Rachel drank until the living room slipped from her.

Darius's hands were still on her, one at her waist and the other caught against her wrist, but even that became distant as his blood filled her mouth. His heartbeat slowed beneath her lips. His breath broke against her throat. Somewhere beneath the hunger, she knew she was taking too much, yet the knowledge had no strength against the relief rushing through her.

Warmth spread into the hollow places Myus had left behind. The ache beneath her ribs eased, and the cold emptiness that had made her feel half removed from her own body began to soften. The darkness under her skin stirred with pleasure, greedy and alert, taking from Darius as though his blood had woken something deeper than thirst.

His fingers tightened against her.

"Rachel," he rasped.

She heard him, but another sound rose beneath his voice.

At first, she thought it was his pulse. Then it grew too vast and violent to belong to any living body. Water roared through her skull, drowning the apartment, Darius's breath, and the shameful sounds she made as she fed from him.

Mist touched her face.

The taste of blood thinned on her tongue, replaced by cold air and stone. When she opened her eyes, Darius was gone, and a waterfall thundered before her, pouring over black rock in a white, endless fall.

Rachel tried to step back, but her body would not obey.

"No," she whispered, though the water swallowed the word before it became more than breath.

She looked down, searching for the couch, for Darius, for the blood on her hands, but dark stone stretched beneath her bare feet and mist curled around her ankles. Her arms felt empty where he had been. The warmth she had taken from him seemed to slip away, pulled from her by the cold air and the roaring water.

This was not her apartment, yet it did not move like a dream. It held itself too firmly. The stone beneath her feet had weight, the mist had bite, and the water fell with a force that made the ground tremble.

"Darius?" she called.

The waterfall surged.

A cold gust tore through the space, drenching her with spray and whipping her hair across her face. Rachel lifted her arm against it and wished, with the desperate instinct of someone who had no other defence, for the wind to stop.

The air stilled.

Rachel stared at her raised hand as the last droplets settled over her skin. The water still fell, but the violence of it softened, as though the world had lowered its voice at her command.

Then the cold deepened.

It spread through the air and silvered the edges of the fall. White water hardened into ice, the rush slowing, thickening, freezing in jagged veins until the roar thinned into a groan. Sheet by sheet, the cascade locked into place, becoming a wall of crystal that rose before her in glittering silence.

Her right hand lifted toward it.

Rachel fought the movement, digging her feet into the stone, but her arm continued rising. The force drawing her closer did not wrench or drag. It simply waited her out, steady as a tide.

"No," she said again, but her hand kept moving.

Cold bled from the frozen wall before she touched it. Her fingertips hovered near the surface, and pain sank into her bones. She strained against the pull until her muscles shook, yet her hand drifted closer.

A shadow gathered beneath the ice.

It spread slowly, black against the pale crystal, forming the suggestion of a face that shifted before she could name any feature. Rachel did not know its shape, but something inside her recognised the presence behind it.

The Abaddon.

The name moved through her without sound.

Smoke pressed against the ice from the other side, black and thick, rolling upward until it gathered beneath her hand. The wall cracked under her fingertips, and the sound cut through the silence like glass splitting in the dark.

Rachel tried to scream, but the cold stole her breath.

A narrow breach opened in the ice.

Beyond it waited darkness. It did not sit still beyond the wall, but pressed toward the opening, vast and heavy, searching for room. Rachel pulled against the force holding her, trying to tear her hand away before whatever waited there could reach her, but her body stayed fixed before the ice.

Frost crept over her fingers. It climbed in white branches across her knuckles, numbing her skin until her hand began to turn blue. Pain sharpened, then dulled, and Rachel watched the ice claim her as though she had already begun to belong to it.

Then the darkness touched her.

It slipped through the breach in thin tendrils and brushed her frozen fingers. The frost melted at once. Heat moved through her hand and up her arm, rich enough to make her gasp as it entered the hollow places Darius's blood had begun to fill.

Essence.

It was not Darius's. It was not Vlad's. It belonged to no power she understood.

It moved through her with the weight of something ancient and vast, easing the pain beneath her skin and answering the darkness already threaded through her. For one breath, Rachel almost leaned into it.

