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Sion’s eyes pierced the shadows. “If I hadn’t stopped you, you’d have been here all night, reveling in his death until you were caught in the morning.”

“No, I wouldn’t.” My fingers twitched, and all I could think about was touching more skin, listening to the final death rattles. I curled my fingers, trying to push those images out of my mind.

“Are you wondering,” Sion whispered, “why you never feel so alive as you do when you are killing?”

That wasexactlyhow I felt. “No.”

The look he gave me told me he knew I was lying. “Now, let’s get the fuck out of here before we end up in one of their dungeons. Your glamour has faded completely, and while I much prefer this version of you, it will get you killed here. Whenwe step out of this door, I will try to take you on a route that avoids soldiers as much as possible. But we have to get past the two new guards first without causing alarm. You take one, I’ll take the other. Let’s get it done quickly and silently. We need absolute stealth in order to escape this castle unnoticed. And if we take too long, or if one of us stumbles, the shouts will alert all the soldiers in the castle. If any problems arise, I’ll cloak everything in shadow, and then I’ll find you.”

I nodded at him.

And the moment Sion opened the door, I lunged for one of the guards. This time, it wasn’t a brush of my fingertips. I simply smacked the guard across the face before he had a chance to draw his weapon. Immediately, he started convulsing, then dropped to the ground. My fingers twitched, hungry for more death. I hoped a whole legion of soldiers would try to take me on. I’d fell them all, one by one, like cutting the heads off lilies, their dying stems bowing to the voracious earth…

I could devour lives like a blight spreading across the kingdom, like the evening shadows crawling over the earth to consume the day with darkness…

I turned to see Sion wiping the back of his hand across his mouth. Something about the blood drops on his fangs made me snap back to reality.

Sion grabbed me by the arm, pulling me along. He led us in a quiet sprint through narrow, empty castle halls. We ran, twisting and turning through slim corridors full of cobwebs and the scent of must, in a route that might not have been used in centuries. He really did know the place like the back of his hand, and we careened through the halls at a shocking speed. But I was running out of breath, my lungs burning. I started to get dizzy, rasping for air. I was in great shape for a human. But compared to a vampire? I could not bloody keep up.

“Sion,” I gasped.

He whirled, and in the next moment, I found myself pressed up against the wall with his hand covering my mouth, his large body pressed firmly against mine. His golden eyes darkened, and he frowned as he listened to something I couldn’t hear with my human ears. With a cautionary eyebrow, he pulled his hand from my mouth and lifted a finger to his lips.

My pulse raced.

We’d been caught, hadn’t we? And by then, our glamour had all but disappeared.

CHAPTER 16

That’s when I heard it, too—the guards’ shouts echoing through the halls. They’d clearly discovered two of the six corpses we’d left behind, and they were sealing off the exits. Sion arched an eyebrow and whispered, “Are you ready to kill some more people?”

“Always.”

We crept closer to a wooden door. Sion glanced back at me, his eyes burning gold. “We’re almost to the way out,” he said. “We just need to get through these guards. I’ll go first and take down as many as I can. You handle the rest with your touch.”

Still catching my breath, I nodded. The shouts grew louder, and my heart raced. Sion drew his sword, and with that, the air around us grew cold, darkening. Shadows crept over the stones, the guards’ cries intensifying in the dark. Night billowed around us as Sion wielded his shadow magic. The torches snuffed out, plunging us into a starless, moonless night.

“Stay close to me,” he whispered.

Unable to see anything, I reached out and touched his back. “Sion,” I whispered, “if you want me to help you kill people, I’m going to need to see a little bit.”

And gods, I really wanted to kill more people.

Some of the shadows receded, revealing his form and the faint outline of his sword. “If you were a vampire,” he said, “we wouldn't need to worry about you not being able to see in the dark.”

“Let’s just get out of here,” I snapped.

He pulled open the door and lunged. In the faint light, I saw his blade swoop. The scent of blood filled the air as screams rang out, echoing off the stone arches. Confusion erupted in the hall.

Maybe Sion could tell who was whom, but the soldiers were pressed so thickly around him, I had no idea of what was going on. I stepped into the hall, crouching low, brushing my fingertips across as many hands as I could.

Internally, I felt the unrestrained joy of a destructive child dancing through a garden, ripping the heads off flowers, trampling the petals into the earth.

Destroy…

A wild thrill coursed through me.

Bodies fell around us, and my thoughts danced with visions of crumbling bones, of blood flowing like claret from a king’s fountain.