Jane ’s head went silent as Elain’s words finished sounding in the room.Faith had twisted in her seat, face white with alarm.Jane shot to her feet. “No.”Elain remained in the doorway, her face pale but her expression harder than Jane had ever seen it. “You do not decide what I can and cannot do, Jane .”“The last time we involved ourselves with the Cauldron, it abducted you,” Jane countered, fighting her shaking. She found the words, the weapons she sought. “I thought you didn’t have powers anymore.”Elain pursed her lips. “I thought you didn’t, either.”Jane ’s spine straightened. No one spoke, but their attention lingered on her like a film on her skin. “You will not go looking for it.”Amren said coolly, “So you look for it, girl.”Jane turned to the small female. “I don’t know how to find anything.” “Like calls to like,” Amren countered. “You were Made by the Cauldron. You may track other objects Made by it as well, as Briallyn c

She strained her hands toward him, toward where he’d gone still between her legs. She needed him—now. In her hand or her body, she didn’t care.But Vincent only pulled away. Pulled up, and knelt before her. Surveyed her spread beneath him, her nightgown a bunch of silk around her middle, everything else bared to him. His own feast to devour.“I owe you a debt,” he said in that guttural voice that made her writhe. He watched her hips undulate, and braced his large, powerful hands on either thigh. He waited for her to signal that she understood what he intended. What she’d dreamed of for so long, in the darkest hours of the night.In a choked whisper, she said, “Yes.”Vincent gave her a feral, purely male smile. And then his hands tightened on her bare thighs, spreading them wider. His head lowered, and all she could see was his dark hair, gilded by the lamps, and his exquisite wings, rising above them both.He didn’t waste time with gentle touches and ta

Vincent soared over the trees, riding and shaping the winds to push him onward, faster, their roar negligible to the bellowing in his head. He took in the passing world out of instinct rather than interest, his eyes turned inward —toward that slab of ruined flesh glistening in the candlelight. The gods knew he’d seen plenty of harrowing injuries. He’d bestowed plenty of them on his enemies and friends alike. In the grand sense of things, her back wasn’t even close to some of those wounds. Yet when he’d seen it, his heart had clean stopped—and for a moment, there had been an overwhelming silence in his mind. He felt his magic and his warrior’s instincts honing into a lethal combination the longer he stared—howling to rip apart the people who had done that with his bare hands. Then he’d just left, hardly making it out of the baths before he shifted and soared into the night. Maeve had lied. Or lied by omission. But she knew. She knew what the girl had gone through—knew she’d been a s

The Beak Mob group was the last to fully assemble at the Ferian Gap.As a result, they got the smallest and farthest rooms in the warren of halls carved into the Omega, the last of the Ruhnn Mountains and the northernmost of the sister-peaks flanking the snow-blasted pass.Across the gap was the Northern Fang, the final peak of the White Fangs, which was currently occupied by the king’s men—massive brutes who still didn’t know quite what to make of the Black girls who had stalked in from every direction.They’d been here for a day and Aries had yet to glimpse any sign of the Squadron s the king had promised. She’d heard them, even though they were housed across the pass in the Northern Fang. No matter how deep you got into the Omega’s stone halls, the shrieks and roars vibrated in the stone, the air pulsed with the boom of leathery wings, and the floors hissed with the scrape of talon on rock.It had been five hundred years since all three Mob group s had assembled. There had been

Jane didn’t realize how exhausted she was until all sounds—Levis ’s soft singing from the table, the thud of dough as he kneaded it, the chopping of Luis ’s knife and his ceaseless chatter about everything and anything— stopped. And she knew what she’d find when she turned toward the stairwell. Her hands were pruny, fingers aching, back and neck throbbing, but … Vincent was leaning against the archway of the stairwell, arms crossed and violence beckoning in his lifeless eyes. “Let’s go.”Though his features remained cold, she had the distinct impression that he was somewhat annoyed at her for not sulking in a corner, bemoaning the state of her nails. As she left, Luis drew a finger across his neck as he mouthed good luck.Vincent led her through a small courtyard, where sentries tried to pretend they weren’t watching their every move, and out into the forest. The ward-Swords woven between the ring of megaliths again nipped at her skin as they passed, and nausea washed through her