Page 3 of The Madness Within

??The Breaking Point

Dorian

Past

I was eighteen when my world ended.

It should’ve been a night like any other.

Silas and I had plans, cheap whiskey, dark rooftops, the kind of laughter only twins understood.

We’d survived the gauntlet of school, of expectations, of hiding what we really were. Two boys with fangs behind their smiles and a future paved in shadow.

We were born together. Bred together. One scream split in two.

But I never made it to him.

I got word just past midnight. My father’s voice, shaking, broken in a way I’d never heard before. He didn’t say the worddeadat first.

Just Silas.

And then blood.

And then… Nothing but a silence that swallowed my name.

I ran.

Faster than a vampire should in human streets. Faster than logic. Than breath. Than thought.

But I was too late.

And I willneverforget what I saw.

Silas wasn’t just killed. He wasemptied. Drained of everything that made him real.

His eyes were open but gone. A sigil was carved into his chest, one older than time, still burning as if the blade had been dipped in hellfire.

The scent in the air wasn’t human. Not shifter. Not witch.

It was something else.

Old. Hungry. Wrong.

I knelt beside him and screamed so loud it fractured every street lamp for two blocks. Magic flared from me that night for the first time, wild, necrotic, violent. I didn’t even know what I was doing, but the sky turned black, and the wind howled with grief.

The ground cracked beneath my knees.

The light in me dimmed with his.

And from that broken silence, the madness was born.

Not a voice. Not a demon.

A truth.

There would never be justice for people like us.

The man who killed Silas? He wasn’t mortal. He wasn’t registered. He didn’t evenexistin the system.

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