CHAPTER 1: Blood and Ash

The phone rang at midnight, the way bad news always did.

Gabriel Thorne stared at the unknown number glowing on his cracked screen, his heart already sinking before he answered. He had learned to recognize the particular quality of silence that preceded disaster, the way the air seemed to thicken with unspoken grief before the words even formed.

"Gabriel." His mother's voice was barely a whisper, stretched thin with exhaustion and fear. "You need to come home. Your father is dying."

He should have said no, and ended the call, or thrown the phone across his pathetic studio apartment, and pretended he had never heard those words. Five years ago, Patriarch Michael Thorne had stood in the grand hall of the family estate and declared his eldest son dead to the Holy Order, dead to God, and dead to the bloodline that stretched back twelve generations of exorcists. Gabriel had been seventeen, broken, and desperate for understanding that never came.

Instead, he found himself standing outside the iron gates of the Thorne estate at half past one in the morning, his breath misting in the October air as he stared up at the mansion that had once been his entire world. The place looked exactly as he remembered it, all Gothic spires and holy stonework, crosses carved into every available surface as though the architecture itself could repel demons. Floodlights illuminated the grounds with cold precision, turning the manicured gardens into something that resembled a military compound more than a home.

The only difference was the sickly green light pulsing from his father's bedroom window on the third floor, a luminescence that made Gabriel's skin crawl with recognition. Curse magic always had that particular shade, the color of rot and corruption, of something fundamentally wrong with the world's natural order.

He had been staring at that window for nearly ten minutes when the gates finally opened with a metallic groan that sounded like a scream.

Marcus Thorne stood in the gateway, his younger brother now twenty years old and every inch the perfect exorcist heir Gabriel had failed to become. Marcus wore the traditional black cassock of the Order, the silver cross at his throat catching the floodlights as he regarded Gabriel with an expression carved from ice and contempt. Where Gabriel had always been lean and rangy, built for speed rather than strength, Marcus had inherited their father's broader build, all righteous muscle and holy conviction.

"You actually came." Marcus's voice carried none of the warmth Gabriel remembered from their childhood, back when they had been brothers instead of strangers separated by faith and shame. "Mother said you would, but I told her you were too much of a coward to show your face here again."

Gabriel swallowed the immediate retort that rose to his lips, tasting bitterness and old wounds. He wore jeans with frayed knees and a jacket that had seen better years, his dark hair longer than the Order allowed, falling past his collar in waves that would have earned him punishment during his training. He looked like exactly what he was: a man who had been surviving rather than living, scraping by on investigation jobs that paid barely enough to keep him fed and housed in the worst parts of Seattle.

"How bad is it?" Gabriel asked instead, keeping his voice level despite the way his hands trembled in his pockets.

Marcus stepped aside, allowing Gabriel to pass through the gates but maintaining careful distance, as though proximity to his disgraced brother might contaminate him with the same spiritual corruption. "See for yourself. Mother is waiting in the west parlor. Father is sedated, but the curse is progressing faster than the healers anticipated."

They walked the long gravel path to the main house in silence, their footsteps crunching in rhythms that reminded Gabriel of funeral processions. The estate grounds sprawled across fifteen acres of carefully consecrated land, every tree and flower bed blessed by generations of Thorne patriarchs. Statues of saints watched their progress with blind stone eyes, and Gabriel could feel the weight of holy wards pressing against his skin like a physical force, testing him for demonic taint the way they had tested every visitor for the past two centuries.

The wards recognized him, even after five years of exile. They recognized the Thorne blood in his veins, the exorcist training that had been beaten into his bones since childhood, and most damningly, they recognized the other thing that lived inside him now. The mate bond hummed beneath his ribs like a second heartbeat, a connection that transcended distance and rejection, binding him to someone who had made it abundantly clear that Gabriel was nothing more than a mistake to be forgotten.

Marcus noticed the way Gabriel tensed as they crossed the final ward line. His brother's lip curled in disgust. "I can feel it on you. The corruption. It is like something rotting from the inside out."

"It's not corruption," Gabriel said quietly, though he had stopped believing his own protests years ago. "It's just a bond."

"There is no such thing as 'just a bond' when it ties you to a monster." Marcus pulled open the heavy oak door that led into the entrance hall, and the smell of frankincense and myrrh washed over them both, thick enough to choke on. "You made your choice the night you let that creature mark you. Everything that happened after was consequence, not persecution."

The entrance hall looked exactly as Gabriel remembered it: marble floors polished to mirrors, oil paintings of stern-faced ancestors lining the walls, and the massive chandelier hanging overhead like a frozen waterfall of crystal and candlelight. His footsteps echoed in the cavernous space, each sound a reminder of how small he had always felt in this place, how inadequate compared to the legacy he was supposed to uphold.

Catherine Thorne waited in the doorway of the west parlor, her elegant frame wrapped in a silk dressing gown, her dark hair streaked with more gray than Gabriel remembered. She looked older, and worn down by whatever had been happening in this house during his absence. When she saw him, her composure cracked just slightly, tears gathering in her eyes before she blinked them away with the practiced discipline of a woman who had learned never to show weakness.

