Chapter 5 “What Hunts In the Dark,”

“Chapter 4: What Hunts In the Dark,”

────── ꕥ ⋅ IVORY ⋅ ꕥ ──────

I didn't go inside.

I know he told me to. I know locking myself in some safe room was the smart choice, the obedient choice, the choice that wouldn't get me killed.

I stood at the edge of the garden instead and watched him disappear toward the front gates like the night had opened up and swallowed him whole.

Something screamed in the distance. Not human. Low and guttural, more animal than anything, and it made every hair on my arms stand up at once.

"Ivory."

Delphine appeared out of nowhere, gripping my arm hard enough to bruise. "Inside. Now. This isn't a request."

"What's out there?"

"Wolves." She said it like the word cost her something. "Rogue ones. Not his pack, not any pack loyal to him. Someone sent them."

"Sent them for what?"

Her eyes flicked toward the gates, toward the dark, toward wherever Rage had vanished to. "For you, probably. Or to send him a message. Either way, you need to be inside four walls right now."

She dragged me through the house faster than I could argue, down a hallway I hadn't seen yet, into a room with steel reinforced doors that looked nothing like the rest of the mansion's soft, expensive elegance.

"What is this place?"

"Panic room." She shoved me inside and started closing the door. "Stay here until someone comes for you."

"Delphine, wait, is he going to be okay?"

Something crossed her face, quick and unreadable. "He's survived four hundred years of people wanting him dead, Miss Marwood. He'll survive tonight."

The door sealed shut with a heavy metallic sound that made my stomach drop.

I was alone.

---

I don't know how long I sat there. Long enough for my hands to stop shaking and start again twice over. Long enough to hear, faintly, sounds that might have been fighting somewhere far above or beside me, muffled through steel and stone.

When the door finally opened, it wasn't Delphine.

It was Rage, and he looked like hell.

His shirt was torn at the shoulder, blood soaked through it, dark and spreading. There was a cut above his eyebrow already healing itself closed as I watched, the skin knitting back together in real time like something out of a nightmare.

"You're hurt." I was up and moving before I could think about it.

"I'm fine." He caught my hands before they reached him, careful despite everything. "It looks worse than it is."

"That's a lot of blood for fine."

"I heal fast." A tired, humorless almost smile. "Perks of the job."

"What happened? Who sent them?"

He was quite a beat too long.

"Rage."

"Someone who wants me distracted," he said finally. "Someone who's heard I bought a human at auction and decided that made me vulnerable."

"Vulnerable how?"

"A weakness they can use against me." His eyes found mine, and something in them looked almost apologetic. "You, Ivory. You're the weakness."

The word landed heavier than I expected.

"So I'm a liability now."

"That's not what I meant."

"It's exactly what you meant." I pulled my hands back, wrapped them around myself instead. "Great. So not only am I a blood bank with a lease, I'm also a target."

"I won't let anything happen to you."

"You can't promise that."

"I can," he said, low, certain, the same tone he'd used the night he bought me. "And I intend to keep every promise I make you, starting with that one."

I wanted to believe him. That was the terrifying part. Some starved, desperate corner of me wanted to believe him so badly it scared me more than the wolves outside ever could.

"Who was it," I asked again. "Really."

He sat down slowly, wincing, on the edge of a bench built into the panic room's wall, and for the first time since I'd met him, he looked less like an immortal predator and more like a man who'd been fighting a war for a very long time and was tired of it.

"There's a council," he said. "Vampire council. Ancient rules, older laws, the kind of politics that decide who lives, who feeds, who's allowed to exist without permission. My family sat on that council once. My sister and I both had seats."

"The one whose garden—"

"Yes." He didn't elaborate, and I didn't push. "The council didn't like what she was. What we both are. And they made an example of her to remind the rest of us what happens to things they consider unnatural."

"What are you? You never actually told me."

His eyes lifted to mine, steady, waiting to see if I'd bolt.

"I'm a hybrid," he said. "Vampire and wolf both. Something the council believes shouldn't exist. Something they've spent centuries trying to make extinct."

The word hybrid settled over me slow, heavy, rearranging everything I thought I understood about the man who'd bought me two nights ago.

"And they sent wolves after you tonight because—"

"Because word travels fast in my world, and someone decided a human bound to me by contract was worth testing." His jaw tightened. "They wanted to see if I'd protect you. If I'd bleed for you."

"Did you?"

"Enough to matter." He held my gaze. "Enough to prove I would again."

Silence stretched between us, thick with everything that had happened in the garden before the phone rang, everything neither of us had said out loud since.

"This is more dangerous than I signed up for," I said quietly.

"I know."

"You should have told me all of this before I signed anything."

"You're right." He didn't argue, didn't defend himself, just accepted it plainly. "I was afraid if I told you the truth, you'd never have signed at all."

"Maybe I wouldn't have."

"Would you undo it now? Knowing everything?"

I opened my mouth to say yes.

What came out instead, quiet, honest, terrifying, was, "I don't know."

Something in his face shifted at that, something that looked almost like relief.

"That's fair," he said. "That's more than I deserve, honestly."

I sat down beside him on the bench, close enough that our shoulders nearly touched, and for a long moment neither of us said anything at all.

"Rage."

"Yes?"

"Is it going to happen again? Tonight, I mean. The wolves."

He was quiet a beat too long before he answered.

"I don't know," he admitted. "But I promise you this. Whatever comes for you next, they'll have to go through me first."

Somewhere above us, faint through the steel walls, I heard another howl split the night open.

Closer this time.

────── ꕥ ⋅ ꕥ ──────