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Hector

T error sweetens the blood, Father told me once. It calls upon the darkness and all its creatures to devour you. The only way you can fight the darkness is by not being afraid of it.

I tried to be strong like him. I tried not to let fear creep into my heart, not to let the air turn thick with the scent of my despair. But I failed. Disastrously so. I was now made of nothing but terror. I was torn and shaken to the very racking of my soul .

The whole Castle seemed to tremble alongside me, its darkened rooms taking on a new horror edge. Even the moonbeams quivered as they broke off the windowsill and stretched over Thea’s crouched form. She had emptied the contents of her stomach twice already, and with a prick at the tip of her finger, I had injected her with enough venom to extinguish whatever poison floated in her system. Still, the dry heaves persisted, and all I could do now was hold back her hair, murmuring soothing words in her ear as if this could change the fact that she got hurt tonight. She got hurt because I’d allowed it. Because I kept her close when I should have sent her away. Because I listened to desire when I should have listened to reason.

My selfishness sickened me, but even self-reproach was a mere wave compared to the ocean of my rage. Rage, I used to think, was a weakness. The dignity of composure was all the strength a man needed to possess. But it came at me now, blood-red and vengeful, and for her alone I would be weak.

“Hector,” Thea panted, slumping on the marble floor, her skirt rising like a twilight cloud around her midriff. “Will you please stop your growling? I’m fine.”

She didn’t look fine. Her skin was drained of color, and her lips were cracked like unwatered soil. In a panic, I got to my knees next to her and swept her cold hands in mine. “How do you feel?”

“Dehydrated,” she croaked.

Upon a silver tray, a glass of water and a cup of herbal tea materialized next to her. She drank every drop of the water, gasped with relief, and cast me another weary glance. “ Breathe , Hector,” she commanded, her voice as hoarse as my insides felt. “I won’t die.”

The mere notion of death in relation to her was a pang in my sternum. It took more strength than I knew I had in me to cling to my fragile composure as I offered her the brew. “Just drink.”

She slipped her palm over the cup, gently pushing it down along with my hand. “I won’t die,” she repeated, more firmly this time. “I saw it.”

My whole body clutched in dread. “What did you see?”

As she turned her face to the side, the small bathroom window painted her profile in a white, ghostly light. I felt like she could vanish any moment now. “I can’t tell you,” she whispered.

“Thea—”

Her head whipped around, black ringlets tumbling over her onyx eyes. “If I tell you, you might do something to prevent it, and you can’t. You mustn’t.”

I looked at her more severely than she could ever deserve. “Do not talk to me about destiny right now.”

Her lips pressed into a thin, stubborn line. I knew that line. I knew it all too well. “It can’t be helped.”

“Yes, it can,” I gritted out, reaching for her shoulders. She tried to slip away, but I hauled her back with an arm around her waist. When she turned her face away, I cupped her jaw and forced her to look at me. “Listen to me. Listen . There is no destiny. Destiny is just another word for life and what you make of it. You have power. Your life is your own, and you decide what happens in it—”

“Hector,” Arawn’s grim voice sounded behind me.

I whirled, hardly able to keep myself from snarling at him. “What was it?”

“Nightshade,” he said, strained with guilt. “I swear it tasted just like any other tea to me.” His gaze darted over my shoulder to Thea, his face looking just as clammy and pale as hers. “It must have been a very small dose. Whoever did this didn’t want to kill you.”

Of course they didn’t want to kill her. Killing her meant coming before the King of Lumia. It meant facing trial, facing execution. What they did want to do was scare me. Unravel me. Provoke me. Prove me incapable of holding the balance between our two worlds.

They used to be terrified of my mother’s rage. They used to lower their eyes and bow at the waist in her presence. But I was no Esperida Aventine, and Espen thought I would be so much easier to handle, to manipulate. This was why he wanted to marry me to his precious daughter. So he could have access to the Castle. So he could have power over the man who controlled it.

How blind, how naive, how lethally wrong I’d been to think that the vampires’ fear of change was greater than their thirst for power. But it was clear now. They hadn’t come to the Castle to appoint me sovereign. They had come to terrorize me out of it.

Arawn’s face hardened as if he’d just realized the exact same thing. “Go,” he said grimly. “I gathered them all in the drawing room. I only let the twins stay in their bedroom. I don’t think this is a conversation you can have in front of children.”

I turned to find Thea leaning against the porcelain sink, and at the sight of her sunken eyes and ashen cheeks, my muscles locked in place, refusing to take me from her side.

“I’m fine,” she reassured me.

Arawn seized my arm and nudged me past the door. “I’ll help her clean up,” he promised, then pressed closer, lowering his voice to a nearly inaudible snarl, “Just find out who did this and make them pay.”

