Saint shut the door behind him, the sound echoing down the hallway. He stood in front of the room he’d locked Aurora in, thinking maybe it would ease the pounding headache he’d been feeling, but instead it only worsened. Two guards stood beside him, faces serious, lips pressed into tight, straight lines, like they hadn’t smiled in five years. He’d trained them to be that way. A guard with a soft heart didn’t live long. Saint remembered that lesson well.
His jaw stayed locked, teeth grinding against each other in pure rage. Aurora had put him through more than enough in a single day, the mall, the escape, the strange messages that had nearly cracked his skull in half from fury alone. Worse still, Marchetti had been quiet the entire time, but restless underneath it, stirring like something trying to claw its way out of him.
He cleared his throat, an itch scratching at the back of it. He assumed it came from all the shouting he’d done at Adrian, and from the exhausting day behind it.
He pulled a cloth from his pocket, wiping his forehead as he resumed walking toward his room, only a few steps from the one he’d locked her in.
By the time he reached his door, the itch had returned, worse than before. He swallowed twice, trying to wet his throat, hoping it might ease. He rubbed a hand against it, dismissing it as nothing. His body did strange things sometimes.
He was used to that by now. For the past ten years he’d learned to live with it. He walked toward Alyssa’s room, the door cracked open just enough to see Nina sitting on the bed, combing her hair with her fingers, humming a goodnight lullaby. He stood there for a few minutes, watching the little girl, trying to push the itch out of his mind.
Saint walked back to his room, loosening the top button of his shirt, sweat trailing down his chest as though he’d just stepped out of the shower. A strange burning sensation began pulling tight across his chest.
He groaned, pressing his palm against his sternum. It had started the moment he left Milo at the underground warehouse, he realized now, an ache he’d barely registered beneath the adrenaline of the day. He’d chalked it up to exhaustion, to the liquor he’d been drinking steadily since leaving Edmund Hawthorne’s house. The anger simmering in his chest now tangled together with the burn spreading through it.
He slumped onto the bed, groaning in pain, almost as if trying to convince himself it wasn’t as bad as it felt. After ten minutes lying still on his back, he got up and went downstairs, telling the guards to release Jules and have Dax take her back to her apartment. He picked up the chain while Dax and the guards carried her out to the car.
Saint climbed back upstairs toward the room he’d locked Aurora in, the chain wrapped around his hand, trying to suppress the pain so no one would notice.
He turned the doorknob, pushing it open slowly, expecting she might have fallen asleep. Instead she sat curled against the wall, exactly where he’d left her. He’d made sure the room was free of anything that could scare her, it was a guest room, since his own room had been torn apart the last time Marchetti broke loose inside it.
The chain rattled under his fingers as his grip tightened around it. Every plan for her punishment that he’d worked out on his way here disappeared the moment he saw her small frame, the tear tracks still dried on her face. His stomach twisted in something close to disgust, like he might gag.
"Meet me in my room." He muttered it quickly and walked straight back to his own, stepping into the bathroom to try to be sick, though nothing came. He gave up and went back to his bed, trying to crack the code Milo had sent him.
A few minutes later, a knock sounded at his door. He didn’t lift his head to check who it was, he already knew. She stepped inside as he tucked the laptop beneath his pillow. She stood there, taking in the room, almost forgetting he was there until he tapped his lap.
"Are you going to stand there until tomorrow morning?"
She stepped forward, tension coiling in her before he hit her with a punishment he hadn’t thought through, one he hadn’t expected to give her even as the words left his mouth. Before he could change his mind, she nodded, forcing a smile onto her face. He watched her struggle to absorb the humiliation of it.
"Get me a drink," he said, dismissive, as if her presence in his room wasn’t stirring something up inside him. She darted out and returned with a glass of water. He drank it while she stood there, eyes wandering the room.
The moment the water hit his throat, the burn in his chest ignited into something violent. The glass slipped from his fingers as he convulsed, a cough tearing out of his throat. Blood hit his palm, dark mixed with thick red. He looked up at her face, panic and confusion written across it, before his vision blurred into darkness as she screamed and bolted from the room.
Aurora’s scream tore through the house loud enough that she heard footsteps thundering toward her before she had time to think. Dax was the first to rush in, pushing past her, followed by Nina, who carried Alyssa on her hip.
"What happened?" Dax’s voice cracked with panic as he dropped beside Saint, hands hovering uselessly over him.
"Umm... umm. I..." Aurora stuttered.
Dax turned a fierce, piercing stare on her that made the words tumble out of her at once.
"I just brought him water. He drank it, and then all of a sudden..." She rambled, her whole body shaking as she pressed herself against the door to steady herself, unable to look away.
More guards flooded in while the nannies hovered near the stairs, straining to catch whatever information they could. Milo appeared moments later, breathless, phone still in hand. He stood in the doorway, mouth open, before his brain caught up with what he was seeing. He darted to Saint’s side as Dax ordered the nanny not to touch the blood.
"We need to get him to the hospital," Aurora said, on the verge of tears.
"No." Dr. Quinn’s voice cut through the room as he pushed past Aurora, the guards, and Milo, who still hadn’t moved from where he stood.
"No hospital. We all know what happens if they run tests on him."
"He’s dying," Milo shouted.
"We can’t say that until we know what’s wrong with him. Get me the first aid kit from my car." He ordered, and one of the guards sprinted off. Aurora stayed frozen against the wall, eyes fixed on Saint’s parted lips as blood trailed from the corner of his mouth.
"What did you give him?" Dax’s head snapped toward her, eyes burning with anger.
"Water. Water, I swear. It was just water. I went to the kitchen myself, I filled the glass myself, I didn’t—"
"She’s the only one who touched the glass." A man in casual clothes spoke up, not dressed like the guards, likely the one who monitored the cameras.
The room fell silent, every eye turning toward her. The silence was worse than if they’d kept questioning her outright.
The guard returned with the first aid kit. Dr. Quinn pulled out a syringe and emptied it into Saint’s upper arm. The convulsions stopped almost immediately, his breathing settling into something shallow but steadier.
"Someone get her out of here," Dr. Quinn ordered.
Two guards moved toward Aurora, gripping her arms before she could argue. She didn’t fight them. She couldn’t. Her whole body had gone numb with shock and guilt. The image of Saint’s blood stayed burned into her mind as they pulled her back into the room they’d first placed her in when she arrived at the penthouse.
Aurora slumped onto the bed, exhausted, her lips quivering with tears and guilt. This should have been the moment to cry freely, yet she couldn’t bring herself to stop even trying to hold it together. She didn’t remember putting anything into his drink, didn’t remember anyone else in the kitchen with her, and yet some quiet part of her still carried a guilt she couldn’t explain, pricking at her chest and twisting like a nail. Her life wasn’t just collapsing in front of her.
She was dragging someone down with her, her abductor, a man who had never once shown her real cruelty, not in the way she’d expected when he first took her. She drew in a sharp, deep breath, closing her eyes for a second as the tears kept flowing freely, before slowly letting herself slip into a trance, an imagined escape she reached for just to change her thoughts, even for a moment.
Her mother’s smiling face came into view, that same sassy smile always resting on her lips, fingers combing gently through Aurora’s hair.
"You’re a rare bloodline," her mother whispered into her ear, her voice calm and steady enough to carry every ounce of pain down the drain.