.
He screamed all the way down.
A loud pop echoed through the chamber, so sharp it split through my skull like a nail. The portal snapped shut.
Gone. He was gone. Really gone.
The shard's light dimmed in my palm — fading from blazing white to a faint, tired pulse, as if it had given everything it had. My fingers uncurled and it rolled free, clinking softly against the stone floor.
My legs gave out. I hit my knees, then my hands, gasping, struggling to pull air into lungs that felt like they'd been crushed flat. The chamber was silent. The fire was gone. The screaming was gone.
It was over.
Rocco.
The thought hit me like a blade between the ribs. Please please please be okay. I tried to save him. Save all of them. But what if I was too late? What if the demon had hollowed him out and left nothing behind? What if the man I loved was gone and something else was wearing his face?
I couldn’t see him. The chamber was too dark now, the shard’s light spent, and my eyes wouldn’t focus. Everything was shadows and the copper stink of blood.
“Rocco?” My voice came out broken. Small. “Rocco, where are you?”
A sound. Low, ragged. Not a word—a sob.
I crawled toward it. My palms slid through something warm and wet on the stone, and I didn’t let myself think about what it was. I just keep moving, pulling myself forward until the shadows shifted and I saw them.
Rocco was on the floor with Lucien cradled in his arms. Lucien's head lolled against his chest, and Rocco was rocking him — slow, rhythmic, the way you'd rock a child — his face buried in Lucien's hair.
Blood soaked through Rocco's shirt, smeared across his chin, stained his teeth.
Lucien's blood. On his mouth. On his hands. Everywhere.
“I killed him.” Rocco’s voice was gutted. Hollow. Like someone had reached inside him and scraped out everything that made him Rocco. “I killed him.”
My heart shattered.
I knelt in front of him and took his face in my hands. His skin was wet. Tears, blood—I couldn’t tell, didn’t care. I made him look at me.
“No. You didn’t.” I kept my voice steady even though everything inside me was coming apart. “The demon did that. Not you. You didn’t do it, Rocco.”
His eyes—god, his eyes. Red-rimmed, destroyed, looking at me like he was begging me to make it true. “It’s the same damn thing.”
"No, it's not." The voice was barely a whisper. Hoarse. Wrecked. But alive. "I'm not fucking dead yet."
Lucien stirred in Rocco's arms and winced. "Damn, you've got one hell of a bite, vamp."
A sound tore out of Rocco — half laugh, half sob. His arms tightened around Lucien for just a second before he let go, and I watched something unknot behind his eyes. Not forgiveness. Not yet. But the first breath of it.
"Lucien?" Raven dropped to her knees beside me, stretching out her arms.
He went to her immediately, pulling her against him, pressing his lips to her cheek. "I thought I lost you."
"You'll never lose me," she whispered.
I pulled Rocco into my arms. His whole body shook. I felt his tears, hot and silent against my shoulder, and I held him tighter. He held onto me like he was afraid I'd slip through his fingers.
But I wasn't going anywhere.
He was mine.