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Chapter Thirty-Three

BLAKE

T he moment the car stops, I’m moving.

I don’t wait for doors to open, for warnings or orders or plans. I’m out of the back seat before Ambrose has fully put the car in park, shoving through the crowd gathered in front of the entrance.

It’s raining. I hadn’t noticed in the car. The sky has cracked open, pouring silver on the street, soaking clothes and skin and ash-dark pavement in a veil of grit and wet. It’s like the first night all over again, except this time the danger is worse. Ten times worse.

I shove my way through the crowd, not caring who I have to shove by to make it to the front. If I have to put my elbow into the gut of the damn president, I will without hesitation. I barrel through the front doors, vaguely noting Ashe stepping aside for me. Perry and Carla are there, the latter looking wide eyed as she stares at Ashe and then me. I don’t care, though, and stagger toward the stage I learned to command, into a home I never expected to have.

Then I swear I hear my daughter scream.

My legs give out beneath me for one terrible half second.

Then I’m running.

Inside, the scent hits me first. Blood. Not the sterile smear of cut fingers or the thin trickle of scraped knees, but something deeper. Hot iron, wet velvet. Animal. It slams into me like a fist to my lungs, thick enough I nearly stumble again as my body reacts on instinct—an ancient response passed down through generations.

Not hers. Please, not hers.

The stage is carnage. The Place—my beautiful, renovated, glitter-lit Place—is shattered beneath towering shadows and falling debris. Tables overturned, cloth ripped like entrails across ruined floors, velvet curtains in tatters, spotlights shattered. It looks like something clawed through the air just to taste grief.

Sounds break through the hum of horror next. A roar that isn’t human, low and guttural, echoed by a frenzied snarl so close to a scream it might as well be one. Something crashes through a table a few feet ahead of me, wood splintering like bone. I flinch back, heart pounding hard and wild, and my vision narrows to a single, monstrous shape barreling across the wreckage.

Oh, gods.

Kit.

The wolf shifter snapping and lunging in the center of the destroyed space is monstrous, soaked in blood and snarling with pure, deliberate hate. His fur is patchy, matted in places with gore. His eyes are sun-yellow and wrong—blown wide with madness, fixed with rabid focus as his massive frame lunges again toward Malachi.

Malachi is there, meeting him blow for blow. Again, I think about how this is everything and nothing like the first night Malachi fought for me. This is Malachi as he really is. A vampire, a monster snarling, his fangs and face streaked in bright crimson. Annihilation given flesh.

And he is my monster.

They crash together in a blur of motion too fast for my eyes to track. One moment, Kit’s claws rake across Mal’s chest, tearing through the black fabric of his shirt and the skin beneath. The next, Malachi’s hands—no, claws, I realize with a jolt—are buried in the wolf’s scruff, yanking him sideways with impossible strength before throwing him through a half-moon booth and table.

Screams echo somewhere behind me—in the wings, in the VIP boxes, I don’t know. Eloise shouts my name, but I can’t look away. The world is narrowed to this carnage before me, knowing that if Malachi falls, so will I. So will my daughter.

“Charlie,” I whisper, breaking enough of the fascination to search for her among the wreckage. Oh god, what if she’s buried under one of the piles of destruction?

The scream that carries my name threads through the chaos again. Eloise. Distant and fraying at the edges. But it sounds too far behind me to matter, like a door I’ve already slammed shut.

My eyes sweep the wreckage. Smoke from busted wiring curls into the ceiling in slow gray ghosts. A tablecloth flutters like a wounded flag. The spotlight above the stage flickers once. Then again. Then dies.

But I don’t see her.

My heart is a live wire sparking in my chest. The air turns viscous, sticky with the silence between impacts. My heart beating with terror to the rhythm of the fight.

Then: movement. Not a lunge, not a blow—something slower, steadier.

A figure flashes through the wings, cutting clean through the edge of light. I almost miss him. But then his form materializes out of the shadows at my side. Cradled tight against his chest is Charlie.

She’s here.

She’s alive.

My knees lock, then buckle.

He’s already crouching as I fall toward them, flinging my arms toward the precious center of my existence. Charlie throws her arms around my neck the second I’m within reach, her fingers digging into my shirt as we crumple together on the floor. Kasar’s physical support is the only reason we land with any semblance of order.

I sob, not with theatrical wailing, but the quiet, gut-deep kind of cry that makes your whole body shake. Charlie buries her face in my neck and clutches me tighter, her breath hot and staccato against my skin. I rock us gently in place like I did when she was little and sleep didn’t come easy, when the world outside our apartment was too loud, too unsafe.

It still is. But now I have her back in my arms.

“Are you hurt?” I manage, brushing the hair back from her damp forehead, searching for bruises, cuts, signs of anything I can’t see. My fingers tremble along the curve of her jaw. Her face is pale, but her gaze is bright and steady beneath the fear. No blood. No broken skin. A little smudge high on her cheek. She shakes her head, the smallest, sharpest movement, and when I look at Kasar, his usual expression of cold indifference is softer.

“She’s okay,” Kasar says, the words barely loud enough to hear over the snarls. Charlie starts to look toward the scene, but he stops her with a careful but firm touch. “We should get you both out of here.”

“Take her,” I demand, guiding Charlie back into the stoic vampire’s arms. “I can’t leave him with Kit. I have to make sure he’s okay.”