A hand emerged through the breach.

Long, dark fingers closed around hers, and Rachel's breath caught as the grip tightened. She pulled back with everything she had, but the hand held her through the broken seam in the ice.

Tears blurred her vision. Her body shook against the force holding her there.

The grip softened.

His fingers slid between hers, clasping rather than crushing, and revulsion twisted through the warmth spreading up her arm. He held her hand like he had the right, like fear was something he could wait out.

"Soon, Aphrodite," his voice said from the dark.

The words moved inside her, settling where no voice should have reached.

"We will be together again."

Rachel tried to answer, tried to deny him, tried to say anything that would anchor her to the world she had been taken from, but fear sealed her throat. She managed only a small shake of her head, and the darkness beyond the breach seemed to gather closer.

His thumb brushed the inside of her wrist.

Fire tore beneath her skin.

Rachel screamed herself back into the room.

The apartment returned in a rush of broken glass, blood, and dim lamplight. Pain splintered up her spine as her back struck the floor near the shattered coffee table. The couch sat crooked behind Darius, Vlad's painting loomed from the wall, and the air smelled of copper and rain.

Darius was above her, both hands locked around her wrists as he held her down.

His throat was bleeding in two places, one wound torn from where she had first bitten him, the other still wet from where she had fed too long. His eyes were dark with hunger and fury, but alarm cut through both.

"No more," he said.

Rachel strained against him before thought returned. The hunger was still alive inside her, changed but not gone, and the sight of his blood pulled at her body with brutal force. She tried to rise toward him, shame and need twisting together until she could no longer separate them.

Darius forced her wrists harder against the floor.

"No more, Rachel."

"I..." Her voice broke around the remnants of the scream. "I can't..."

The roar of the waterfall surged again through her ears, and Rachel squeezed her eyes shut as mist seemed to touch her face. Ice flashed behind her eyelids. The memory of that dark hand closing around hers returned, and the pain around her wrists burned hotter.

Darius's grip shifted.

"What are you seeing?" he asked.

Rachel opened her eyes and found him staring at her hands.

Black lines moved beneath her skin.

She stopped fighting.

The pain sharpened, circling her wrists as though something unseen had begun drawing through flesh and bone. Rachel cried out, twisting beneath him, but Darius did not release her until the last line burned into place and the heat began to settle.

Then he let go as if her skin had burned him.

Rachel shoved him back with strength she had not known she had. He staggered into the couch, catching himself against the armrest while she scrambled upright among the glass. Her body shook with the last force of the feeding, the vision, and the thing that had reached for her through the ice.

The burning eased.

Rachel looked down.

A dark mark coiled across her skin. It began at her index fingers, curled through her palms, then wrapped around both wrists before winding up her forearms like twin serpent tails. The pattern ended just shy of her elbows, unfinished and too beautiful, as though some ancient claim had been interrupted before it could close.

Darius had gone still.

"What is it?" Rachel asked.

His eyes lifted to hers, stripped of their usual amusement. "An incomplete bonding mark."

Rachel's chest tightened. "A bond mark?"

"Yes."

"But I'm bound to Vlad, and there's no mark for that."

"Because the bond with Vlad was never sealed by a mark." Darius kept one hand pressed to his bleeding throat, his gaze fixed on the dark coils winding through her skin. "A bonding mark is made with essence. Enough of it to bind the claim into the body."

Rachel looked down at the lines curling from her fingers to her elbows, and the burn beneath them seemed to answer him.

"You're saying someone marked me?"

"Something tried." Darius stepped closer, then stopped before he reached her. "This is incomplete, Rachel, and it still took power. Old power."

Her throat tightened around the memory of the dark hand closing over hers while ice cracked around them.

"Could you have done it?" she asked.

Darius gave a humourless laugh. "After what you took from me? No. I barely had enough strength to throw you off."

Rachel folded her arms over herself, though the mark remained visible beneath her fingers.

"Then where did it come from?"

"That is what I would like to know."

His voice had gone cold.

Rachel lifted her eyes and found him studying her. His shirt was torn at the collar, his throat was bloody, and his face was drawn from what she had taken. He no longer looked like the amused vampire who had waited on her couch and teased her about Vlad's painting. He looked wounded, wary, and old enough to know when beauty had teeth.

