Chapter Fifteen #2
I tear free, the heart comes with it. It’s stone cold in my hand.
Still alive in a way it shouldn’t be, muscle twitching once, twice, as if it hasn’t yet accepted what’s been done to it.
Blood runs over my fingers in thick, dark lines, dripping from my knuckles, hitting the broken concrete below in a steady, wet rhythm.
The body drops.
I don’t look at it.
I’m looking at what’s in my hand, and something in me surges.
Not thought or decision.
Hunger.
It hits fast and absolute, ripping through everything I’ve held in place for five centuries, dragging something older, sharper, and far less controlled up from where I have buried it.
My fangs descend before I can stop them, the shift immediate, instinctive, the scent of blood saturating the air until it’s all I can taste, all I can feel.
The world narrows.
The room disappears.
The smell of human blood in the air, but it’s tainted. Half human, half vampire, but human nonetheless.
It smells so good.
My grip tightens, crushing the heart.
For a fraction of a second…
The hunger overwhelms me, the craving like an adrenaline surge, and I spin toward the intoxicating smell.
Then I see her.
Cali is on the floor where the third one drove her down, her arm cut open, that intoxicating blood leaking out. But her body is still, her head turned to the side, her throat marked with the force of the choke that took her air.
That’s when the world snaps back into place.
Hard.
Violent.
The hunger doesn’t disappear, but it collides with something stronger.
I drop the heart, and it hits the floor with a wet, final sound that barely registers as I’m already moving, crossing the space between us in a single step, dropping to one knee beside her.
“Cali?”
No response.
Her chest rises, but it’s shallow. Too fucking shallow.
I reach for her throat, fingers pressing in to find it, to feel it…
A pulse.
It’s faint.
But thank God, it’s there.
Relief hits sharper than anything else has tonight, but it doesn’t slow me down. The bruising is already forming under her skin, the way her breathing catches instead of flows.
“Come on,” I mutter, my hand sliding to her jaw, tilting her head back. “Breathe.”
Nothing.
Her chest stutters. Stops. Starts again, too shallow to matter.
“Cali!”
Still nothing.
I don’t think. I need her to wake the fuck up. So, I do the only thing I know will get a rise out of her.
I slap her.
The crack of it echoes sharper than the door breaking earlier, my hand striking across her cheek with enough force to snap her head to the side.
For a split second, nothing happens, but then… she jerks. Air tears back into her lungs in a violent, choking gasp, her body arching as she drags in breaths. Her hands come up on instinct, grabbing at me, at the ground, at anything solid as she fights her way back into it.
I stay there, one hand still braced at her jaw, watching, tracking every breath as it steadies, deepens, and becomes something that will keep her alive. Relief settles in my chest, heavy and unfamiliar.
Her eyes snap open, locking onto mine, still sharp despite everything, still very much her. She pulls in a breath, then another, forcing control back into her body. “Took you long enough,” she mutters. “I was starting to think you missed me.”
For a second, I look at her.
Really look.
At the way her breathing is still catching at the edges, the bruising already darkening under her skin, the fact that she’s here, conscious and above all alive.
My hand tightens slightly against her shoulder. “I did,” I say, but the words come out quietly.
The words are out before I even decide to say them.
Not sharpened into something safer or buried under something drier.
Just… there.
Her expression shifts.
Not dramatically or enough for anyone else to catch.
But I see it.
Because for once, I didn’t give her something to deflect.
Then I hear a click, a small, sharp, deliberate sound, a sound I know from every nightmare that has ever been worth having, and the world lurches back into real time.
“Run,” Cali chimes.
I look at her. She already has something in her hand. Small, black, an antenna snapped upright. Her thumb presses the switch down with a clean, deliberate motion that doesn’t hesitate, doesn’t second-guess.
A sharp, rising whine cuts through the space between us.
Her eyes lift to mine, steady in a way that locks everything else out. “Go!”
She doesn’t wait to see if I do.
She moves.
And the world fractures around it.
One second she’s in front of me, the next she’s already across the floor, her body hitting a line and committing to it with a speed that turns distance into something irrelevant.
I follow on instinct.
My foot hits the floor and pushes, and the space disappears.
Everything sharpens.
