Alex
Blake looks at me for a long, long time. His stare is exactly like Skye’s–unyielding, expectant, and unnaturally violet. She wasn’t wrong about that.
I’m the one who breaks from his gaze to look down at my filthy hands. They’re caked in Kai’s and Skye’s blood. It doesn’t feel like enough. Ripping him into sections before tearing his head clean off his shoulders doesn’t feel like enough.
I curl my hands into fists.
The woman, the queen, which is the only person she can be, cautiously moves around the desk in my direction. “Skye’s pregnant?” She’s just as beautiful as Skye described, with thick, dark brown hair and sea-green eyes that swirl with power I can taste. The other man, the one who kindly shut the curtains to shield me from the spray of sunlight ghosting through the clouds, does not move to stop the woman who is, obviously, based on their mingled scents, his mate.
She is in charge.
But she’s not nearly as powerful as Skye’s father. That’s really, really fucking clear.
Blake motions for Maeve to stop, and she does, but she looks overtly annoyed that her body bent to his will. She folds her arms over her chest and tsks, checking her watch. Waiting. For what? I have no worldly idea.
“You’re the father, I assume?” Blake asks coldly, and I suppose I deserve the ice in his tone. Skye warned me it could come to this, that our secrets could reach the surface before we settled on a plan. We talked about these things in quiet moments in each other’s arms over the past few months. We thought we had time. We were so stupid. So naive. I thought she was safe.
“I am.”
The door to the room rips off its hinges. A gust of violent wind explodes, sucking the air from the room.
I’m ripped from the chair and tossed so violently across the room by an unseen force that my vision goes startlingly black. Sharp, lifted voices screech, then shut out, leaving me in a veil of utter silence. A void. The black holes Skye talks about to put me to sleep at night.
A real, deep, kind of sleep.
* * *
“You have no right to keep him here, chained up, like some kind of prisoner!”
“This is on Maeve’s orders, not mine.”
“He is Skye’s husband!”
“We know nothing. Ryatt nearly killed him, and Skye is–Skye can’t explain. Not yet.” A small, female voice cracks somewhere nearby, but everything is dark and fluid. I try to open my eyes, but they’re heavy, maybe broken. I don’t know.
“Marianna already called the university. Skye wasn’t lecturing. An extended leave of absence was just put in for her two days ago. She didn’t say anything to us about it.”
Voices drift in and out, and I’m trapped, unable to move.
“If he’s the Alex Scarlett they mentioned, he’s technically missing, according to the university.”
“You’re telling me this–this thing is a… what did you say it was?”
“A paleomicrobiologist.”
“Whatever that is.”
“Ryan, please, you’re not helping the situation.”
“That’s an advanced field of study,” says a calmer, drier male voice. Someone steps toward me–a man, a shifter based on his scent, but my senses are flooded by the alarm bells pinging through my skull. A steady hand presses on my shoulder, then fingers press against the side of my neck, feeling for a pulse. “I have a colleague who occasionally holds guest lectures at LU. Alex Scarlett is renowned not only at LU but abroad. If this man is him, he’s a genius. A leader in his field.”
“Cole–”
Dad? No. No, Skye has an uncle named Cole. I know that. I remember that. She told me all about these people. I…. Where is she? What have they done to her? How’s the baby?
“He’s also a vampire.”
“He’s Skye’s husband. Is anyone listening to me?” The pitched female voice floods the room, and she’s furious. She’ll tell me what I need to know if I can just… wake up.
I open my eyes to slits, and it takes all of my strength. Dim light blurs my vision. Shadows dance all around me as a red velvet room slowly comes into view. My fingers twitch, and the shadows part, followed by a flurry of movement as a fresh shadow falls over my body.
I close my eyes just as an older woman with thick, curly dark hair and shocking silver eyes takes up the sliver of my hazy field of vision.
“Good morning,” she says softly, kindly. “You can open your eyes. There’s no sun in here. You’re safe.”
“Don’t talk to him like that,” a deep male voice rumbles, followed by a sharp swat and a grunt. “Kenna, just be careful, please.”
“I need everyone in the room to shut the fuck up,” Kenna says sharply, I think, and suddenly her hands are on either side of my face.
I open my eyes at her touch, and she smiles down at me. It takes all of my strength to fight my natural tendency to bare my teeth and hiss. I’m sure everyone here, the group of seven or so people staring at me like I’m some lab experiment, would love that.
“My wife?” I croak, and Kenna’s eyes soften further. She purses her lips into a sympathetic smile before turning her head and shooting daggers at two men–twins, I believe, and close to her own age–standing only a few feet away, tucked in the shadows of a regally decorated bedroom.
I’m in a bed, lying on top of ornate satin sheets, and I am, in fact, in chains.
“Skye is recovering. She’s going to be all right,” Kenna says after a moment, and another woman steps up beside her, golden blonde hair glistening in the faint light of a lamp on a nearby bedside table. She looks oddly familiar, but I can’t place why. “And the baby, too. It’s going to be a while until she wakes up. We’re keeping her asleep as long as we can. She’s very weak.”
