Page 28 of Guardian Falling
“Sloane’s Crimson Sight confirmed it,” I say, remembering my Blood Witch’s report from earlier. Her new powers are still raw, unpredictable, but the Sight doesn’t lie. “Charlotte was turned against her will. A forced transformation. Someone powerful did this to her.”
“Who?” Hex asks, his tactical mind already calculating angles. “What vampire is stupid enough to create scions in our territory without permission?”
The blood signature surfaces in my memory before I can stop it. Ancient and familiar, a pattern I haven’t sensed in over two centuries.
The answer sits in the back of my mind, unmoving, when the door opens.
I feel him before I see him.
Leather creaks as that restless, wolf-edge presence slides into the room, dragging my attention with it, whether I like it or not.
Rogue.
I turn, irritation sparking hot in my chest. “You said you weren’t leaving her.”
His jaw tightens, but he doesn’t bristle back. “I needed to hear this.”
“Then sit down.” I hold his gaze with mine. “Because you haven’t heard the worst of it yet.”
Something crosses his face, but he doesn’t sit. However, he goes still in the way Rogue goes still when he’s bracing, weight dropped low, shoulders squared, ready to absorb the inevitable impact.
“The sire signature in Charlotte’s blood…” I let the silence build. “It belongs to Valeria.”
The shift in him hits fast. His shoulders dip, jaw tightens hard enough to flex, gold flashing savage in his eyes before he buries it again.
Not rage, something far worse. It’s the look of an old wound getting ripped back open.
“She’s dead,” he says, flat and certain.
“So, I thought.”
“You told us the Coven executed her.” Hades speaks carefully, his necromancer’s calm never wavering. “You said Khaos senther wherever he sends beings through his Reality Bending. That no one ever comes back.”
“No one does.” The energy beneath my skin crackles, so I stand, needing to move. “And yet here she fucking is, in our territory, creating scions deliberately.”
“She’ll build an army,” Hex predicts. “She’ll force the Coven’s hand.”
“And when the Coven investigates…” Hades begins.
“They’ll findusat the center,” I end the sentence for him.
The trap closes around the table in silence, but Oracle’s voice cuts through it. “Then whythisgirl? What’s special about Charlotte that an exiled vampire risks everything to turn her?”
The answer moves across Rogue’s face before I speak it, and I see the second it hits him. The weight of it. The ugly truth of it. His expression hardens like he’s already put the pieces together before the words even left his mouth.
Our eyes lock across the room. “She’s my mate,” Rogue says quietly.
Nobody speaks.
Scorch pulls the cigarette from his mouth and crushes it out halfway through. That’s enough to put a crack through the room all on its own because Scorch treats cigarettes like extra organs.
Dread reins his fear back immediately, the pressure peeling off the room enough to breathe again, and Hex’s hands freeze over the keyboard.
Oracle shuts his eyes for a second. The silence that follows hits hard.
A room full of monsters going dead quiet for one of their own.
“Valeria didn’t just find my fated mate,” Rogue continues, his voice steady even as the tension coils through his shoulders. “She turned her into the one thing guaranteed to destroy me.”