Kasar smiles; well, it’s more of a smirk, but still I’ve never seen him smile before. “Malachi is fine.” Kasar rises, Charlie in his arms again. “He’s dragging this out because he’s pissed at Kit. The mutt doesn’t even realize he’s already dead.”

I look toward the pair, battling each other with such savagery I can’t understand how Kasar isn’t worried. The light brush of a breeze over my skin tells me Kasar has left like I’d asked.

Kit swipes at Malachi, who leans backward enough that his claws only scrape across his chest.

“Mal,” I breathe, fear returning to lodge in my throat. I swear I see him look over at me for a fraction of a heartbeat, across the wreckage of the restaurant and through the darkness. I swear our eyes meet in the blink of time.

Then Malachi is focused on the irate beast in front of him, attacking with a new ferocity. I understand what Kasar meant now.

It stops being a fight, then. It becomes a brutal, clawed, bloody inevitability. No mercy, no quarter. Only finality. Only death.

Malachi sidesteps a lurching bite, his expression cold and precise. Not indifferent. Not cruel. Just still. Like this is a dance he’s done countless times.

Kit lunges again, and Malachi doesn’t flinch. He doesn’t block either. He absorbs the hit—shoulder cracking backward with the force, a claw carving across his ribs. He lets it happen only to slam his full weight forward in the next breath. Those nails, sharpened into claws, anchor into the shifter’s thick, matted hide. His hands find purchase like a butcher setting his grip.

Then Malachi wrenches. Pulls.

The sound that comes from Kit isn’t a cry. It’s a rupture, something internal bleeding into the air. Tendons slide against bone. The ripping snap of ligaments fills the silence between heartbeats.

Kit lands on the floor of the stage, wet and gasping, one leg back-folded in a way that should never happen. His massive wolf form shudders—a panting, broken thing now, muscles twitching with ragged panic. He tries to move, but all he manages to do is jerk, sending more foaming blood from the jagged opening in his neck.

Malachi doesn’t move right away. He stands in the center of the wreckage, chest heaving. His shirt is in tatters and dark with blood. It sticks to him in strips, clinging wetly to his ribs and arms, torn like offerings left at an altar. Every muscle in his body is tense, carved marble gone living, taut with the effort of restraint—restraint that I can feel tremble as he looks down at the collapsed, twitching shape of the wolf gasping at his feet.

That’s when I see it. The look in Malachi’s eyes.

They glow. Not golden, not amber. But burning red.

Rage and power, coiling in his gaze like comet trails, ancient and terrible and blinding. Like gods moving across the battlefield of old, carving judgment from ruin.

He leaps up on the stage beside Kit, face twisted in rage, fangs extended. “She is mine.” Then he grips the sides of the wolf’s head and wrenches, decapitating him completely.

I can’t breathe. I can’t think. Everything is frozen in time, except for Malachi, who is rising once more and letting Kit’s canine head tumble from his hands. When it lands with a wet, hollow thud, I flinch like it was a gunshot.

And then Malachi looks at me.

His fangs are still exposed. His eyes, that impossible shade of blood rage, pin me to the broken floor between us like I’m the stake that kept him leashed.

He’s all violence and ruin and devotion, standing at the center of a battlefield made of rhinestones and velvet and smoke. His tattooed chest is torn open above ribs that keep rising, keep falling, and I can’t move. I can’t move because if I do, I might fall apart.

I’ve seen fury in a man’s face before.

I’ve never seen a man look at me with murder fresh on his hands and love in his gaze.

It’s not soft. Not the romance-novel swell of violins and velvet roses. This isn’t love built from fairy tales—it’s baptized in blood and bone, in the protective howl of something ancient clawing its way up through his chest.

It’s the kind of love that promises to raze cities for you.

The kind that kills.

Malachi drops to one knee like the fury inside him has burned its way out. His bloody hand scrapes against the wrecked floor as he breathes hard, chest rising and falling in staccato bursts, his head bowed for a long, quiet second. His hair is soaked, dark strands clinging to his temples, and blood drips in slow threads from his collarbone to the floor. He looks like something carved out of wrath turned marble, and still, he kneels like a man who has lost everything.

The silence after the storm is deafening.

I cross to him, unsure how my legs still work, how they haven’t folded under the weight of what just happened, of what I just saw. His fingers twitch against the ruined stage, and when I drop to my knees in front of him, he reaches for me, blindly, like he’s chasing the tether of us in the dark. His bloodstained hand lands on my hip, anchors there as though that touch alone can remind him that he’s still alive, that I still am too.

“Blake,” he rasps. The sound is raw—like something dragged through fire. Not just the scrape of exhaustion or anger. There’s something else. A question dressed up as a warning. A plea.

I bring both hands to his face. His jaw is rigid beneath my palms, his fangs still sharp against his lip. His skin is hot to the touch under the blood, searing and alive in a way that makes my breath vanish. I tilt his face up toward mine, gently, so he doesn’t have to carry anything—not even the weight of his own shame, if this is what he thinks this is.

The red is gone, replaced by exhausted gold. His pupils pull back down to something almost human, the flood receding behind the dam again—for now. But it’s still there, I can feel it. The quiet pulse of his rage and love wrapped together inside him like some steel-forged chain. I don’t flinch. I don’t draw back.

He took a life to reclaim mine. Charlie’s too. Ours.

“Charlie?” he whispers. Tears burst into my eyes.

I lean my forehead against his. The smell of iron clings to him, but I don’t care. “She’s safe.” My own voice is scraped raw. “We’re both safe thanks to you.”