“What’s your name?” the new woman asks, and Kenna moves her touch downward to my chest, which feels oddly warm and prickly.
“Alexander–Alex Scarlett. Doctor… Alex… ander… Scarlett.”
“There’s no rush.” Kenna moves her hands over my stomach, and the heat becomes unbearable. I wince, and the chains binding my wrists and ankles rattle when I try to curl inward. “I’m sorry. I’m just making sure my idiot father didn’t maim you beyond repair. You’ve responded to our healing methods quite nicely, though.”
“Where is my wife?” I rasp, my vision blurry. “I want to see her. Now.”
The blonde woman is staring down at me so intently it’s like she’s looking into my mind. She might be. All of these people have powers in some way, right?
“We should bring them together,” she says to Kenna. “I think it would be best for both of them–”
“He is not going within an inch of my granddaughter until this is sorted,” snarls one of the twins, the leaner one, who steps out of the shadows, and… yeah. That’s him. Alpha King Sydney. It has to be. Skye described him to a T, and he fits her description perfectly.
“You are all acting insane!” the blonde woman shouts, and I cringe as the sound reverberates through my skull.
A bickering match ensues, and after what feels like an eternity, the women successfully shove the men out into a hallway that spills golden light into my prison, leaving only two men left.
If I can call the second man that.
He’s extraordinarily small, strange-looking–ancient and wiry. He says nothing from his perch on a stool in the corner of the room but scribbles notes in a leather-bound journal like his life depends on it, peering at me over the rims of his half-moon spectacles.
The other man… I recognize his kind instantly.
“We’ve never formally met, but I’ve heard about you. I’m Cole. I’m a physician out of Crescent Falls. This is my wife, Misty. She’s Skye’s great aunt.” He steps forward and places his hand on the blonde woman’s shoulder, and the sour look on her face shifts, calming. Mates, most definitely.
Cole has dark gray eyes, but they’re normal, not swirling with power or an unnatural shade. He’s just… a shifter. Good. That’s good.
“I want to see her,” I manage to say, but it hurts. Everything hurts.
“Soon. She’s doing well, okay?” Misty, the blonde woman, clears her throat and nods like she’s trying to make herself believe it. “Look, this is not a good situation. Skye nearly died. It’s a miracle she made it, and Blake, her father, you met him–” She hesitates and licks her lips, glancing up at Cole. “He says he… saw what happened. Looked into your head?”
I nod, and she continues, “Who did this to her?”
“He’s dead.” I close my eyes for a moment, wincing against the warmth of what I believe are Kenna’s powers sinking into my skin, my bones. “It doesn’t matter now.”
“You’re sure? Maeve can send–”
“I tore him apart. He’s dead. There’s nothing left of him. I made sure of it.”
The room falls into silence, leaving only the scratchy scribbling of the tiny man’s pen. It’s loud enough to make my temples throb.
Kenna clears her throat and sits on the edge of the bed, and that’s when I notice there’s a third man in the room. He only steps out of the shadows to make his presence well and intensely known when his mate, Kenna herself, curls her fingers around my calf in a touch that would be comforting if the man wasn’t looking at me like I’ll be signing my death warrant if I make any sudden movements.
“There’s a lot we need to know,” Kenna says, eyeing her mate as he approaches.
“It can wait,” Misty says, shaking her head.
“Maeve needs to know,” Kenna cuts in, closing her eyes for a moment before looking down at me. “If we let you go, let you out of these chains, will you… try anything?”
I bite back a deranged laugh. I feel like all of my ribs have been broken and rearranged. I’m exhausted. My head is killing me. I want nothing more than to fix this, though. I should have ended this a decade ago.
“I just want to see her. I need to see her. The only thing you’ll risk by letting me loose is me running through that door into the sun I know is there.”
“What will happen in the sun?” Misty asks, more curious than anything.
I turn my gaze to hers. Gods, I know her. I’ve heard her described, at least. Why? “I burn. It won’t kill me, but it hurts like fucking hell, and I’d rather avoid it.”
Misty eyes me for a moment before nodding at Kenna, who turns to her mate expectantly and holds out her hand for a key.
Everyone steps away from the bed as I’m freed by the tall, blond man who looks like he’d love more than anything to pull my fangs from my mouth with a rusty pair of pliers.
I lie there for a moment, twisting my wrists and ankles until my body awakens, and memories of the ice come hurdling back to me in flashes of red blood and nylon yellow. Skye’s dark hair splayed and frozen in a puddle of her own blood. Everything we dreamed of, the ridiculous, far-fetched life we tried to build crumbling like sand through my fingers.
“My name is Prince Kieran Alexander of Scarlett Thunder,” I rasp, taking the deepest breath I can against the pull and pinch of what must be freshly healed cracks in my ribs. “I go by Alex. My father is King Cole Alexander. Ten years ago, I killed the Queen of Crimson River. Last night, I killed her son.” I turn to look at the shocked group of shifters and gods or goddesses, whatever they are. “There is no one coming for me.”