Chapter 11
The approaching footsteps stopped outside the chamber.
Before the latch moved, the scent of fresh blood struck Rhen.
His head snapped toward Leena.
She remained in the chair beside the hearth, one hand gripping its carved arm while the other pressed low against her abdomen. The last color drained from her face.
A dark stain spread beneath her.
Too fast.
Far too much.
For one disbelieving heartbeat, Rhen’s mind refused to name what his senses had already understood.
Then Leena swayed.
“Rhen…”
He moved.
The heir was still held stiffly against his chest. Rhen crossed to the cradle in a single stride and lowered the child into it with exacting care, one hand supporting the tiny head until it rested safely against the mattress.
The baby stirred beneath the blanket.
Rhen was already turning away.
Leena’s knees folded.
He caught her before she struck the floor, one arm locking around her shoulders as the other supported her weight.
Blood flowed down her legs.
Hot.
Fresh.
Relentless.
“No.”
The word tore out of him.
He lowered her to the rug beside the chair, keeping her upper body braced against him.
“Leena.”
Her lashes fluttered.
“I don’t…”
Her breath caught.
“I don’t feel good.”
The door opened.
Mary entered first, the birth medic directly behind her. Both women stopped at the sight of blood spreading across the rug.
The medic recovered first.
“Get her onto the bed.”
Rhen lifted Leena before the command had finished. He carried her the short distance and lowered her onto the mattress, supporting her head and shoulders while the medic tore back the blood-soaked fabric.
More red followed.
The medic’s expression changed.
“Postpartum hemorrhage. Mary, bring the emergency case. We need blood now.”
Mary ran.
Rhen remained at Leena’s side.
The medic pressed folded linen firmly against the source of the bleeding. Rhen covered her hands with his own, controlling his strength with such precision that every muscle in his arms shook.
“Here,” the medic ordered. “Maintain pressure. Do not press harder than this.”
Rhen fixed the amount of force into memory.
He did not move.
Leena’s fingers closed weakly around his sleeve.
Her skin was colder than it had been minutes ago.
Too cold.
Her heartbeat raced beneath the silence of the room, frantic and uneven.
Rhen heard every failing beat.
“Stay with me,” he ordered.
Her gaze moved toward him, unfocused.
The baby began to cry from the cradle.
A thin, uncertain sound.
Leena’s eyes shifted toward it.
“My baby…”
“He’s safe.”
Rhen leaned closer, keeping one blood-slicked hand over the linen while the other caught hers.
“He is safe. You stay where you are.”
Mary returned carrying the emergency case and two bags of human donor blood. She set them beside the medic with trembling hands.
The medic worked quickly, opening supplies, fitting a line into Leena’s arm, and issuing clipped instructions that barely penetrated the roar building inside Rhen’s skull.
The blood beneath his hand continued to spread.
It ran between his fingers.
Over his wrists.
Into the dark fabric covering his knees.
Nothing stopped it.
“Why isn’t it stopping?” he demanded.
The medic did not look up.
“I’m trying.”
“That isn’t an answer.”
“A concealed birth injury,” the medic said, her voice tightening as she worked. “Something reopened inside her. If the uterine wall tore or failed to close properly after delivery—”
Rhen’s snarl cut through the room.
“Fix it.”
“I am trying. I need you to keep her still.”
Rhen’s jaw locked.
Leena trembled against him.
Her heartbeat weakened.
“No.”
His gaze cut toward her face.
“Leena. Look at me.”
Her eyes opened with visible effort.
Fear lived there now.
Not for herself.
Her attention moved again toward the cradle.
The baby’s cries grew louder.
“He needs…”
“He has Sule.”
Her fingers tightened weakly around Rhen’s hand.
“And you.”
Something inside him tore.
“Don’t.”
“Take care…” Her breath hitched. “Take care of him.”
“No.”
Rhen’s voice came out hard enough to break stone.
“You stay and do it yourself.”
A faint, exhausted smile touched her lips.
It looked too much like farewell.
Rhen bent closer.
“No. You don’t get to do that.”
Her hand rose unsteadily and brushed his cheek.
The touch barely carried enough pressure to register.
“Rhen…”
He caught her wrist before it could fall.
“You don’t get to leave us. Sule is coming. You stay until he gets here.”
Leena’s gaze held his.
There was no fear in it now.
Only recognition.
The calm certainty of the one person who had always looked at him and insisted there was something inside him besides death.
Her fingers slipped from his.
The medic’s head lifted sharply.
“I’m losing her.”
“No.”
Leena’s body slackened against Rhen’s arm.
Her final breath left her in a quiet exhale.
Her heart stopped.
