The chapel was cold, the kind of cold that doesn't just touch your skin but seeps into your marrow until you forget what warmth ever felt like. I stood there, my knees shaking, staring at the small, broken body of Marcus. His blood had already begun to darken the white marble floor, a jagged, ugly stain on the Thorne sanctity. He had died protecting Toby. He had died for a family that viewed him as a tool.
I looked at my hands. They were stained crimson. I had tried to hold his life in, but it had slipped through my fingers like water.
"Leave us," Silas’s voice cut through the silence. It wasn't the voice of the man who had whispered to me in the dark. It was the original Silas Thorne. The predator. The man who saw the world as a game he had already won.
The guards vanished into the sha
