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W atching Evie sleep should bring me peace, but guilt pressed against my ribs like a cold iron cage.

All because of a fucking bastard named Malachi Draven.

Somehow, in only two days, he’d won Evie over and yet I was the asshole because I refused to go save him. I snorted. Had to love how that fucking worked out.

I was making the right choice, leaving him right where he was.

The logical one.

Malachi had done terrible things. Things no one should be forgiven for. He made his choices, carved his path in blood and betrayal, and now he was reaping what he sowed. If anything, his fate was inevitable. If I had any regrets…I wasn’t the one to kill him.

But logic didn’t quiet the gnawing voice planting seed after seed of doubt in my heart. The one that reminded me I owed him everything .

That without Malachi, Evangeline would be Ravok’s prisoner or worse, dead. That as much as I despised him for his multitude of sins, as much as I want to believe the world was better off without him, I couldn’t deny the simple truth.

He saved my mate.

And that was a debt I could never repay.

I paced the length of her bedroom, hands clenched at my sides.

Sylvester put her under before he even started, and she’d sleep until morning, her broken body so severely damaged, the healer had nearly drained himself fixing her. A wave of volatile fury rose again, cresting until the edges of my vision darkened.

How I wished we could move on.

Let both Malachi and Ravok rot away beneath the weight of their combined evil.

But that look on Evangeline’s face when I told her no—a mix of betrayal and disappointment—cut deeper than any blade. I’d explained, in detail, we didn’t have the manpower for a rescue mission, that we couldn’t afford to risk everything for a traitor, and all of that was true.

Rohr was right. That bastard didn’t have a noble bone in his body…

Except Malachi did sacrifice himself. For Evie . And no matter how much I tried to ignore that fact, that choice meant everything.

I dropped onto the edge of the bed, stroking her face, adjusting the blankets, checking her temperature.

Since she’d plummeted from the sky, I hadn’t been able to stop touching her. Tracing the marks of her suffering as if I—not Sylvester’s expert healing—could take away her pain.

All I wanted to do, all I’d ever wanted, was to keep Evie safe. I never wanted her to feel a moment of suffering or hurt or torment. I wanted to encase her in a cocoon, protected from the world, untouched by anything that might hurt her.

But now, seeing her…I had failed miserably.

And I would always fail.

She was meant to fight her own battles, hard wired to face threats head on, and keeping her locked away would only make her hate me. Resentment was a powerful poison, something I knew quite a lot about.

Riordan was right.

I had to get my fucking head on straight, because even now—especially now—I fought the urge to lock her door and hide her from a world that seemed vested in her suffering. I tipped my head back and closed my eyes and repeated the same mantra I’d been chanting for hours now.

She is home. She is safe. She is mine.

She was cool, no sign of fever, a blessing after all the internal damage. According to Sylvester, most of her injuries predated her dematerializing, so Malachi had been right to get her out of there, even if the trip had almost killed her.

I dragged my hands down my face, exhaustion seeping into my muscles.

I needed to let go of these doubts.

Malachi had made his bed and was getting what he deserved.

Fuck, he’d locked his own Maker in an iron box and starved him for over a thousand years. That kind of depravity was unheard of, even among our kind. The sheer callousness required to keep a vampire hovering between life and death for that long, feeding them a single drop of blood a year, was staggering.

I had seen a lot of evil shit in my life, but I’d never even heard of something so blatantly soulless and cruel. I knew Malachi was a heartless bastard, but this…I tucked the blankets tighter around my mate.

Our lives would be better without him.

Evangeline’s life would be better. He’d spent these past months haunting her steps, and this was our chance to finally be free of him. As a mated male, I needed him gone from our lives or dead, and right now, I hardly cared which.

And just like that…the rage I’d kept tamped down boiled over.

Evie had smelled like Malachi when I’d found her. His scent was all over her…on her lips, her body, and beneath the blood and adrenaline and sour stench of pain…the scent of shared arousal.

And release .

I leaned forward, elbows resting on my knees.

We were supposed to have a bright future.

The one we deserved, after surviving hell.

We were supposed to be happy, goddamn it, but our happiness was unraveling by the moment, and jealousy was an ever-present specter on my shoulder, reminding me I would always be sharing my mate with another. With Riordan, acceptance had come gradually, but made perfect sense.

There would be no acceptance with Malachi Draven.

The truth was, Malachi dying solved all our problems, and I didn’t even have to lift a finger. No blood on my hands, or Riordan’s. This was simply letting nature take its course.

Circle of life shit.

And Malachi certainly deserved to die. But since when had anyone ever gotten what they deserved in this fucked up world?

No, if people got what they deserved, Evangeline would be happy and pampered and safe.

I would be beside her in this very bed, my arms around my mate, her name on my tongue as I planted my seed deep inside her womb. We would have a home. A family. A fucking life.

Not another war.

And Malachi…he would suffer for his own bad choices. But I didn’t believe that people got what they deserved. Because at the end of the day, it wasn’t about what people deserve—it was about what was right.

And no matter how much I wanted to believe otherwise, leaving Malachi to rot in Ravok’s grasp wasn’t right. My heart told me that, as I was sure Evangeline would tell me another hundred times when she woke up.

I groaned, dropping my head into my hands. If we went after Draven, we were risking everything to rescue the bastard who tried to take it all away.

The fucking irony was too much.

“Blake,” Evie whispered, her hand reaching for me, even in her sleep. The moment her fingers found my hand, I wrapped them up, kissing her bruised, healing knuckles, a surge of protectiveness washing over me, chasing away the exhaustion.

I settled beside her on the bed, awake, alert, on guard.

Running my fingers through her tangled hair, smelling of unfamiliar shampoo—a fact I tried hard to ignore, yet couldn’t—I knew one thing for certain.

If I left Malachi Draven to his own fate—the fate he’d made for himself, a thousand times over—my mate would never forgive me.

And maybe, deep down, I’d never forgive myself either.