The absence of it struck Rhen harder than any impact ever had.
The medic pushed him aside.
“Move.”
He did not.
“Rhen, move!”
Mary pulled at his shoulder while the medic began compressions. Rhen released Leena only because some broken remnant of reason understood that refusing might cost the medic the seconds needed to bring her back.
He stood beside the bed.
Blood covered his hands.
His forearms.
His clothes.
The medic worked.
One compression after another.
An injection.
Another command to Mary.
Another bag of blood opened too late.
Rhen listened for a heartbeat.
Nothing.
The baby screamed from the cradle.
Still the medic worked.
Rhen counted every second.
Ten.
Twenty.
Thirty.
He stopped counting when the numbers ceased meaning anything.
The medic’s movements finally slowed.
“No,” Rhen warned.
She checked Leena’s throat.
Then her chest.
Her face changed.
“I’m sorry.”
“No.”
“Rhen—”
“No.”
He shoved past her and gathered Leena into his arms.
Her head fell against his chest.
Too loose.
Too still.
He pressed his ear to her mouth, then against her chest, searching for anything the medic and his own senses might have missed.
No breath.
No heartbeat.
No life.
The stillness did not lie.
“No…”
The word left him as a wrecked whisper.
Humans.
This was why he had always hated them.
Not because they lacked courage.
Not because their lives were brief.
Because they were built like glass.
The world breathed wrong near them and they shattered. No regeneration. No second chance. One failing piece of flesh and everything they were simply stopped.
His fangs descended as grief turned feral inside him.
Hot.
Violent.
Useless.
There was nothing to fight.
Nothing to kill.
No throat he could tear open to reverse what had happened.
Rhen held Leena more tightly.
His head tipped back.
The roar that tore from him shook the chamber.
It was not a cry shaped for a human throat. It carried centuries of violence, restraint, and a love he had despised himself for possessing.
There was no hiding it now.
Not from Mary.
Not from the medic.
Not from the stronghold carrying his grief through every stone.
At the exact moment Leena’s life vanished, the royal thread woven through the ancient wards went dark.
Rhen’s grief struck the breach.
The protections flared white through the walls.
Then they ruptured.
For one terrible heartbeat, raw magic surged outward from the stronghold, racing through the streets of New Orleans like a shock wave.
Every creature sensitive to power would feel it.
Isa.
The coven.
The heretics waiting beyond the wards.
The heart of the stronghold had gone silent.
Rhen drove one fist into the stone floor.
The impact split it beneath his hand.
It changed nothing.
Nothing could.
He remained on his knees beside the bed, Leena locked against his chest while blood soaked through his clothes and branded him to the wrists.
Mary stood several feet away, one hand covering her mouth.
Grief hollowed her face.
The birth medic lowered her bloodstained hands.
Neither woman tried to take Leena from him.
The baby cried again.
The sound cut through the chamber, small and furious, demanding the mother who would never answer.
Mary looked toward the cradle.
Then toward the phone resting on the table.
Someone had to tell the king.
Her legs nearly failed before she reached it.
Mary lifted the receiver and called Sule.
He answered before the second ring.
“Mary?”
His voice was sharp and immediate, already threaded with alarm.
Mary opened her mouth.
Nothing emerged except a broken breath.
“Mary.” Sule’s tone hardened. “Talk to me.”
She stared at Leena’s face where it rested against Rhen’s chest.
The stillness.
The blood.
Rhen’s empty eyes.
The baby’s thin screams.
“Sule,” she managed.
Her voice broke around his name.
“What happened?”
“It’s Leena.”
Silence answered.
Not even breath came through the line.
Mary closed her eyes.
“You need to come home.”
“Put her on the phone.”
The command came instantly.
Mary’s knees weakened.
“Sule—”
“Put Leena on the phone.”
“I can’t.”
The words disintegrated in her throat.
On the bed, Rhen did not move.
His arms remained locked around Leena as though death might still be forced to surrender if he refused to release her.
Sule’s voice changed.
The authority left it.
What remained was quieter and infinitely more dangerous.
“Mary.”
She gripped the phone with both hands.
“Tell me.”
Mary looked once more at the queen who had made a home inside a fortress built for monsters.
“She’s gone.”
* * *
Sule did not remember standing.
One moment, he had been seated at the council table with the phone against his ear, Isa and the coven arranged across from him.
The next, his chair lay broken behind him.
The baby’s scream carried faintly through the call.
Thin.
Desperate.
Alive.
Leena was not.
Something inside Sule went brutally, murderously cold.
The witches around the table rose at once as the pulse from the shattered wards reached them.
Isa’s face drained of color.
“Sule—”
He was already gone.