"Gabriel." She crossed the distance between them and pulled him into an embrace that smelled like jasmine and desperation. "Thank God you came. I was afraid you wouldn't."

He held his mother carefully, aware of Marcus watching them with judgment written across every line of his face. "What happened to him?"

Catherine pulled back, her hands framing Gabriel's face as though checking to make sure he was real and whole. "Three weeks ago, he started feeling weak. We thought it was exhaustion from the purification rituals in Portland. Then the marks appeared."

She led him through the parlor, past furniture that cost more than most people earned in a year, toward the grand staircase that curved up to the private family quarters. Marcus followed at a distance, a silent sentinel ensuring that Gabriel did not stray from the prescribed path or contaminate anything with his presence.

"What kind of marks?" Gabriel asked, though the sickly green light from the bedroom window had already told him most of what he needed to know.

"Curse marks. Symbols we've never seen before, written in a language that predates the Order itself." Catherine's voice dropped to barely a whisper as they climbed the stairs, each step taking them closer to the source of the corruption. "The healers have tried everything. Holy water, exorcism rites, purification circles. Nothing works. The curse is eating him alive from the inside, and we have three days before it reaches his heart."

They reached the third floor landing, and Gabriel could feel the curse magic now, pressing against his skin like oily fingers. The hallway stretched before them, impossibly long, lined with closed doors that hid childhood memories he had spent five years trying to forget. His father's bedroom sat at the far end, the green light seeping out from under the door like poisonous fog.

"The healers say there's only one cure," Catherine continued, her voice breaking on the last word. "Alpha blood that has been willingly given, mixed with holy water and administered before the curse reaches his heart."

Gabriel stopped walking. His entire body went cold, understanding crashing over him like a wave of ice water. "No."

"Gabriel, please." Catherine turned to face him, her hands gripping his arms with surprising strength. "I know what I'm asking. I know what it means, what he did to you, what we all did to you. You have every right to refuse, to walk away and let him face the consequences of his own cruelty."

"Then why am I here?" Gabriel heard the bitterness in his own voice, sharp enough to cut. "Why drag me back to this place if you already know I should refuse?"

Marcus spoke from behind them, his voice cold and precise. "Because there's only one Alpha powerful enough to break a curse this advanced. Only one whose bloodline is old enough and strong enough to counter whatever dark magic is killing our father."

Gabriel closed his eyes, already knowing the name that would come next, already feeling the mate bond twist like a knife between his ribs.

"Dominic Ashford," Catherine whispered. "Your mate. The only one who can save your father's life is the man who rejected you five years ago."

The world tilted sideways, and Gabriel had to brace himself against the wall to keep from falling. Dominic Ashford. Youngest billionaire Alpha in North America, and heir to Ashford Industries, the supernatural security empire that controlled half the werewolf packs on the continent. The man whose golden eyes had met Gabriel's across a burning packhouse and changed everything with a single look.

The man who had looked at seventeen-year-old Gabriel, felt the mate bond snap into place with the force of destiny itself, and said five words that had destroyed him: "I don't have a mate."

"You want me to go back to him," Gabriel said flatly. "You want me to beg the man who publicly rejected me, who called our bond a mistake, who made it clear I was nothing more than an inconvenience to be forgotten. You want me to humiliate myself before him and ask for his blood to save the father who disowned me for the crime of being his mate in the first place."

"Yes," Catherine said simply. "That's exactly what I'm asking you to do."

Gabriel looked at his mother, really looked at her, and saw the truth written in every line of her face. She was desperate, terrified, and willing to sacrifice her son's dignity, his pride, his carefully reconstructed life, for the chance to save her husband. The same husband who had thrown Gabriel out of this house, who had declared him spiritually corrupted beyond redemption, who had made it clear that Gabriel's existence was an embarrassment to the Thorne legacy.

"You have three days," Marcus said from the shadows. "Three days before the curse reaches his heart. There's only one cure, brother. The question is whether you're strong enough to claim it."

Gabriel stared at the green light seeping from beneath his father's door, at the physical manifestation of curse magic that was slowly killing the man who had given him life and then taken everything else away. He thought about Dominic Ashford in his glass tower in downtown Seattle, surrounded by wealth, power and the pack that worshipped him. He thought about standing before that man again, about asking for help from someone who had made it abundantly clear that Gabriel meant nothing.

The mate bond pulsed in his chest, a connection that distance and rejection had never managed to sever, reminding him that no matter how much he wanted to walk away, no matter how much he wanted to let his father face the consequences of his own hatred, he was still bound to Dominic Ashford in ways that transcended choice or dignity.

"Three days," Gabriel repeated, his voice hollow. "Fine. I'll go to him. I'll beg if I have to, and get you his blood."

He did not say what they all knew: that the real question was not whether Dominic would help, but whether Gabriel would survive asking.