Page 88 of Blood Vows
The closer I got to his room, the stronger it grew, that terrible, suffocating terror. Panic clawed up my throat, each breath more frantic than the last. I could feel him. I could feel something surrounding him.
A threat against him.
The door was already open, yet I knew I hadn’t left it that way. I crept inside, breathless, the room spinning with motion and shadow.
But I didn’t see my life flash before my eyes.
I saw his.
The world around me flickered. The room shifted. For a heartbeat, I was no longer standing there, but inside him, his memories flashing like broken glass. The dagger. The scream. His brothers’ faces twisted with betrayal. His father’s voice, cruel and sharp. His mother’s cry.
Then something darker.
A bargain.
A hand made of shadow reaching from the abyss.
A voice whispering promises of power that came at the cost of his soul. The truth struck me like a blow.
Vas hadn’t just inherited the curse.
He had been chosen by it.
And every lie that had been told, every secret buried beneath blood and centuries, had led to this moment. I gasped, clutching my chest, the necklace burning against my palm as if it knew what I had seen.
For a heartbeat, I thought the room was empty, that the terrible presence I had felt was only a trick of my imagination. But then my gaze landed on the bed. Vas lay there, still and silent, his dark hair falling across his forehead, the sheet tangled low around his waist. The faint rise and fall of his chest was the only sign that he lived. He looked peaceful, almost human in sleep, the weight of his darkness hidden beneath the calm of dreams.
But it wasn’t him that stole the breath from my lungs.
It was the two figures standing over him.
Victor and Tal.
Their faces were pale in the dim firelight, their eyes locked on the sleeping form of their brother. And in Victor’s hand, gleaming coldly like liquid moonlight, was…
The dagger.
Its edge caught the faint light as he turned it, the same way a man might before delivering a death that had long been planned.
My throat tightened, sound catching somewhere between a gasp and a cry. But before I took a single step inside, Vas’s eyes snapped open just as the dagger came down on him.
Victor’s voice came first, low and rumbling, filled with barely contained fury.
“Where is our Fated?” he growled, his eyes flashing with accusation before roaring in fury…
“Where is Vanessa?!”
32
WHEN THE LIES CRACK
“NO!”
The sound that tore from my throat was not a word, not even a breath, but something primal and broken.
It was enough.
Vas moved.
