Chapter 1
THE HOLLOWING
The first thing that registered was the sepulchral silence.
It filled the room completely, squeezing in on all sides, yet it didn’t settle around me the way it should have.
It wasn’t peaceful or restorative, the kind that followed a long, dreamless sleep.
It felt hollow, as though something vital had been cut out of me.
Sensation came next, returning to me in fragments as though it were slotting back into place piece by piece.
The solid press of cushions beneath my back.
The weight of my own body, cumbersome and slow to respond.
The feel of my chest rising and falling in steady, automatic rhythms that somehow felt misaligned; the cadence overlapping in a way that made it hard to tell where one beat ended and the next one began.
I opened my eyes and blinked up at the living room ceiling.
Familiar shadows stretched across the beams as the sound of flames licking at the firewood hissed and snapped through the air.
Everything was unchanged, exactly as it had always been, and yet none of it rooted me.
My awareness kept slipping, catching a fraction too late, as if my body and mind were no longer moving at the same speed.
As if my thoughts had been pulled too far apart and then stitched back together incorrectly.
I lay there motionless, waiting for pain or panic to surface, for some delayed reaction to crash through now that I was fully conscious, but neither came.
The last things I remembered before everything went dark came to me in uneven flashes. Temple. The Sang Noir. William’s cold, deliberate voice. Sigils burning across the floor around me. The chanting. The pressure building inward until everything tore apart.
I’d ported back home to the Blackburn Estate, straight into the arms of the first boy I’d ever loved, already knowing the nightmare I’d faced at Temple wasn’t over.
The voices had followed me back—barbed, invasive chatter that had crowded my head all at once, overwhelming my mind until thought itself gave out under the crushing weight of it.
There had been too many demands. Too much noise.
Too much pain for one person to bear. It had taken everything I had just to stay inside my own head, and in the end, even that hadn’t been enough.
But it was quiet again now. Too quiet. Only a deafening silence that didn’t feel natural or safe.
“You’re awake.” The sound of Trace’s baritone rippled over my skin like a current.
I turned my head and faced him, swallowing past the dryness in my throat.
Azure blue eyes, wrought with tension and worry, locked onto mine. He sat perched on the edge of the coffee table beside me with his shoulders hunched forward and his hands clasped tightly between his knees as though he hadn’t moved a muscle in hours.
The posture was all wrong for him. It was too small and hopeless, too afraid, like he thought he was about to lose me and was already trying to figure out how to survive it.
“How are you feeling?” he asked, his eyes combing over my face, pausing on my eyes, my mouth, my cheeks, tracking every change as it happened.
“I’m okay,” I rasped and then winced as my throat scraped against the words.
It felt like I’d been screaming for hours. Only I couldn’t seem to remember screaming at all.
“I’m afraid we’re going to need a better assessment than that, love.”
I peered over Trace’s shoulder at the sound of Dominic’s voice and met his eyes.
He was standing by the mantle with his hands in his pockets and a lopsided smile playing at the corner of his mouth.
Despite the easy way he wore it, I knew he wasn’t nearly as relaxed as he wanted me to believe he was.
He was doing that thing he always did—holding himself so painstakingly composed that you’d almost miss how close to the edge he actually was.
But I could see straight through it.
“Nothing’s broken,” I offered lightly, even if that was only true in the strictly physical sense.
He clicked his tongue at me. “That’s a remarkably low bar, angel, even for you. Forgive me if I find it less than reassuring.”
For a brief, fleeting moment, the sound of their voices grounded me, just as it always had, but the feeling didn’t last. The comfort only went skin-deep, burning through me too quickly for me to hold onto and leaving an emptiness in the space where the warmth should have been.
Something about it just didn’t feel right.
Then again, nothing did.
“How long was I asleep?” I asked as I tried to push myself upright.
Every muscle in my body protested the movement, but I promptly schooled my features before anything could show. The last thing I wanted was to give them more reason to worry about me.
