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If my biological father wasn’t standing right next to him and my weirdo pureblood freak uncle wasn’t stomping down the hall to make sure I’m dead, I’d want to jump Roman’s bones over it.

“You guys think you might want to grab a weapon?” I whisper as I grab the vial of powdered silver off of the instrument tray. A scalpel stained with dried blood sits beside it, and I take that too. Quickly, I run to the corner of the room to hide behind the door.

“I have been waiting centuries for this, dóttir. I will taste his blood before he can draw his own weapon. Those who betray their family do not deserve Valholl.”

When the door bursts open a second later, all hell breaks loose.

40

ROMAN

The door slams open,and a half-dozen vampires spill into the room. I don’t know how old they are, but it’s clear that they’re highly trained soldiers as five of them go for Agnarr.

The sixth comes to me—slowly, as she sizes me up. I put a metal autopsy table between us as I back toward the counter lining one wall, wishing I’d listened to Gwyn.

None of them notice her behind the door, and I hope it stays that way as long as possible. She’s still weak.

Agnarr seems to be holding his own, but I’m not someone to underestimate either. And that’s exactly what they did. I’m a rarity, being a born vampire—or hybrid, I suppose—and I’ll make them regret only sending one of their soldiers after me. The dark-haired vampire has moved slowly, approaching with a careful, measured gait, until she suddenly throws the autopsy table out of the way. It slams into the horrifying refrigerated cabinets that I’d torn apart to get to Gwyn. They’re all open slightly, haphazard, from the rush I’d been in.

I catch sight of Gwyn for a moment, and it looks like she’s about to help Agnarr when the autopsy table crashes into the door, making her rethink it. Good.

The vampire rushes me, and I shove her—hard. She slams into one of the vampires attacking Agnarr, and they both fall to the ground.

The bolts affixing the scale to the counter barely hinder me as I rip it free. The bowl clatters to the ground, and in the half-second it takes the dark-haired woman to look down as it spins on the tile, I’m throwing the entire piece of heavy equipment at her skull.

She falls back, vertebrae cracking as she slams down hard. For good measure, I pick up the scale once more and bash her fucking head in. Over and over again, I hit her, until there’s nothing but a bloody lump of flesh.

Then I throw it toward the vampires attacking Agnarr.

He’s got one pinned against the wall while another has his hands wrapped around Agnarr’s throat. He ignores it, like it’s nothing more than a nuisance. One of the soldiers is screaming, trying to reattach his severed leg, while another seems to be suffering from a broken back as he writhes on the floor in agony.

It’s pretty fucking telling that Ketill is staying out of the melee, essentially sacrificing his own people to his wildly powerful brother. Dispensable, I wonder if the vampire writhing on the ground was moved by loyalty or forced by command.

A large, freckled vampire with long hair runs at Agnarr, hand aloft with some medical instrument in his grasp. He stabs Agnarr in the arm in an attempt to free the vampire pinned against the wall. But Agnarr doesn’t care, only elbowing him in the face hard enough to knock him back into me. I shove him, kicking the fucker in the middle of his back as hard as I can.

When Agnarr grabs at the thing in his arm, hand gripping the bulbous end as he tries to tear it free, he draws his blood into the long tube by accident. And then he laughs.

When he rips it from his arm, I know what he plans to do.

The vampire pinned against the wall clamps his mouth shut, but Agnarr grips him by the jaw and forcefully rips it open. He shoves the long tube past clenched teeth, breaking a few on the way. He releases the bulb, and blood pours into the soldier’s mouth.

Covering the vampire’s mouth and nose, Agnarr forces him to drink the blood and swear an oath he didn’t agree to.

I wrench the severed leg out of the screaming vampire’s grasp and begin to beat him with it. Rigor mortis hasn’t set in yet, so I discard the floppy leg pretty quickly. It’s absolutely insane that I even considered it as a weapon, but the tiny autopsy instruments won’t do much damage. Soon, Agnarr’s newest bloodsworn approaches, stiffly picking up the severed limb. I leave him to it as he tries to shove the leg into its owner's mouth, boot first.

Just as I turn to help Agnarr with the remaining three soldiers, the maimed body of the woman I beat to death manages to stand. She moves with stiff, ambling steps like a gruesome caricature of a zombie. It’s fucking disgusting, and I swallow down the urge to retch. Falling from her crushed head, skull and flesh and blood and brain matter splatter against the ground with sick, wet sounds as she moves, and all the fucking lights go out like some sort of horror movie.

The faint glow of the refrigerator’s LED panel illuminates the room just enough for me to see, casting the scene of horrors in shades of green. Even through the overwhelming stench of vampire blood, I catch Gwyn’s apple scent. It calls out to me now, above the sterile stink of the morgue, above the blood and the sweat, and I’m worried for a second that she’s been hurt—but then I see a trampled blood bag on the fucking floor. Someone grabs my neck, trying to drag me down to the ground, but I resist just long enough to see the shadows of her feet beneath that open door. Thank fuck she’s still safe.

But something clatters to the ground with a metallic clang, and a sea of vampires floods into the room, followed by a tall, slim figure I’m sure is Ketill. I think we might be fucked. He stops just inside the door, unmoving, blocking the entry. Blocking Gwyn from getting out if she hasn’t already.

In the dark, I see the blinking light of a power supply that somehow got knocked to the ground. I follow the length of the cord, hoping to find something that can do some major fucking damage before we get overwhelmed.

Because now, we’re outnumbered ten to one at least, and if Ketill thinks he’s going to kill us and keep Gwyn as some hybrid blood bank, I’m not going to make it easy.

Smiling, I reach the end of the cord. There’s a large yellow button at the base of a bone saw, and I press it, just as I shove the headless woman toward the oncoming tide of soldiers.

I let it hang, grabbing onto the power cord instead.