SERAPHINA’S POV

For a moment, I stared at the newcomer without understanding why every instinct in my body made me recoil.

His face was familiar in the way a nightmare became familiar after waking from it too many times.

Beside me, Kieran had stiffened abruptly, tension radiating off him like a shockwave.

His eyes narrowed, and when he spoke, his voice carried a kind of hatred I rarely heard from him.

“Damian Rooke.”

The name struck through me like a blade.

The inn rose in my mind at once: the auction, Mireya’s hollow eyes, the sickening scent of fear and blood beneath expensive perfume.

For one breath, the island disappeared, and I was back in that underground room where cruelty had been dressed in velvet and gold.

My hands curled into fists.

Damian’s smile deepened as if our recognition pleased him.

“Alpha Kieran,” he said, dipping his head with mock courtesy. “Luna Seraphina. I thought Catherine’s little welcome party would slow you down longer, but clearly I underestimated your enthusiasm.”

Kieran stepped forward, the sand beneath his boot compacting under the weight of his Alpha pressure.

“You shouldn’t be here.”

Damian’s eyes gleamed. “I had no reason to be until you interfered with my private affairs.”

The air shifted as his gaze moved from Kieran to me, and I felt the exact moment he stopped performing.

His smile faded, his expression sharpening with sudden, violent focus as he inhaled once, slow and deep.

Then every trace of composure drained from his face, and he seethed with such vicious, ugly possessiveness that my stomach twisted and bile burned at the back of my throat.

“You." His voice vibrated with barely concealed rage. “You’re the one who took her.”

Mireya.

I had stayed with her after we brought her out of that place. I had held her on some nights when nightmares dragged her back into the auction.

I had sat beside her while Alois worked over the tracking curse, had let her cling to me when panic stole her breath, had promised her again and again that Damian would never touch her while Nightfang still stood.

Her scent must have lingered.

Not strongly enough for anyone else to notice in the middle of this battlefield, but Damian was not anyone else.

He was her mate.

The word had never felt more obscene.

“You touched her,” he said, and the calmness of his voice fractured around the edges. “You put your hands on my mate.”

Kieran’s expression turned murderous.

“Your mate?” he repeated, disgust sharpening every word. “You kept her in a cage.”

Damian’s gaze snapped to him, and something dark moved beneath his skin.

“She was mine, and your Luna stole her!”

Damian struck without warning, crossing the distance between us with inhuman speed.

Kieran intercepted him before he reached me, and the impact of their collision tore through the beach with enough force to send sand, shattered shells, and fragments of broken roots spraying into the air.

I staggered back half a step before catching myself.

Kieran drove Damian sideways, but Damian recovered with terrifying precision, twisting out of the blow and striking back with a speed that split the air.

Their bodies blurred through the space between the trees and the shore, each impact sending tremors through the ground beneath our feet.

“He’s been enhanced,” Maxwell growled from my right, voicing my thoughts.

Damian was not like Jack—not swallowed by wild corruption and collapsing darkness—but Catherine’s touch clung to him all the same.

It curled beneath his movements in thin, elegant threads, amplifying what was already cruel in him.

Kieran blocked a strike aimed for his throat and answered with a blow that would have crushed a normal man’s ribs.

Damian slid back through the sand, laughed once under his breath, and came forward again as if pain only entertained him.

“Kieran!” I shouted.

“I have him,” he snapped. Ashar’s fury burned so fiercely that it felt like standing too close to a wildfire.

Another wave of rogues tried to close around us while Damian kept Kieran occupied, and the shape of Catherine’s plan became clearer with every passing second.

She had not sent Damian to win alone. She had sent him to anchor us here, to force Kieran into a fight personal enough to hold him, brutal enough to distract him, and dangerous enough that I would not want to leave.

Brett saw it at the same time I did.

He stepped closer, claws already extending from partially shifted hands. “Go.”

I turned on him sharply. “No.”

Maris moved beside him with both blades drawn, her face calm in a way that made my chest hurt.

“Sera, he’s here to delay you.”

“I know that,” I said.

But knowing it did not make leaving them feel any less like tearing something open inside me.

Brett’s gaze flicked toward Damian, where Kieran had just slammed him into the base of a palm hard enough to split the trunk.

