Page 53 of Wicked Believer

“Sir.” Dagon steps closer, undeterred as he lowers his voice and speaks directly into my ear. “Sir, there’s been a breach.”

My spine runs cold.

“Charlotte, she’s ... she’s gone, sir.”

I don’t ask what exactly the wordgonemeans. My mind is already too busy reeling, remembering.

The feel of her lying limp in my arms.

The sight of her no longer breathing.

The way my stomach felt as if it’d been dropped down into my feet, like I’d been disemboweled, at the sight of her standing there in limbo.

So close to Azrael’s arms, so close to being beyond my reach.

The glass in my hand shatters, the juices spilling over my skin.

The room goes instantly dark, all the light inside it being pulled and sucked inside me until nothing but a pitch-black void remains. Someone screams, a woman it seems, as the trading floor erupts in chaos, but I don’t stay long enough to gauge their reactions or to excuse myself from the room. I’m gone in a blink. The tail end of the crowd’s gasps as the lights and electronics come back on barely registers as I become shadow and step through the ether.

The next thing I know, I’m standing inside Xzander’s studio, time frozen around me.

From the second that anthrax was first delivered, I began memorizing Charlotte’s daily schedule down to the minute. But the sight of the body lying upon the floor stills me.

“No.”

A sound I don’t recognize tears from my throat. Something tortured, something garbled and tormented with pain.

But my light, my power, must recognize that it isn’t her before my mind fully comprehends what I’m seeing, because instead of lifting her into my arms, I remain frozen.

I wouldknowif she were dead. I would feel it.

Our connection is still intact. Which means ...

She’s mine. Still.

Now and always.

The nausea that plagued me subsides, and it takes only a matter of seconds for me to regain control, the terror that gripped me giving way to momentary relief before it turns into something far more insidious, far more unhinged.

Fury.

Violent and barely controlled.

I step toward the actress’s corpse, hardly noticing where Xzander, the security team, and the accompanying police remain frozen in time around me. I crouch next to her, examining the bloodied spot in the middle of her spine where the assassin’s blade made entry.

Carefully, I use the edge of my suit coat to lift the custom Dior dress she was wearing—a replica of the one Charlotte wore yesterday—as I take stock of the wound that killed her.

Black spider veins shoot out from the point of entry, squirming and writhing.

Exactly as I feared.

“Fuck,” I snarl.

The confirmation settles in, though no one within the studio can hear me.

I stand swiftly, following the vague scent of Charlotte’s perfume. I can taste it with a simple flick of my forked tongue. I chase the scent and taste down the stairs and into a back alley, the whole city still frozen in time around me.

I come to a stop on Seventh Avenue where, at the mouth of the alley, the trail ends, muddied by the medley of other scents of the city.