"One down. Now it's your turn," she said softly, voice like wind over frost. Her gaze didn't blink, didn't waver.
He rose.
Not smoothly. Not with the fluid grace he'd spent two centuries cultivating, the predator's ease that had become his signature. He rose the way things rise when the alternative is dying. By degrees, with effort, hand against the blood-stained floorboards leaving a print of charred bone and ruined flesh. Every movement cost him something he couldn't yet calculate.
Rage tore through him. Not grief for Nikolai, not truly. They'd been allies, not friends, partners in damnation but never brothers despite the word Nikolai had used. But cold fury at the unraveling of designs that had taken decades to construct. The network. The Salem positioning. The careful accumulation o
