Chapter Twelve
Viktor’s fingers dug into the doorframe hard enough to splinter the wood.
Ant knelt beside the chair, one hand twisted in Able’s harness, the other pressed flat against the burgundy cushion.
His entire body convulsed in small, violent jerks.
Blood streaked from both nostrils down to his chin, dripping onto the collar of Viktor’s shirt that he was wearing.
His eyes were open - wide and gray and completely unseeing, pupils blown so large they’d swallowed the iris.
Small gasps escaped his throat in an arrhythmic pattern that made Viktor’s heart clench.
Able started to bark - the sharp, frantic sounds echoing off the walls. The dog stayed frozen in position, though, clearly trembling with the effort of holding his training against every instinct telling him to break Ant free.
Viktor’s legs tensed. He knew how that dog felt. Every cell in his body screamed at him to cross the three meters separating them, to rip Ant’s hand away from that cursed chair, to carry him out of the nightmare house and never look back.
Don’t touch him during the reading. You could leave us both vulnerable.
Ant’s voice from last night, calm, logical, and absolutely firm on that one point. But clearly, he hadn’t expected a vision from hell itself, and now he was suffering, and Viktor didn’t know what to do.
His fangs descended. His vision bled red at the edges.
The vampire in him wanted to tear the entire wing apart, to rip through the wards and drag his mate to safety.
Fuck the consequences. Fuck Ant’s warnings.
His mate was hurt, bleeding, and trapped by something and what?
Viktor was supposed to just stand by and watch?
Ant’s body jerked again. A thin sound escaped his throat - something between a gasp and a whimper that Viktor had never heard from him before.
The doorframe cracked under Viktor’s grip.
No. He forced himself to take a breath he didn’t need. Think. There has to be another way.
Able’s barking shifted pitch, becoming more desperate. The dog’s eyes tracked between Ant’s convulsing form and Viktor in the doorway, as if begging him to do something, anything.
Viktor closed his eyes. The mate bond glowed faintly in his awareness - that golden thread connecting his consciousness to Ant’s.
Usually, it hummed with a steady, reassuring warmth.
Now it pulsed erratically, like Ant’s heartbeat was transmitting directly into Viktor’s skull.
Panic. Confusion. Terror that wasn’t quite Ant’s own but was bleeding into him anyway.
And underneath it all, so faint, Viktor almost missed it - a whisper.
Viktor.
The words weren’t spoken out loud. Viktor wasn’t sure it was even a conscious thought. But as soon as he heard it, it was easier to hear again. His name was being repeated as if he were the only lifeline Ant had left.
Viktor. Viktor. Please.
His mate was calling for him. Viktor’s eyes snapped open, and his hands released the doorframe.
He couldn’t cross the physical space. Ant was clear that touching him could risk catastrophic damage to his mate’s mind.
But the bond between them wasn’t physical.
It existed in a space beyond flesh, blood, and magic.
The magic behind a mating was far older and more fundamental than any ward Claudius could create.
Ant had reached for him through that bond, which meant Viktor could reach back.
He planted his feet in the doorway and closed his eyes again. This time, he didn’t fight the connection or try to shield himself from the chaos bleeding through from Ant’s side. Instead, he grabbed onto it with both metaphorical hands and pulled.
The bond flared bright in his awareness, and as soon as it did, Viktor poured everything he had into it - his strength, his consciousness, his absolute unwavering certainty that he would protect his mate from anything. Even from visions, he couldn’t see.
Viktor felt his physical body sway, but kept his eyes closed, his focus locked on the golden thread. He pushed his consciousness forward, following it like a rope through fog, forcing his way past interference, static, and the chaotic magical noise he could now tell was saturating the room.
I’m coming, precious. Hold on!
The bond stretched, and Viktor’s awareness split - half of him still standing in the doorway, half of him sliding along the connection into territory he’d never navigated before.
The sensation was deeply disorienting. On the one hand, he could feel his fangs fully extended, and the way his fingers were reaching for the doorframe again, but at the same time, he was moving, falling, diving through layers of magic and memories that would turn his stomach if he’d bothered to stop and pay attention.
The static intensified. Viktor snarled and shoved harder. He had centuries of being a stubborn ass on his side, and he wasn’t about to be stopped by something insignificant like a spot of magical interference. The bond flared brighter, and suddenly he was through.
The change was so abrupt it was nauseating. One moment, Viktor was standing in a guest room watching his mate convulse. The next he was...
Here. Wherever here was. The space around him didn’t follow normal rules.
It was too bright and too dark all at the same time, and yet the edges were blurring like a painting left in the rain.
Viktor could see a room - the same guest room from his physical state, but it was wrong somehow.
The colors were oversaturated, and the shadows were moving independently of any light source.
And everywhere, everywhere Viktor could sense at least, there was the thick, cloying scent of magic twisted with fear.