“Then don’t give Catherine what she wants.”

More enemies pressed in from the sides. Maxwell and the others cut them down quickly, but the path toward the estate would close again if we hesitated much longer.

Maris’ voice softened without losing its edge. “Your mother is inside. The victims are inside. Catherine is counting on you being unable to walk away from every fight she throws in front of you.”

For a second, I hated her for being right.

Then I hated Catherine more.

Kieran’s eyes met mine across the chaos. Blood streaked one side of his face, though I could not tell if it was his or Damian’s. He understood everything at a glance.

“Go!” he roared. “I’ll catch up.”

Damian laughed, wiping blood from the corner of his mouth with his thumb. “Will you?”

Kieran’s answer was not words. He hit Damian so hard the sound cracked across the beach like thunder.

Brett stepped between me and the fight, his expression grim but steady. “Maris and I will keep the opening clear. If he tries to follow, he goes through us first.”

Maris’ mouth curved. “And I have no intention of making that easy.”

I looked at them, at the blood on Brett’s arms and the fierce stillness in Maris’ eyes, and something painful pulled tight beneath my ribs.

“Don’t die,” I said.

His expression shifted into something quieter. “We’ll hold.”

It was not the promise I asked for.

It was the only one he could honestly give.

So I nodded once and turned away before I could change my mind.

“Move!”

The team surged with me, cutting through the remaining enemies as we pushed toward the ridge.

Maxwell fell into place on my right while several warriors carved a path ahead, their movements tight and efficient as we abandoned the wider battlefield for the narrower trail leading up through the trees.

Behind us, Kieran and Damian collided again with a force that shook birds from branches that had not made a sound since we arrived.

I forced myself not to look back.

If I looked back, I would hesitate.

If I hesitated, Catherine won.

The island seemed to close around us the deeper we moved.

Palm fronds brushed overhead, too glossy and too still. Flowers bloomed in violent colors along the path, their sweetness cloying enough to coat the back of my throat.

Roots twisted across the ground in patterns that were almost natural until I looked too closely and saw how they bent around hidden lines of warding carved into the soil.

Catherine had made the island beautiful enough to lie.

But beneath the lie, everything suffered.

The trail broke open ahead, and the full structure came into view.

From the beach, the estate had looked like a private paradise built into the ridge, all pale stone, glass, and elegant terraces overlooking the sea.

Up close, the beauty became colder. The white walls were too clean, the windows too dark, the architecture too precise.

Beneath the visible mansion, a lower level had been carved directly into the hill, with a wide entrance hidden between stone columns and hanging greenery.

It looked like the entrance to a luxury retreat.

It felt like the mouth of a grave.

We rushed toward it without pause.

Then the shadows beneath the archway shifted.

I stopped so suddenly that Maxwell nearly collided with my shoulder.

A man stepped out from beneath the white stone entrance.

Dark clothes. Pale face. Dark blue eyes.

Lucian.

For one second, the world tilted.

Not because I was surprised to see him.

After everything, some part of me had known Catherine would place him somewhere we could not avoid him.

But knowing a blade was coming did not make the cut any less painful.

He stood with his hands at his sides, expression unreadable, but his eyes found mine immediately.

Something flickered there, so fast I might have missed it if I had not once trusted him enough to learn the language of his silences.

Apology. Warning. Pain.

Then it vanished.

“Hello, Sera,” he said.

My throat tightened.

“Lucian.”

Maxwell swore softly beside me.

The warriors behind us shifted, preparing to attack, but I lifted one hand.

Not yet.

Because Lucian was not alone.

A woman stood beside him beneath the archway, quiet and still, her presence so magnetic that my eyes slid to her as if pulled by an invisible thread.

She had pale blonde hair styled in a braid crown, framing a face I had seen before, though never in flesh.

Her features were delicate, almost solemn, and her cerulean eyes carried a depth that made the air around her feel colder.

Recognition came slowly, then all at once.

The portrait Lucian kept in the OTS Historical Exhibition Hall, the one he’d stared at, grief in his gaze as he told me about the mate he lost. The mate who still held his heart.

The leash around his neck.

My alleged cousin.

“And you,” I said softly, “must be Zara.”