"You never left the room," he said. "At least your body did not."

Rachel curled her fingers into her palms, and the mark tightened beneath the movement.

"What happened?" he asked.

"I don't know."

His jaw flexed. "Rachel."

"I don't know."

"You disappeared from yourself. One moment you were feeding from me, and the next your eyes changed, your body went cold, and you stopped responding to anything I said."

Rachel's throat went dry.

Darius's gaze sharpened. "Where did you go?"

She looked away before her face could betray her.

"I don't remember."

His laugh held no humour. "You are a terrible liar."

"I'm not lying."

"You are standing in front of me with a fresh bonding mark crawling up both arms after almost draining me dry, and you expect me to believe nothing happened?"

Rachel folded her arms across herself, hiding as much of the mark as she could. "I didn't ask for this."

"I did not say you did."

"Then stop looking at me like that."

"Like what?"

"Like I'm dangerous."

Darius's gaze moved to the blood on his throat before returning to her. "You are dangerous."

The words landed hard because there was no cruelty in them, only fact.

Rachel stepped back, her heel catching near a shard of glass. "I didn't mean to hurt you."

"No, but you did." His voice stayed controlled. "And when something reached for you, you chose to hide it from me."

"I'm not hiding anything."

"Then tell me what touched you."

Rachel could still feel the Abaddon's fingers between hers. She could still hear his voice inside her, still feel the burn where his thumb had traced the inside of her wrist. If she said it aloud, Darius would go to Vlad, and Vlad would come here, and then he would see the mark, smell the blood, and understand that she had called Darius because he was easier, because some ugly part of her had known he would come when asked and might even bend if she needed him to.

Her stomach turned.

Darius watched her face, and the anger in him shifted into something that hurt more.

"You need Vlad," he said.

"No."

"Yes."

"I can't see him."

"You do not get to avoid him because you are ashamed."

Rachel's eyes burned. "You don't understand."

"I understand enough." Darius collected his jacket from the back of the couch with a stiff, controlled movement. "You are empty, tainted, newly marked by something neither of us understands, and whatever is inside you was strong enough to make you feed from me against my will. If you will not tell me the truth, then I cannot help you."

Panic rose quickly. "You're leaving?"

"I am."

"Darius, please don't."

He reached the door and paused with his hand on the handle.

Rachel hated the weakness in her voice, but fear was larger than pride now. "I'm frightened."

For a moment, she thought he might stay.

Darius stood with his back to her, shoulders tense and head lowered. Blood still shone at his throat. His fingers tightened around the door handle until the metal gave a faint protest.

"What are you frightened of?" he asked.

Rachel looked down at the mark.

The answer waited on her skin.

The Abaddon. The waterfall. The ice. The hand that had held hers like a lover and a captor. The voice that had called her Aphrodite as though it had the right. The relief she had felt when his essence entered her.

She pressed her lips together.

Darius turned enough to look at her. "Tell me the truth, and I will stay."

Rachel wanted to. The need to speak rose hard and sudden, but the thought of Vlad knowing sealed the words inside her. Darius would tell him. He would have to. And then Vlad would come, not because she had chosen him, but because the darkness had left him no choice.

"Please," she whispered.

"Then go to Vlad."

He opened the door and left.

Rachel sank to the floor among the scattered glass, drawing her knees toward her chest as tears slipped down her face. The apartment smelled of blood and rain, and beneath both lingered the scorched scent of whatever had burned itself into her skin.

She ran a trembling thumb over the inside of her wrist, where the burn still lived beneath the skin, and the memory of that dark hand closing around hers rose so clearly that she almost felt his fingers again.

Only hours ago, the Abaddon had been a name given shape by other people's fear, a creature from old warnings, half-buried histories, and Myus's broken answers. She had barely begun to understand what he was, or why every creature who spoke of him did so with dread.

Now his mark was on her skin.

Rachel stared at the dark coils until her vision blurred, the apartment shrinking around her as the truth settled into her bones.

The Abaddon had found her, and if her dreams were true, it was only a matter of time before she ended up like the others.