Page 85 of Vampire Soldier
Kit lands on the floor of the stage, wet and gasping, one leg back-folded in a way that should never happen. His massive wolf form shudders—a panting, broken thing now, muscles twitching with ragged panic. He tries to move, but all he manages to do is jerk, sending more foaming blood from the jagged opening in his neck.
Malachi doesn’t move right away. He stands in the center of the wreckage, chest heaving. His shirt is in tatters and dark with blood. It sticks to him in strips, clinging wetly to his ribs and arms, torn like offerings left at an altar. Every muscle in his body is tense, carved marble gone living, taut with the effort of restraint—restraint that I can feel tremble as he looks down at the collapsed, twitching shape of the wolf gasping at his feet.
That’s when I see it. The look in Malachi’s eyes.
They glow. Not golden, not amber. But burning red.
Rage and power, coiling in his gaze like comet trails, ancient and terrible and blinding. Like gods moving across the battlefield of old, carving judgment from ruin.
He leaps up on the stage beside Kit, face twisted in rage, fangs extended. “She is mine.” Then he grips the sides of the wolf’s head and wrenches, decapitating him completely.
I can’t breathe. I can’t think. Everything is frozen in time, except for Malachi, who is rising once more and letting Kit’s canine head tumble from his hands. When it lands with a wet, hollow thud, I flinch like it was a gunshot.
And then Malachi looks at me.
His fangs are still exposed. His eyes, that impossible shade of blood rage, pin me to the broken floor between us like I’m the stake that kept him leashed.
He’s all violence and ruin and devotion, standing at the center of a battlefield made of rhinestones and velvet and smoke. His tattooed chest is torn open above ribs that keep rising, keep falling, and I can’t move. I can’t move because if I do, I might fall apart.
I’ve seen fury in a man’s face before.
I’ve never seen a man look at me with murder fresh on his hands and love in his gaze.
It’s not soft. Not the romance-novel swell of violins and velvet roses. This isn’t love built from fairy tales—it’s baptized in blood and bone, in the protective howl of something ancient clawing its way up through his chest.
It’s the kind of love that promises to raze cities for you.
The kind that kills.
Malachi drops to one knee like the fury inside him has burned its way out. His bloody hand scrapes against the wrecked floor as he breathes hard, chest rising and falling in staccato bursts, his head bowed for a long, quiet second. His hair is soaked, dark strands clinging to his temples, and blood drips in slow threads from his collarbone to the floor. He looks like something carved out of wrath turned marble, and still, he kneels like a man who has lost everything.
The silence after the storm is deafening.
I cross to him, unsure how my legs still work, how they haven’t folded under the weight of what just happened, of what I just saw. His fingers twitch against the ruined stage, and when I drop to my knees in front of him, he reaches for me, blindly, like he’s chasing the tether of us in the dark. His bloodstained hand lands on my hip, anchors there as though that touch alone can remind him that he’s still alive, that I still am too.
“Blake,” he rasps. The sound is raw—like something dragged through fire. Not just the scrape of exhaustion or anger. There’s something else. A question dressed up as a warning. A plea.
I bring both hands to his face. His jaw is rigid beneath my palms, his fangs still sharp against his lip. His skin is hot to the touch under the blood, searing and alive in a way that makes my breath vanish. I tilt his face up toward mine, gently, so he doesn’t have to carry anything—not even the weight of his own shame, if this is what he thinks this is.
The red is gone, replaced by exhausted gold. His pupils pull back down to something almost human, the flood receding behind the dam again—for now. But it’s still there, I can feel it. The quiet pulse of his rage and love wrapped together inside him like some steel-forged chain. I don’t flinch. I don’t draw back.
He took a life to reclaim mine. Charlie’s too. Ours.
“Charlie?” he whispers. Tears burst into my eyes.
I lean my forehead against his. The smell of iron clings to him, but I don’t care. “She’s safe.” My own voice is scraped raw. “We’re both safe thanks to you.”
ChapterThirty-Four
BLAKE
We don’t speak much on the drive home.
Not because the silence is empty, but because it’s full. Dense, like fog off the river. One of those deep night silences that presses against the windows, curling around the frame of the Range Rover, humming softly beneath the idle murmur of tires on wet pavement. The street lamps cast thin gold blades across the glass, slicing the darkness into pieces I don’t know how to hold yet.
In the back seat beside me, Charlie is curled in on herself. The seatbelt strap pulls tight across her chest, but she hasn’t moved to adjust it. She clutches my hand in her lap, fingers sticky-slick with rain and sweat. Neither of us lets go.
Malachi’s steady at the wheel; his blood-splattered knuckles pale on the leather, his jaw set with a kind of quiet fury. He hasn’t spoken since we’ve gotten in the car. But he hasn’t closed himself off, either.
