Page 10 of Claimed

I step back as Malachi steps forward.

Valentin’s hand lashes out and catches his wrist before Malachi can get too close to me. Violence ripples through the room as Malachi looks down at the hand around his wrist. Valentin’s eyes are closed, his body locked in stasis again, yet his grip remains iron.

A warning. A line drawn even from the dark.

The leader of the Twelve looks at me and for once, he has nothing sharp to say as Aaron’s voice cuts through the silence. ‘We need the Lower Vaults.’

Malachi’s jaw tightens. ‘No.’

‘Yes,’ Aaron says. ‘He’s cycling between curse-stasis and blood-hunger. If he wakes fully like this, he could tear through the Tower.’

‘He ordered us not to harm her,’ Malachi eventually says.

‘I heard him.’

‘So if we move him, she comes.’

Every eye turns to me. My heart kicks once, hard. ‘Excuse me?’

Malachi’s expression is carved from fury and humiliation. ‘He reacts when you move away. He protects you when we approach. He drank from you and dropped into stasis. Until we understand why, you stay where he can sense you.’

The words land exactly where they are meant to.

I’m no longer hunter but I’m also not quite a guest. I’m not even prisoner yet, but I’m worse.

Necessary.

A cure, a weapon and a liability.

Everything I knew I would become if they learned my true identity.

I press my tongue to the cut beneath it and taste blood again. And underneath that, the name waits behind my teeth like a loaded gun.

Lyra Hannigan.

The woman Valentin Moretti believes is his fated mate.

The truth that might save him might chain me and hand every creature in this Tower the one piece of me I’ve kept alive by burying it.

I look at the mark crawling towards Valentin’s throat, at the ruined sheets, the fractured Glass, the vampires a hair’s breadth from tearing me to pieces.

Then I swallow the name down.

For now.

Meeting Malachi’s stare, I bare my teeth in a smile that feels sharp enough to draw blood. ‘Fine,’ I say. ‘But if any of you call me a blood bag, I’m stabbing someone.’

Luca blinks. Aaron’s mouth twitches. Malachi looks like he might actually combust.

And Valentin, unconscious on the bed, whispers into my mind one last time.

Mine.

The word slides through me less like an endearment and more like a warning.

A claim.

He exhales. Then the Tower lights flicker back on, one by one, cold and merciless over the wreckage.