Chapter 11 Malek
MALEK
The safehouse waits at the very edge of the Alps, buried in stone and shadow where even satellites cannot find it. I only come here when I need to remember, which is not often, because remembering is a dangerous game.
Tonight, though, I drive the narrow mountain roads with the windows down, the icy air biting my skin like punishment, and I tell myself it’s not a memory I’m chasing. It’s control.
The building is older than most of the cities that surround it, a black structure cut into the rock face, hidden behind a thicket of pines.
From the road it looks like nothing—an abandoned hunting lodge left to rot—but the reinforced steel doors at the back tell a different story.
The lock recognizes me at once, palm pressed against the panel, and the bolts groan open.
Inside, the air is colder still, the silence thicker.
The room opens into a cavern lined with stone walls that have stood longer than nations.
Shelves run the length of it, stacked with relics, weapons, scrolls sealed in wax, maps traced in ink that has faded to brown.
The Crimson Pact might be broken, but its remnants live here, fragments of the oath we once swore, fragments of the lives we destroyed to keep it alive.
I shrug out of my coat and move through the space, trailing my fingers along the spine of a ledger written in Latin, the script familiar though it’s been centuries since I last studied it.
The maps spread across the far table still mark territories long abandoned, lines drawn to show which of us guarded which borders, where the Syndicate could not tread, where we promised the world would stay safe from the truth of what we were.
I stop at the center, where a glass case holds what’s left of the seal itself. Crimson once, now dark as dried blood, cracked down the middle. I remember the night it shattered.
Rafe had been laughing even as he bled, his wild grin splitting his face as he swung his blade into Roman’s shoulder.
Cassian hadn’t moved, his stillness like a monument, only his eyes following the betrayal as if he had known all along.
Darius had roared his fury, the ground itself answering when he called on it, but Roman had already broken us by then.
The seal split with the sound of a bone snapping, and I knew even before I saw it that nothing would ever bind us again.
I close my eyes and inhale the scent of the place. Dust, stone, old parchment, and under it the faint metallic tang of blood soaked into walls that remember everything.
My mind drifts where I don’t want it to. To her.
Jennifer Callahan, walking into the ballroom like she owned it, standing in my path like no one else ever has. Her voice sharp, her gaze sharper, her will the kind of steel that makes men like me notice.
She should be nothing to me. Just another opponent, another hunter who thinks the law can bind creatures like us.
But the lion inside me knows better. It recognized something before I did, and now I can’t unhear the echo of her words, can’t forget the scent that clung to the air after she walked away.
I know what it would mean to give in to that pull.
The Pact was created to prevent it. To keep us apart from them, to ensure we never blurred the line between their world and ours.
Darius was the one who said it first, but I agreed.
So did Cassian. Even Rafe, with all his chaos, understood.
To love them is to doom them. To tie ourselves to them is to burn the fragile wall that keeps the world from seeing what we are.
And yet I can’t stop thinking about what it would feel like to taste her skin.
I push away from the case, jaw clenched, and pour myself a drink from the decanter resting on the shelf. The whiskey burns going down, but it doesn’t quiet the images.
The silence is broken by the soft buzz of the encrypted terminal in the corner. I set the glass aside and cross the room, the screen flickering to life with a single message. Michaelis again, his words stripped of preamble.
Roman is consolidating. Syndicate forces moving through Marseilles, Palermo, and Algiers. Early signs of full mobilization.
Of course. Roman never was content with scraps. He has been circling the Syndicate for years, whispering in ears, buying loyalty, promising blood and power. Now he’s binding them, one by one, turning them into something that will move against me sooner than I’d planned.
The lion stirs, restless, eager for the fight. My hands tighten on the desk.
Something colder seeps in, not from the screen, but from deeper inside.
A voice.
Not heard, but felt.
Malek.
It cuts through bone and marrow, not in sound but in memory, a summons that pulls from the old oath, from the seal that no longer binds us but still echoes through what’s left. Darius. His call is sharp, heavy, threaded with command.
Come back. The war isn’t over.
I shut my eyes, jaw tightening. The call drags at me, pulling from the center of my chest, from the part of me that still remembers what it was to fight as one.
I see his face in my mind: brow furrowed, eyes lit with fire, the scowl that never lifted even in peace.
I hear Rafe’s laugh on the edges of it, Cassian’s silence waiting like judgment.
The lion presses forward, as if ready to answer the wolf and the bear.
I don’t let it.
I push the voice back, grind my teeth against it, and force my body still until the echo fades. My breathing is rough by the time it breaks, my chest aching as if something inside me has been torn out.
Not again.
That life is dead. I buried it centuries ago. The Pact is broken, and I will not bleed for it again.
I take the glass from the shelf and drink until it’s empty, then pour another.
The maps spread across the table blur under my gaze. Borders once marked by loyalty are meaningless now. Roman is consolidating. Darius is still calling. And Jennifer—Jennifer is digging in deeper every day.
I tell myself I don’t miss them. That I don’t miss firelight oaths, or blood spilled in trust, or the sound of brothers’ voices carrying through the night. I keep telling myself I don’t miss the way it felt to believe in something larger than myself.
I drain the glass and let it shatter against the stone wall.
I walk away from the terminal without answering.
And I remind myself, with every step, that the only war worth fighting now is the one I choose.