A figure sat at a desk, working over financial documents. Viktor’s lip curled. Ronald Finch. Or the memory of him, preserved in whatever twisted vision the wards had trapped Ant inside.
Footsteps sounded in the hallway.
The door opened.
“Lord Raven, I wasn’t expecting...” Ronald’s voice was thin, nervous.
Claudius stepped through, Edmund and another vampire flanking him.
The scene played out exactly as Viktor had imagined it - Claudius being all polite until he wasn’t, the asshole using a thrall which wasn’t necessary at all, the feeding, and Claudius, fucking Claudius, treating it all like it was a king-sized joke.
But then the entire scene stuttered. Ronald was back at the desk. The door opened. Claudius entered.
“Lord Raven, I wasn’t expecting...”
Viktor’s hands clenched into fists - metaphorical or physical, he wasn’t sure, but he quickly realized what Ant’s problem was. His mate was stuck in a loop…which begged the question, Where the fuck is Ant?
He spun, trying to orient himself in the bizarre non-space of the memory.
The room around him felt oppressively small despite its actual size, the walls pressing in like they were alive.
The ambient magic buzzed against his skin, but it was nothing like Ant’s magic.
The magic trying to smother him was thick, ugly, and felt completely wrong.
Then Viktor felt it, a flicker of his mate’s familiar presence, but it seemed distant and fragmented.
There! Viktor’s instincts homed in on it. Ant’s consciousness wasn’t in the room, and he wasn’t watching the scene like Viktor was. It was as if he had been pulled in deeper, somewhere underneath the surface of the memory, trapped in the mechanism of the loop itself. Viktor dove for it.
The scene reset around him - Ronald back at the desk, footsteps in the hall - but Viktor ignored it, pushing his consciousness down, down, following the thread of Ant’s presence through the layers of twisted magic.
The loop grew louder. More insistent. The sound of Ronald’s voice layered on top of itself, echoing.
“Lord Raven, I wasn’t expecting...”
“Lord Raven, I wasn’t expecting...”
“Lord Raven...”
And underneath it all, barely audible, a whisper.
Viktor.
Viktor snarled and shoved through another layer of interference.
The magic was fighting him, trying to shred his consciousness, as if he were a foreign presence that the magic was trying to eject.
But Viktor had been a predator for a long time, and he knew how to be relentless.
He was the poster boy of someone who would refuse to let go, even when everything screamed at him to give up.
Not a fucking chance. Viktor pushed deeper as the scene fragmented around him. Multiple versions of Ronald’s death played simultaneously, overlapping and bleeding into each other. Claudius’s laughter echoed from a dozen different moments. Edmund’s voice distorted into static.
And finally, Viktor found him. Ant’s consciousness was a small, bright point of light drowning in a sea of chaos.
The loop had fractured him, splintering his awareness into pieces that couldn’t quite reassemble themselves.
Fear was wrapped like an aura around him, and Viktor could feel the real genuine panic that belonged to Ant himself.
Viktor’s protective instincts roared to life. Fear had no place in Ant’s life. He wrapped his consciousness around Ant’s fractured presence and pulled him close, forming a barrier between his mate and the maelstrom of memories trying to consume him.
I’ve got you.
Ant’s presence flickered, weak and disoriented. The loop continued to scream around them, demanding attention, demanding to be witnessed. But Viktor stood firm, holding Ant against his metaphorical chest and refusing to let the magic tear them apart.
You’re safe. I’m here. You’re not alone.
He could feel Ant trying to respond, trying to orient himself, but the loop kept dragging at him, kept trying to pull him back under. The wards had created a perfect trap - a scene so traumatic and so endlessly repeating that it would eventually erode any observer’s sense of self.
But the wards hadn’t accounted for a fated mate bond. Viktor tightened his grip. His consciousness blazed bright with his protective fury. Nothing, not magic, wards, or senseless deaths on autorepeat, was going to take his mate from him.
The loop screamed as Ronald died again, and again, and again. But Viktor didn’t care. And that became his strength. Viktor remembered telling Bridget back when he and Ant first met about how he genuinely didn’t care about anyone else, and Bridget had worried about that.
But from the first time he’d seen him in that courtroom, Viktor had felt protective of Ant, and over time that had bloomed into a love so many vampires feared.
It was all-consuming, and there was nothing on Earth, hell, or in-between that could come between Viktor and his mate.
He locked his metaphorical arms around Ant’s fractured awareness and became an anchor - a solid and immovable force in a space designed to trap and disorient.
Feel me, he pushed through their bond. I’m here. I’m solid. Focus on me, not the loop. Come back to me, precious.
Ant’s presence wavered, then steadied ever so slightly. It was still fragmented, and Ant was still weak, but Viktor got the sense Ant was no longer drowning quite so completely. Tightening his arms, Viktor prepared himself to stay exactly where he was for as long as it took.