“It’s been a while,” answered Trace as he reached out to steady me, holding my arm and supporting my back as he carefully helped me sit up. “A few hours.” The way he said it made it sound as though he’d lost track of time altogether.
I dragged my hands through my hair, my fingers catching at the roots before dropping back to my lap as Dominic padded over to the bar cart and poured two glasses of something dark and expensive looking.
“Do you remember what happened?” asked Trace, drawing my attention back to him.
“Before or after I ported back here?” I asked dryly, unsure which of the two was worse at this point.
Trace frowned, his brows creasing as though he already regretted asking the question.
That made two of us.
“I remember everything.” My gaze flicked to Dominic as he crossed the room to join us. He took the seat beside me on the couch and then pressed one of the tumblers into the palm of my hand.
“Start at the beginning, angel.”
“Right,” I said, a humorless breath catching in my throat. As if starting at the beginning had ever gone well for me.
For a second, I considered how much easier this would be if I didn’t remember any of it. Or better yet, if I could skip ahead to a version of the story where I’d never touched the book at all.
Unfortunately, things never really worked out like that for me.
Mostly because of…well, me.
“Everything started off fine,” I began as I set my drink on the coffee table without touching it.
My stomach was already sour enough without adding alcohol to the mix.
“I ported to Temple like we planned, and for once, all hell didn’t break loose.
The study was completely empty. No guards.
No wards. Nothing. The whole thing went off without a hitch.
” A quiet breath slipped out of me, half disbelief, half something that felt like irony.
After weeks of hiding behind wards and reinforced walls, doing nothing but waiting, it had felt like movement. Like progress. Like we were finally getting somewhere instead of just waiting around to be picked off one by one. I should have known nothing good ever came that easy.
“All I had left to do was wait for the timer to go off and port back. And I swear to God, I had every intention of doing that,” I said and then swallowed against the knot at the back of my throat. “Until I saw it.”
The divot between Trace’s brows deepened. “Saw what?”
“The Sang Noir,” answered Dominic before I could say anything. He didn’t look at Trace when he spoke, his eyes were fixed on me, just like they always were. His jaw flexed once. “Please tell me you didn’t do the one thing you were explicitly warned not to do.”
Heat shot up my neck, reddening my cheeks before I could stop it.
What a fucking question. Did he even know me at all?
“How could I not, Dominic? It was right there on the conference table! I barely had to take a step to grab it,” I said, the defensiveness in my voice doing nothing to help my case.
“It felt stupid to leave it there after everything we just risked getting into Temple in the first place. Especially when I’d have to do the whole thing all over again anyway. ”
Trace rubbed a hand along his jaw, and I instantly wished I could close my mouth and never open it again. But I knew I couldn’t do that. Not yet anyway. They needed to know what happened. I owed them at least that much.
“The second my fingers touched the book I felt their magic slam into me and lock my feet in place. I was completely trapped. I couldn’t even take a single step let alone port back. I had no idea what was going on until I saw the sigils.”
Understanding darkened Dominic’s eyes. “They used the book as a trap.”
I nodded once, knowing that now. “Unfortunately, I didn’t have a chance to figure that out or even process what the hell had just happened before William walked in.
I don’t even know how he got there so fast. It was like he was standing outside the door the whole time just waiting for me to show up and take the bait. ”
“He wouldn’t have needed to,” said Trace, his dimples pressing in as the muscles in his jaw hardened. “The sigils were most likely tied to some kind of detection spell. He probably ported there the second the wards went off.”
“He definitely didn’t look surprised to see me there,” I agreed, ignoring the chill that slid down my back at the memory of his cold eyes. “He looked resolved, like he’d been expecting me and already knew exactly how the whole thing was going to play out before I even got there.”
It was always the same sinking feeling I got when dealing with the Order. The feeling that no matter what we did or how carefully we planned, they were always one step ahead of us, already waiting at the finish line.
Dominic’s fingers stilled against the rim of his glass, his dark eyes moving over my face. “And the Horsemen?”