Page 32 of Donovan
I couldn’t tell if he was studying me, waiting for me to wake, or just making sure I was still breathing. Relief washed over me every time I saw him.
Because for a terrifying moment, when I was slipping in and out of sleep, I thought he was gone.
That he had left. That I had made my choice, risked everything to keep him alive, only to wake up alone. The thought of never seeing him again…
Of losing him after everything we’d been through…It made my chest ache in a way I couldn’t explain.
I wasn’t sure how much time passed, hours, maybe days, but in the moments I was awake, my thoughts became tangled, looping in circles that I couldn’t escape.
What happens now?
The question echoed in my mind, looping over and over like a curse I couldn’t shake. There was no going back to the Guild. That much was obvious.
The second they found out what I had done, that I let Declan turn, that I didn’t drive a blade through his heart before it was too late, they would come for him.
And for me.
They wouldn’t hesitate. There would be no deliberation, no hesitation, no mercy. The Guild had never been about mercy.
It didn’t matter that Declan had begged me to end him before the change took hold.
That he had looked me in the eyes, voice raw and broken, and pleaded for a death I couldn’t give him.
No. They wouldn’t care about any of that. They would see my hesitation as weakness. They would see my choice as betrayal and they would brand me a traitor for it.
Maybe they already had.
Maybe, the second I failed to report back, the second I disappeared without a trace, my name had been carved onto the Guild’s list of the condemned.
A hunter turned fugitive. A mistake that needed to be erased. Not that I cared but I should have.
I should have felt a deep, gut-wrenching fear at the thought of my former comrades hunting me down like prey.
At the knowledge that the people I once fought beside would now see me as nothing more than a loose end to be dealt with.
But I felt nothing. Because my loyalty to the Guild had died whenI lost both my brothers and in its place, all that remained was a hollow ache.
A part of me liked to think Asher and Finn were still out there, somewhere.
That they had managed to carve out a life for themselves. One without blood, without orders, without the weight of the Guild pressing down on their shoulders.
Maybe that was wishful thinking.
Maybe they were both dead, their bodies left to rot in some unmarked grave, and I was just fooling myself by pretending otherwise. But I couldn’t let myself believe that.
I wouldn’t. Because if they were still alive, it meant they had escaped. It meant they had broken free, that they had found something beyond the endless cycle of kill or be killed.
I used to be so angry at them for choosing their vampire lovers over family, but now?
Now, that anger was just a dull throb, a barely-there ghost of an old wound. Maybe I had never really been mad at them in the first place. Maybe I had just been scared.
Scared of being left behind. Scared of being alone.
But I wasn’t alone.
Not really. Because I still had Declan and no matter what happened next, no matter what hell awaited us, I wasn’t letting him go.
A low moan slipped past my lips before I could stop it. The sound startled me, like it had come from someone else entirely.