“Hector, wait!” Thea gasped, lurching forward. “I just remembered. Camilla had a flask secured around her thigh. Could it be…”

I heard nothing after that. Inside me, something seethed; something dark and vengeful clawed at the prison of my ribcage. How lovely vengeance was, a beautiful void. Stronger than grief. Fiercer than sorrow. It made my bones smolder, my heart spit fire. And all of my devotion turned violent.

My sword found me a second before I burst into the drawing room. The lamplights exploded, and the eruption of startled gasps and shattered glass veiled the swift ringing of the blade as it cut through the air.

The Castle shoved Camilla back with a brutal gust, and her back hit the wall just as the sword wielded itself against her throat. Her face contorted, burning with a rage no tamer than my own. “What is the meaning of this?” she hissed when my fist found the hilt of the blade.

I kept it still. I pressed it down upon her. “Where is the flask?”

“Hector,” Espen warned, lunging for me only to come crashing into an invisible wall.

Blood started trickling down Camilla’s slender throat, the blade wedging itself into her flesh. My fangs itched from the desire to dig into her, empty her of substance just as the poison had done to Thea. “I will not ask again.”

“Enough!” growled Espen behind me, filling the room with the violent thrashing of his body as he drove it over and over against the Castle’s magic. “That’s enough!”

“ I say when it’s enough!” I thundered.

Camilla bristled, cutting her palms on the blade as she tried to push it back from her throat. The tendons stood out on her neck. Her lips curled over her fangs in half rage, half torment. The very hinges of her jaw loosened, viscous drops of venom trickling from the needle-thin tips of her fangs.

I did not falter. I did not think a single thought of mercy.

Her words were labored, hissing like water on hot stone, “Look at you turning on your own kind the second things get tough. How long did your conflict last? How long did it take for you to go against the people you’re supposed to protect? And for what? A girl you don’t even fuck? You’re insane if you think we’ll make you sovereign after this.”

“Give me the flask!” I roared, my mind too seized in fury to pay attention to her meaningless threats. My pulse struck in my veins. Who is she to speak of loyalty to me? What does she know of devotion so strong it could please the greediest of gods?

When she realized it would take the strength of a million demons to overpower me here, inside the Castle, where my bones and blood were soaked in its starstruck magic, Camilla stopped resisting and reached for the holster around her thigh, smearing her sea-foam skin with the blood from her palms.

There was a crowd roar buzzing in my ears. My fingers were shaking with a rage unknown to my body as I swiped the silver vial from her hand. Without hesitation I raised it to my lips. The taste was overwhelming. Salt and iron, tinged with the darkness of our curse. Vampire blood.

I tossed it away and whirled around. The sword in my hand rasped as it grazed the floor. “Who was it, then?” I snarled, resisting the terrible, catastrophic urge to let the blade take all of their heads with one single swipe. “Which one of you bastards poisoned my wife?”

No one answered. No one moved. No one even breathed.

But the Castle did.

In an uproar of motion, all the windows around the room boarded up, vaulting the moonlight away and trapping them in cold, enduring darkness.

Under the single stitch of light leaking through the busted doors, their shadows turned manic. Alexandria rushed to Lance’s arms. Dahlia recoiled in a corner. Roan slipped in front of Tieran to shield him from me while Collette reeled forward, dashing in full speed to grab Espen by the arm.

Frightened. They were all frightened and astonished, and I reveled in it.

“You will not lock us in here,” warned Collette in her raging snowstorm voice.

“Or what?” I spat, turning to Roan with a deranged smile. He stared back at me with blatant bewilderment, as if he could not comprehend how any of this had happened. “Your son has already pledged his loyalty to me.”

“ He did,” Espen sputtered, his dark eyes narrowing into two blazing slits. “But the rest of us will fight you, Hector. And you will not win.”

The sword at my side made a rapid, whirring sound. It thirsted for their blood as much as I did. “You have a lot of audacity to come into my house, harm my wife, and then think you’ll survive me, Espen.”

“He’s right, Father,” Roan intervened, his voice steady, reasonable. “What happened today, here of all places, is unforgivable.”

Espen bared his fangs at me. “Yes, but we have laws.”

“I am the law! You are in Aventine Castle! I am the law! ” My voice reverberated through the hollow of their silence. They all looked at me, frozen as statues, disbelief in their glowing eyes. They had not believed my love deep enough for this. Of course they hadn’t. Worship was a human thing.

“You have until dusk to come forward,” I declared, storming toward the entrance. “If you fail to do so, the blame will befall you all.” I paused but didn’t turn to see the rise of terror in their eyes. Still, I smelled it in their blood, and I was glad for it. Now you know how it feels.

“No need to fret,” I said venomously. “I will be merciful. Death, after all, always is.”