Every angle, every obstacle, every piece of debris becomes something to account for, to move around, to use. The broken tables, the scattered equipment, the fractured concrete, none of it slows us, not when the pace climbs past human, past reasonable, into something that doesn’t negotiate.
We don’t run through the warehouse so much as tear through it. Distance disappears beneath us in hard, powerful bursts, my body driving forward while concrete, steel, and stacked pallets flash past in a blur.
Cali is already moving ahead of me, adjusting her line without hesitation, somehow finding the same path I would have taken and cutting to it before I consciously make the choice myself.
We hit the doorway flat out, and neither of us backs off.
I catch the frame with one hand as I pass, using the momentum to sling myself around the corner before driving forward again.
My boots hammer the concrete for barely a heartbeat before I push off, eating up more ground while the warehouse rushes by around us in flashes of steel beams, loading bays, and industrial shadows.
The world narrows, as it always does, when things turn violent.
The target.
The route.
The hunt.
Everything else can fucking wait.
Cold air slams into us.
Night, the open space, and we don’t stop.
The lot stretches out ahead with gravel, broken asphalt, open distance, and we tear across it at a pace that strips the world down to sensation.
Wind rips past, dragging at clothes, hair, and anything loose enough to catch it.
The ground hits fast and hard underfoot, each step a controlled impact that launches the next, my body running at the edge of what it can take and not caring.
She’s fast.
Not just fast… precise.
Every step placed exactly where it needs to be, no wasted motion, no excess, her body cutting through space like it was built for this moment.
I match it, then push past it.
My hand catches her arm mid-stride, not slowing her, just redirecting, pulling her half a step closer as I shift our line, angling us farther from the building in the fraction of a second it takes to calculate the blast radius.
“Keep moving,” I snap.
She doesn’t argue, and we clear the edge of the lot, and the world behind us detonates.
The sound hits first. A violent, concussive crack that tears through the air and slams into my back like a physical force.
Then the heat. A wave of it rolls outward, brutally chasing us across the open ground. The pressure follows, a solid wall that catches us mid-stride and lifts.
My feet leave the ground, and for a split second, there’s nothing under me, nothing to push against, the force ripping momentum out from under us and turning it sideways.
I twist midair, my grip on her tightening as I turn my body into the impact, taking the worst of it as we hit the ground hard and roll, gravel tearing under us as we skid.
The blast rushes past—heat, wind, followed by debris—then silence crashes in behind it.
I hit the asphalt on my side and roll, come up already reaching, already checking, and find Cali four feet away on her hands and knees in the gravel, head down, breathing.
Seeing that Cali is okay, I turn… and the warehouse is gone.
For a long, suspended moment, neither of us speaks.
The warehouse burns behind us, orange and ferocious, sending sparks and black smoke against the sky—Mordain’s failsafe. Whoever came back here, they were never meant to leave with what they found.
My hands, when I reach for her, are shaking.
I turn her face toward me with two fingers at her jaw and read the damage, the bruising already darkening at her throat, the gash at her temple where the wall caught her, the way she’s holding her ribs on the left side with an effort so practiced she probably doesn’t know she’s doing it.
The journal is still in her jacket.
She got it out.
“You could’ve died.” The words come out without the careful structure I normally build around everything I allow myself to say. They land raw, stripped of everything except the thing they mean.
Cali looks up at me, while the fire throws gold and shadow across her face, but her eyes stay locked on mine, steady and unflinching.
There’s no guard in them this time, at least not much of one.
Just something raw enough to catch me off balance.
Something I’ve only ever seen in passing before, buried beneath the walls she keeps firmly wrapped around herself.
Her gaze moves across my face the same way she works a scene, picking through details, following evidence, looking for the truth hiding underneath the surface.
Whatever she finds makes something shift in her, and it is just enough to make my chest tighten. And the look she gives me after that is a hell of a lot more dangerous than a weapon.
“So could you,” she says.
The words land clean with no edge or accusation.
Just fact.
I should let it end there, but I don’t. My gaze stays on her, tracking the shift in her expression, the way something quieter settles where the fight used to be, something that doesn’t belong in a moment like this and yet refuses to leave.
Five centuries of control, and this is what unsettles it.
Not the fight.
Not the blood.
Her.
She watches me like she knows that.
And that’s the most unsettling thing of all.