LOGINEMBER’S POVI’m fighting so hard against the men holding me that my shoulders feel like they’re going to dislocate.I reach through to Sapphire with every ounce of willpower I have, I scream, and I thrash, but there is no release of the power we had at the Bacchanal. There is no release of strength or divine fury, or a miracle.All there is the ugly stench of death.I can see down the hallway into the storage room — Maurice on the floor, chest wound bleeding, his eyes open and blinking.Gale slumped against the pipe, still, with two holes in his chest. Harrison is standing between them with blood running down his arm from where Maurice’s knife is still embedded.He looks at what he’s done. His son’s body. The blood. The man gasping on the concrete beside him.He looks up the hallway, and his eyes find mine, and what I see in them is not triumph or righteousness or the cold satisfaction of a mission completed.What I see is a man who just murdered his own child and is feeling the full,
EMBER’S POVI can see everything from where I’m pinned in the kitchen. The hallway is short — bathroom, bedroom, storage room at the end, the door hanging open.Maurice is inside the room. I can see his back, his body positioned between the doorway and where Gale is chained, and in his hand is a kitchen knife that he grabbed from the drawer on his way through.His hands are shaking so badly that the blade is catching the light in irregular flashes.Harrison reaches the doorway and stops. He looks past Maurice at Gale, who is pressed against the wall as far as his chains will allow, wild-eyed, tear-streaked, the pathetic desperation of a man who has just realised his father didn’t come here to rescue him.“There you are.” Harrison’s voice carries down the hallway to where I’m pinned, and the sound of it is the worst thing I have ever heard because it’s CALM. Conversational, almost. Like he’s greeting his son at a holiday dinner and not standing in a doorway with a loaded gun. “Look at
EMBER’S POVNobody moves.The six arrows point at the house, and Harrison stands before them with his one remaining arm raised, and the silence that follows his words is not the kind that invites a response.“Thirty seconds,” Harrison says. “Bring him out, or my men come in.”I back away from the window.My phone is on the kitchen counter where I left it beside the cold tea, and Queenie’s is in her jacket pocket, and Knox is an hour away at minimum doing whatever Knox is doing with Logan.Even if I could reach him right now, he would arrive to a house full of arrows and dead bodies.Calling Knox is not a plan that would work right now. Even by some miracle, we’d all be dead before he arrives.“Everyone away from the windows,” Maurice says, and there’s a quality in his voice I’ve never heard from him before. “When those arrows come, they’ll punch straight through the siding. This place is weathered and old, and I doubt it can do much to protect us against those reinforced arrows.”He g
KNOX’S POVWhatever just happened to Gale — wherever he is, whatever is being done to him right now in a storage room in a shabby house where I put him — Logan FELT it. Through whatever bond they share.My phone buzzes in my jacket. The vibration travels through the silver haze like a distant drum.Logan hears it too.His head snaps toward my pocket with the speed of a predator acquiring a target, and I see the calculation happen behind his wild, bloodied eyes.Faster than thought, faster than language, the rapid-fire processing of a desperate man assembling a plan from broken pieces.His hand moves to his pocket. The remote.“Logan, wait—”He presses it.The silver DETONATES. Every thread in the restraint ignites simultaneously, and my entire nervous system goes dark like a city losing power in a storm.My muscles lock. My legs fold. I hit the concrete floor face-first, and the impact splits my lip, but I barely feel it because the silver is everywhere — in my blood, in my bones, in
KNOX’S POV“I’m not revealing his location while you’re holding a trigger that could end my reign.”“And I’m not surrendering my only leverage on the word of a man who is illegally detaining my chosen mate.”We stare at each other. Two men at an impasse built from identical materials — love and fear and the absolute unwillingness to blink first. In another life, I think I might have liked Logan. The sheer, obstinate, self-destructive devotion is something I understand at a molecular level, and under different circumstances — circumstances that don’t involve him threatening to expose the worst night of my life — I could almost respect it.“Gale is alive,” I say. “Unharmed. Being held in a location I control. I’m prepared to take you to him personally.”“After I give you the drive.”“After you disarm the trigger and tell me where the drive is stored.”“No.”“Logan.”“No.” He stands. The crate screeches against concrete. “I’ve been reasonable. I gave you forty-eight hours. I came alone
KNOX’S POVThe words land in my chest, and I feel the bruise of them immediately. Twenty years of unwavering loyalty. Twenty years of placing himself between me and danger by any means necessary, through near-deaths and battles and the kind of thankless service that never makes it into the history books.My jaw tightens. I force myself to feel nothing. Not an inch of mercy. Not a drip of care.Because this is the man who drugged my coffee and killed my wife and murdered sixty-three people and documented me like a lab animal and lied to my face for a decade.But he is also the man who committed his life to my family’s legacy. The man I considered my brother long before any of this, back when life was simpler and the worst days could be solved with a bottle of beer after brutal training and shared laughter that meant nothing and everything at the same time.Both things. At the same time.I don’t honour the confession with a response. I harden the bruise the way you harden a bruise,
EMBER’S POV“Because I saw you on the news.” His voice cracks again. “During a press conference. I saw you standing up there, speaking to the camera, saying five words they have haunted me every night. You are dead to me. And though it wasn’t directed at me, I felt it so much. I felt it down to my
EMBER’S POVMy mother stands in the doorway, draped in designer everything as always.A silk dress in garish emerald that probably cost more than she can actually afford. Jewelry dripping from her neck, her ears, her wrists, every piece fighting for attention.Hair and makeup done to perfection, no
KNOX’S POVHe blinks, the picture of innocence. “I’m not sure I understand. I explained the purpose quite clearly at the beginning of the evening. Conflict resolution. Closure. An opportunity for all parties to—”“Bullshit.”The word is deadpan, and I see Logan’s head snap up, see Gale’s sobbing st
EMBER’S POVI slump back into my seat unconsciously, not realizing how rigidly I’d been holding myself until the tension drains away.Knox lifts our entwined hands to his lips and presses a kiss to my knuckles, his eyes on me.It slows the tightening in my chest. Loosens the knot that Harrison’s qu







