Back toward the house.
Back toward the restaurant.
Back toward the house.
Her mind — ancient, composed, trained across eons to witness the rise and fall of civilizations without flinching — refused, for a full three seconds, to accept what it was seeing.
The creature was keeping the daughter occupied.The Prince was devouring the mother.
And the daughter did not know.
The mother did not know she was being given.
The creature had chosen this time, this evening, this precise hour, in order to deliver to her master the one woman the daughter had not yet been able to reach.
A mother.
The word struck something deep inside Seraphiel that she had not felt in eons. Every covenant she had ever been appointed to guard — every sacred bond between parent and child, between lover and lover, between hearth and the vow that kept hearths from burning — every single one was being desecrated in the same house, in the same hour, by the same profane hand.
