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“My husband didn’t just lock me away, Arianette,” she says. “After he killed Benji and claimed the throne, he stole my boys only to lose them both. Timothy was so focused on building his empire, on cultivating his Shadows and controlling his kingdom, that he couldn’t even keep his son bound by his legacy to the Barons, losing him to another house–another family. He sent Whitaker to live with Rufus fucking Ashby. He destroyed his own home, bit by bit, and dared to claim that I was the problem.”

Her voice carries an edge as she continues, “I thought my mission had failed when he sent me halfway across the world, over medicated and locked away like something forgotten. But then one day I was told to pack my bags and I was escorted back here. Back to Forsyth to Saint Mary’s.” Her lips curve. “What I’m sure Timothy thought was a downgrade was something else for me. An opportunity. A second chance. I wasn’t going to let it go to waste.”

“So you started escaping the hospital and killing college girls?”

“Timothy spent the last twenty years focusing more on life than death. He got tied up with the greed and frivolity of the other houses, just like I feared. The Barons had become weak, nothing more than a clean-up crew for their destruction. When I came back I decided to make them all pay. Taking one sacrifice from each house–one girl to represent each bloodline, each territory, each branch of the roots that had been allowed to wither. Four lives to restore the balance and remind the Barons what they were supposed to protect.”

Four. “Then why me?”

“Oh, Arianette.” Amber’s voice stays almost conversational, but there’s something strained underneath it, a tremor she keeps swallowing down before it can escape. Her fingers twitch at her sides, and when she notices me watching, she forces them still. “You were just a poor, pathetic girl sucked into my husband’s world that had to pay for his sins. An obligation that came out of his incessant need for control. Timothy always wanted access to the university underneath Strong Manor and the only way to get that was by fulfilling a decade’s old contract between families that my son refused to honor. You were a pawn in powerful men’s games. You should have been dead long before the wedding, keeping Timothy from receiving his precious blueprints.” She stares down at me with distaste. “But you survived, you married my husband, and for that you will join your sisters in sacrifice.”

Her smile falters. For a second, something almost wild flashes across her face before she reins it in. She inhales slowly through her nose, straightens her shoulders, and continues as though she hasn't just cracked open something ugly inside herself.

“By kidnapping you, I hurt Timothy in ways most people can’t understand. I hurt his ego and pride by stealing something that belonged to him–something he didn’t even want. It got him involved in the most delicious game of cat and mouse.” She reaches toward me, then stops herself before her hand can make contact. Her fingers curl into a fist instead. “You were the price to get him involved, Arianette.” The words hover between us. Amber's smile returns, but it looks wrong now, stretched too tightly across her face. “Not the prize. Not some precious treasure waiting to be claimed. You were the obligation he assumed to get what he wanted.”

Her words strike like a punch, but I shake them off, refusing to believe her. “He’s not the man he used to be,” I bite back, a flash of Timothy lunging between me and Liam, taking the blade that was meant for me. “You don’t know him. Not anymore.”

She gives a small shake of her head, almost impatiently, as though I'm being stupid for ever believing otherwise. “I know men. I know their nature and their desires. He will never want anything as much as he wants power. Ever. Not his son, not his wife, and certainly not your tight, little, replaceable pussy.”

Outside the chapel, I hear a low howl on the wind, darkness creeping towards dawn. I’m slow to realize that my positioning is like Kelsey’s and it’s not until Amber moves around me with a slow, predatory grace, removing objects from her robe’s pleats and setting them on the altar: vials of dark liquid, bundles of dried herbs, and small, bleached bones, that it hits me that she’s doing this here and now.

"The soil remembers every sacrifice, Arianette," she whispers. "For too long, the Baron King has sat on a stolen throne, but the old ways demand a return to the roots."

She reaches into the deep folds of her robe and pulls out a small, heavy container. The sound from inside is a frantic, dry scratching—the sound of a hundred tiny legs against glass. Fear hammers against my ribs so hard I can’t breathe. I want to fight, to scream for Hunter or Damon, but my voice is trapped behind the sheer magnitude of my terror.

Amber grips my jaw, her fingers digging into my skin with bruising force. "You were the first offering stolen from the altar," she hisses, her empty eye sockets boring into mine. "The one that got away. But the Seal of the Barons will be completed tonight. I am remaking you."

“No, please no.”

She wrenches my mouth open and she tips the container.

The stag beetles spill into my mouth—a black, skittering wave of cold shells and biting mandibles. I gag, my eyes watering as I feel them scrambling against my tongue and scratching at the back of my throat, a living suffocation.

“Let them consume you from the inside out. Remake you into something new.”

I fall over, gagging and coughing up the beetles, tears streaming down my cheeks. The sound of their feet skittering across the stone, echoes loud in my ears.

"Be still," she murmurs, reaching back into her robe to draw a jade-handled knife with a blade that glints like a shard of the moon. "Through blood, perpetuity."

She raises the blade, the tip hovering just above the pentagram scar on my chest, preparing to carve the final mark of her ritual. I close my eyes, waiting for the bite of the steel, for the end of the dance.

Because it was always going to end this way, wasn’t it?

Then, the heavy oak doors of the sanctuary don't just open—they explode inward.

A low, vibrating snarl rips through the sacred silence. I open my eyes to see a flash of brindled fur and a goofy underbite turned into a weapon. Ares doesn't hesitate. He launches himself across the stone, his powerful body a blur of reddish-brown and black stripes as he skids onto the rug and thrusts himself directly between me and Amber.

He stands over me, his hackles raised, his brown eyes fixed on Amber. She stumbles back, the jade knife wavering in her hand, and he lunges forward, teeth clamping down on her forearm.

Her scream tears through the chapel, high and jagged, nothing like the calm, measured voice she used while she explained how she planned to destroy me. She tries to wrench herself free, but Ares holds on, his growl vibrating through his entire body. The knife slips from her fingers and clatters against the stone.

I crawl over on my elbows and knees, crunching beetles and herbs, until I’m able to grab the knife and leverage myself upright, holding the handle of the knife between two hands.

I dry heave, spitting on the floor, then stagger to my feet. “Ares, aus,” I command. “Drop it.”

He releases Amber’s arm and steps back to sit. “Braver hund,” I tell him and he licks my knee.

Amber falls to the ground, clutching her bloody, gnarled arm, and cries out in pain. “We’re going to wait here,” I tell her, “until my men get back, and if you move a single fucking inch, I’ll have my dog rip your face off, got it?”