Page 34 of The Madness Within

“It was the girl, wasn’t it?” His voice cracked across the silence, low and uneven, like something trying to remember how to speak. “You spoke to her?”

I didn’t flinch. Just removed my coat, slow and deliberate. “What business is it of yours?”

His laugh was a jagged sound. “You always were stupid when you were curious.”

“She’s not yours, Kreed.”

“She will be.” He stepped forward now, eyes black as floodwater. “Body. Mind. Blood. The Gate wants her. The Hollow King whispers her name through the Veil every night.”

“She’s not a prophecy. She’s a person.”

“Not anymore.”

The room groaned with the pressure of his power. The sigils hidden in my floorboards sizzled. My wards twitched like they’re trying to escape.

“If you get in my way again,” he said, almost tender, “I’ll do worse than kill you.”

I grinned like a bastard. “You always did talk too much.”

I moved. Shadows rose.

He didn’t.

And that’s the problem.

The spell hit me before I finished the countercurse. A pulse of rotted air. A language I hadn’t heard since the catacombs under Kiev. My bones locked up like I’d been buried alive.

“You think you’re the predator in this room?” Kreed hisses, stepping into my frozen stance. “You think you’ve been hunting me?” His lips brushed my ear.

“Dorian’s been hunting you.” I groaned as the pain started.

It wasn’t physical. Not at first.

It was memory. Being peeled apart. Burned. Rewritten.

I screamed. Just once. He stole the sound and swallowed it.

And in that final moment, before everything inside me cracked and collapsed, I saw his smile.

Not satisfied.

Triumphant.

Chapter Twelve

??The Scale Beneath the Skin

Ember

Sleep was a rumor I stopped believing in weeks ago.

Tonight, I didn’t even pretend to chase it. Instead, I sat at my desk in the half-light of my apartment, the glow of my screen casting shadows across a wall stitched together with string, pinned photos, police sketches, clippings, and handwritten notes.

It looked like madness, felt like prophecy.

And in the center of it all?

Dorian Vale.

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