Chapter Twenty-Eight #2
Sloane doesn’t hesitate. Her palm presses flat to his chest with firm, grounding intent, and the moment contact is made, Bloodfire ignites between them.
It is not the devastating inferno she wields in battle.
This burns differently, a surgical flare of supernatural heat that threads inward rather than outward.
Light crawls across the scion’s skin in branching veins of molten gold, sinking through flesh and bone to reach the buried structure of Valeria’s command.
He screams.
Not from injury.
But from rupture.
The sound tears out of him raw and disbelieving, like something inside his skull has just split open under unbearable pressure. His hands claw at the air, at Sloane’s arms, at nothing, as if trying to hold together a mind that is being forcibly rewritten.
“It’s going to sting,” Sloane tells him steadily, her voice anchoring even as the fire consumes the foreign influence threaded through his nervous system. “Let it.”
The scion’s body convulses once, violently, then stills, and the light recedes. For a suspended heartbeat, he stands there, chest heaving, eyes unfocused as the last remnants of compulsion burn away like ash in a sudden wind.
Then clarity crashes into him.
I see it in the way his posture shifts, in the sharp inhale that seems to scrape his lungs clean from the inside out. His gaze moves from Sloane to Charlie, then to me, recognition dawning in stages that look almost painful to witness.
“I…” His voice fractures, unused and disbelieving.
“I can think.” The realization lands harder than any blow.
His knees buckle, but he catches himself before falling, instinct reassembling into something recognizably his own.
Hunger still hums through him, loud and demanding, but it no longer owns the direction of his body.
“I don’t feel her inside me anymore!” he declares, like this is the greatest gift we could have ever given him.
Charlie smiles weakly, but behind it, I see the fracture, the agony that she still feels. Still feels her. “Go,” Charlie urges, breathless but steady.
Gratitude flickers across his expression with startling intensity, something raw and deeply human surfacing beneath the ruin of what he has been made into.
“Thank you,” he says hoarsely, the words torn free as though they might dissolve if he waits too long. “All of you. I… I feel like I can breathe. If I actually needed to, that is.”
Charlie reaches out, lightly pressing her hand to his. “I completely understand, but you’re free of her now. You should go.”
Then survival takes over, because he turns and runs.
Not toward blood.
Toward freedom.
The rhythm of the battlefield shifts, and we move.
Sloane advances with relentless precision, each liberation of the locked scions a controlled act of defiance against the structure Valeria built to hold them.
Around us, the club adjusts seamlessly. Reyna’s shout cuts through the chaos, sending Ronan spinning to intercept a newborn barreling toward a chained scion too weak to defend herself.
Hades repositions with skeletal efficiency, his presence carving out a protected corridor along the wall where the freed can stagger toward safety.
Above us, Seraphine’s voice alters its resonance, the unsettling harmonics that once disoriented the attackers softening into something that steadies instead, a sound threaded with quiet reassurance rather than fear.
The church begins to change.
Hope, however fragile, has entered the fight.
This isn’t a slaughter anymore.
This is a rescue.
The fight is still brutal. There is nothing clean about it, nothing sanitized, and the sounds in this church are sounds I’ll carry with me for a long time.
But its shape has changed. The team that came here to destroy has become something else entirely, and I feel that change the way I can feel weather shifting before rain, something in the air is different, something in how my brothers move and where they direct themselves.
Charlie reaches the last set of chains. The scion is a woman, and she’s in worse shape than the others, malnourished and shaking so hard the iron rings rattle, the fight barely left in her. She looks at Charlie with eyes that are an intense red, and Charlie meets her gaze without wavering.
“I know,” Charlie says softly. “I know how this feels, but it ends here. She doesn’t get to keep you.”
I break the shackle.
Sloane steps in, and the Bloodfire does its work. The woman makes a sound like someone surfacing from deep water, sudden, ragged, desperately alive, and the red bleeds from her eyes as the last of Valeria’s compulsion burns away.
Behind us, the battle is fracturing into its final form, Crave and Valeria’s combat reaching a pitch that shakes the remaining walls of the church, stone dust falling like gray snow.
It won’t be long now.
I stand at Charlie’s shoulder, both of us blood-spattered and breathing hard, looking at the row of freed scions now huddled against the far wall, terrified, disoriented, and alive, every one of them, and something settles in my chest that has nothing to do with the fight still happening sixty feet away.
Charlie looks at me. There’s blood on her cheek, but her eyes are clear.
I reach out and grip the back of her neck once, brief and solid. She presses into my hand for exactly one second before squaring her shoulders and turning back to face the church.
Good girl, the wolf says, deep in my bones.
She’d hate it if she could hear that.
But I’m fairly certain she knows anyway.