Page 48

If Malgrave gave you something, it was never a gift.

“He’s real.” My voice comes out thinner than I want it to. “I thought he was a myth. A story sirens tell their daughters to scare them into behaving.”

“He’s real, he’s methodical, and he doesn’t do anything without extracting something in return.” Roxy keeps her eyes on me, and something about that look makes my skin prickle. “Scar’s five hundred years old, Echo. He’s watched empires rise and fall, and he’s seen what happens when Malgrave gets involved in either. He told me that even Raze stays on edge when Malgrave’s around. And Raze doesn’t flinch from anything.”

I try to picture what Roxy just described. Malgrave walking into this clubhouse, putting his hand around Carnage’s throat and taking his voice while an entire room full of creatures powerful enough to tear most things apart stood there and watched it happen.

That’s the part that gets me.

Nobody stopped him.

Not Raze, not Scar, not even the angel who apparently nearly tore through his own shirt when he thought Malgrave was going to touch Carnage. They all stood there because whatever Malgrave could have done if Carnage refused was worse than letting him take the one thing a hellhound was never supposed to lose—his voice.

I think about Carnage in the yard again, opening his mouth and getting nothing. The anger on his face. His hand closing around his throat when his body failed him. Then last night in the garage, when he tried to answer me and that same frustration hit all over again.

Malgrave did that to him.

And from everything Roxy is telling me, taking a hellhound’s voice wasn’t even the scariest thing that man could have done. She glances toward the doorway before she continues, like some part of her still isn’t sure it’s safe to say this out loud even here, even now. “Something that’s bothered Scar for longer than he’s willing to admit. In five hundred years, nobody has ever been able to say who Malgrave actually answers to.”

The kitchen goes very quiet around that sentence, the kind of quiet that presses against your eardrums.

“Every contract he’s ever brokered… every deal, every truce… they all carry his signature. But underneath it, buried in the ink where nobody’s supposed to look twice, there’s a second mark, much older. Nobody’s ever been able to read it. Scar’s tried. Vampires who’ve been alive since before the concept of writing existed have tried.”

My pulse climbs into my throat, thudding hard enough that I swear Roxy can hear it from across the table. “You’re saying he’s not brokering for himself?”

“I’m saying I don’t think he ever has been.” She wraps both hands around her mug like she needs something solid to hold onto. “Every deal that man has ever closed has benefited someone else. Scar always figured Malgrave was playing the long game, that eventually we’d figure out what the fuck he was getting from all of it. But men like him leave fingerprints somewhere. Malgrave never has.”

The room tilts, just slightly, the way the world does right before you understand something you were never meant to.

I think about what I felt in Carnage last night. His voice might be gone, but something is still there, buried deep enough that I only caught it when my siren reached for him.

And there were two different powers inside it.

Hellfire and Holy Grace.

The same two frequencies I felt burned into the ground where the earth had been torn open.

Malgrave put his hand around Carnage’s throat and took the sound away, but what if that wasn’t all he was doing?

My stomach twists. He knew exactly where to reach. Exactly what to take. And if Roxy is right about him never doing anything without someone benefiting from it, then there’s one question neither of us has asked yet.

Who benefited from taking Carnage’s voice?

I look at Roxy. “Fuck.”

Her face tightens. “Yeah.”

Because suddenly punishment doesn’t make nearly as much sense as it did five minutes ago.

This was never about containing Carnage.

Someone wanted what was inside his voice.

I press my palm flat against the table, needing something solid beneath it while the pieces keep coming together in my head. Somewhere down that hallway, Carnage is asleep, or pretending to be, carrying a silence that was never about protecting anyone.

Malgrave took something from him.

Deliberately.