Chapter 23 #2
He felt it in his own chest—a corresponding flutter, a matching weakness. As if his heart was slowing in sympathy with hers. As if the bond between them was real, not just superstitious nonsense, not just old words spoken in a glowing cavern.
For one of us to die, we both have to die.
He was dying with her.
And somehow, impossibly, that felt right.
No. He refused to go. He snarled into her throat as he sank his teeth deeper, and forced himself to live. If she died, he would live for both of them.
This would work.
It had to.
It had to.
Nadi’s eyes fluttered closed. The flow of blood from her neck was slowing. Her breathing stopped. Her heart gave one final, shuddering beat—
And then she was still.
Raziel lowered her gently to the marble floor before staggering backwards, his own body trembling with a weakness he’d never experienced before. His vision was graying at the edges. His limbs felt like they were made of lead.
He fell to his knees. He thought he might be sick. Or pass out.
Nadi was dead.
“There.” Lilivra’s voice washed over him like ice water, sharp and satisfied. “Was that so difficult? I knew you had it in you, grandson. I knew you could make the hard choices when the moment demanded it.”
She moved up to him, stepping over Nadi’s supine form with the casual indifference of someone avoiding a puddle. She reached down and cradled his cheeks in her hands. Her touch was warm. Warm like Nadi’s had been.
“Now,” she continued, smiling down at him with all the tenderness in the world, “we have much work to do. The transition of power must be handled carefully. There are factions that will resist, families that must be brought to heel, resources that must be—”
She stopped.
Behind her, there was a sound. Soft. Almost imperceptible.
The sound of someone getting to their feet.
Lilivra turned.
Nadi Iltani stood behind her, very much alive, with her own silver sword gripped in both hands and fire burning in her dark eyes.
And before Lilivra could move, before she could summon her ancient power or issue a command or do any of the thousand things that had kept her alive for millennium—
The silver blade sang through the air.
Lilivra’s head left her shoulders in a spray of blood that was darker than any vampire’s, older than anything Raziel had ever seen. It hung in the air for a frozen moment—that beautiful, terrible face still wearing an expression of absolute shock—before it began to fall.
Raziel caught it.
He didn’t know where he found the strength. His body was still trembling, still weak from the near-death the blood bond had pulled Nadi through. But he caught his grandmother’s severed head in both hands and turned toward the fireplace that dominated one wall of the ballroom.
Lilivra’s eyes were still moving. Still alive, somehow, in that decapitated head. Her mouth was forming words, but she had had no air to propel them.
“You should have stayed hidden,” he told her. “You should have let the world move on without you.”
And he threw the head into the flames.
The scream that erupted from the fireplace was unlike anything Raziel had ever heard. It wasn’t a sound—it was a force. It spoke of a millennium of accumulated rage and thwarted ambition and the absolute refusal to die.
The sound was ancient. Primal. It carried within it the echoes of every scheme Lilivra had ever crafted, every life she had ever manipulated, every dream she had ever crushed in pursuit of her vision.
It was the death cry of something that should never have existed in the first place—a creature that had lived so long it had forgotten what it meant to be mortal.
What it meant to be a vampire.
What it meant to be fae.
But die she did.
The ancient flesh caught fire immediately, burning with a strange silver-white flame that seemed to devour rather than simply consume.
Lilivra’s white hair turned to ash in seconds.
Her opal eyes—those terrible, knowing eyes that had watched civilizations rise and fall—burst and ran like liquid starlight.
Her perfect features melted and twisted and finally, finally, crumbled to nothing.
The flames consumed everything. The schemes she had woven for a millennium. The prophecies she had whispered into the ears of frightened children, turning them into weapons for her own use.
All of it—turning to ash.
The screaming stopped.
And then there was only silence.
* * *
Nadi’s legs gave out the moment she was certain Lilivra was truly dead.
She hit the marble floor hard, the silver sword clattering from her grip.
Every muscle in her body was screaming. Every nerve ending felt like it had been set on fire and then frozen solid.
The blood bond had dragged her to the very edge of death and then yanked her back, and the whiplash was excruciating.
But she was alive.
Against all odds, against all reason, against the machinations of an ancient monster who had been pulling strings for longer than civilizations had existed—
She was alive.
“Nadi.” Raziel’s voice was hoarse, ragged, but he was there—collapsing to his knees beside her, gathering her into his arms with hands that trembled almost as badly as hers. “Nadi, Nadi, Nadi—”
He kept saying her name like it was a prayer.
Like it was the only word he knew anymore.
His arms were wrapped so tightly around her that she could barely breathe, but she didn’t care.
She clung to him with equal desperation, burying her face in his chest and breathing in the scent of him—blood and smoke and something underneath that was uniquely Raziel.
They had done it.
Moons help them, they had actually done it.
“I told you.” She managed a weak laugh that turned into a cough. “Fae magic. Not just superstition.”
“H—how?” he stammered uselessly.
“Maybe the tree wasn’t a bad omen, but a sacrifice. Maybe it was in our blood… you being a vampire. I… I don’t know.” She laughed again, astonished. “I’m not one of the elders.”
“You died.” His voice cracked on the word, and when she looked up at his face, she was shocked to see something glistening in his crimson eyes.
Raziel Nostrom—the Serpent, the monster, the creature who had laughed while families were slaughtered—was crying.
“I felt your heart stop. I felt you leave me—”
“Almost.” She reached up to touch his face, her fingers leaving smears of blood on his cheek. Whose blood, she couldn’t even tell anymore. There was so much of it. “I almost died.” Wincing, she groaned in pain. “Might still die.”
“I thought I’d lost you.” His forehead pressed against hers, his breath hot against her lips. “I thought—for that moment, when your heart stopped—I thought I’d finally lost the only thing in this world that mattered.”
“You can’t get rid of me that easily, vampire.” She smiled weakly. “Told you. You don’t get to die until I say so, and I meant it. You’re stuck with me now. Forever.”
He stared at her like she was something impossible.
Something miraculous. And then he was kissing her—desperately, frantically, with all the terror and relief and love that words could never express.
She kissed him back with equal fervor, tasting blood and ash and something that might have been tears.
When they finally broke apart, both gasping for air, Nadi became aware of the silence around them.
They were no longer alone. Vampires were staring at them with expressions of pure shock.
Others had flooded into the room. They seemed not to know what to do—yet violence didn’t seem to be on the list, since none of them were attacking.
The bodies of Mael and Lana, and the headless corpse of Lilivra, still lay where they’d fallen, their blood pooling and mingling on the expensive marble.
The fire in the hearth had died down to normal flames, as if the strange silver-white burning had never happened.
And from somewhere outside, Nadi could hear the distant sounds of fighting—the remaining Rosov forces and whatever was left of the fae resistance, still caught up in a battle that no longer had any purpose.
The Nostrom dynasty was finished.
All that remained was Raziel. The last Nostrom standing. The Serpent who had devoured his own family.