I stalk through the doors to Cyrus’ office and fling the first thing my hands find across the room. The glass jar filled with teeth shatters against the far wall.

Teeth. From all the liars who have crossed Cyrus’ path over the centuries.

“This is insane,” I hiss. “This is so damn insane and it just keeps getting worse and worse!”

I seethe, placing my hands on Cyrus’ desk, glowering at its polished surface.

I’m overflowing with anger. With kinetic, destructive energy. I could burn down all the forests that surround me with the heat washing over me.

I look to the side and see Cyrus close the doors behind him. He studies me with those intense eyes as he leans back against the door.

And suddenly, I need an outlet. I need to pour some acid out of me.

Cyrus knows what’s coming. I can see it in his eyes as I stalk across the room. I see his body tense and prepare for it. I see the hunger and excitement alight in his eyes as I close the distance between us.

My hands instantly tangle into his hair and I roughly pull his face to mine. Cyrus’ lips aren’t gentle when they connect with mine, and I don’t hesitate in taking his lower lip between my teeth.

His hands go to my hips and I just don’t have any kind of patience right now. I climb him, assisted as his hands clamp onto my ass and he lifts me. My legs wrap around his waist, pressing myself against him tightly.

A needy, greedy grunt works its way out of my chest, over my lips. I wrap my arms behind his neck, shifting my kisses from his lips to his neck, nipping and sucking as I work my way across his skin.

Cyrus carries me across the office. With a sweep of his arm across his desk, he clears everything from it and lays me on my back across it.

Even better.

He can press himself all the harder into my center now.

We’re both angry right now. We’re both filled to the brim with revenge and spite. And we’re taking it out on one another’s bodies.

And it’s everything.

My hands dig into Cyrus’ shirt, and a moment later, it shreds to pieces. I smile as he meets my eyes for a moment, and I let the pieces fall to the floor.

Cyrus lifts the hem of my own shirt and I let my head fall back and my eyes slide closed as his lips come to my stomach.

“Cyrus,” I moan as he works his way up, pushing the fabric further up my torso as he climbs higher.

“Say it again, Logan,” he growls against my skin.

I fist my fingers in his hair, making sure he can’t escape. “I want you, Cyrus,” I pant. In one quick movement, he splits my shirt, ripping it clean in half. He flings the fabric across the room. “I never wanted anyone else in my entire life. Because every other man was too boring. To calm. To clean.”

Cyrus kisses his way over my bra, up between my breasts. His hand comes to one side of my throat as he licks his way up the other side of it.

“I want a king who can burn down the entire damn world,” I breathe, hardly able to speak through the raging desire inside of me. “I want you, Cyrus.” My hands travel south, reaching for the belt around his waist. Greedily, I pull at it, unlatching the leather. “I want you, now.”

“I will take you, Logan,” Cyrus growls against my skin. I feel his fangs lengthen, and a small prick as they pierce my skin. He climbs up on top of the desk, sliding me forward to make room.

Nearly falling off the edge, I throw out a hand to brace myself, all reason in me gone, replaced entirely by need and desire, when my hand falls to the chair at the desk. And it meets something sharp, and something else wet…and hairy.

Annoyed at the distraction, my eyes momentarily dart to the chair, even as Cyrus undoes my own belt and the button of my pants.

But a scream erupts from my lungs, over my lips.

My hand is smeared with blood.

And sitting on the chair is Cyrus’ crown. And carefully placed in the center of it, is a bloody scalp of snow-white hair.

I know whose it is immediately. Only one member of Court has hair that void of color.

Fredrick.

Confused, Cyrus rises onto his hands, and the moment his eyes meet the scalp bloodying his chair, his face pales.

“Moab,” he breathes.

My lungs are swallowed up by the roiling pit of acid that is my stomach.

Cyrus pulls me to my feet and I walk around the desk, staring down at the white hair on the chair.

I shake my head. I try to speak, but the words get caught in my throat. I swallow once. But my mouth is too dry.

I’m flung back in time, falling through nearly twenty centuries.

“He’s still alive?” I finally manage to speak.

Cyrus reaches forward as if he’s going to grab the scalp of his assistant, but seems to think better of it, instead, crossing his arms over his chest.

“Do you remember?” he asks, “when we interrogated a man over some peculiar deaths? When you wore Edith’s face?”

I nod as I fight the urge to vomit. I do remember. I remember it very specifically as Cyrus interrogated and tortured the man.

“He implied Moab had escaped. That what had happened during that time was him.”

I search my memory for what came after that. But all I can find is darkness.

I know what that means.

It means I died another death shortly after the memory.

“I went to the tomb and confirmed myself,” Cyrus says. “He’d somehow escaped and has been missing for the past 367 years.”

“How?” I breathe. My mind is tracing a path mentally, going through tunnels and secret passages through the castle.

Down into the dark.

Down into the heart of the mountain.

“I still do not know,” Cyrus confesses.

Long ago, long, long ago, Cyrus and I had a son. After he Resurrected, after he forsook us and turned his back against every one of our fears, he went out into the world. And his mission was to create others like him.

He succeeded.

He conceived and different mothers bore him seven sons and thirteen daughters.

In the end it came to the great war. A division split. Those who stood with us, who knew we had to remain hidden, in secret, if we did not wish to be eliminated. And then there were those who sided with our son. Who wanted to take over the world.

Only two of our grandsons sided with Cyrus and I. Dorian and Malachi, the third and seventh sons.

Five sided with their father.

Two were killed.

Two were banished. They left Roter Himmel in shame, and were killed only years later by some of the loyal.

But the other, the first born to our son, Moab—Cyrus never let him escape.

Deep in the castle, down a tunnel that allows not a sliver of light, located behind a locked gate, there is a lightless room.

In the floor, there is a tomb.

It is hewn from the granite of the mountain, a hole only three feet deep and six feet long. There is a boulder that rests over the top of it, so many thousands of pounds that it takes six vampires to move it, inch by inch.

When the war was over, when our son was dead, and the disloyal disowned and chased off, Cyrus took his firstborn grandson, and with his most trusted soldiers, he laid Moab in the tomb and closed it up.

For over sixteen centuries Moab had been trapped in the belly of the mountain.

Vampires are immortal. They cannot die without a stake through the heart, or a beheading—save Cyrus. So he lay in the ground for centuries, starving and withering into desiccation.

But somehow, when I was Edith, Moab escaped.

Moab was the most devoted to his father of all my son’s children. The first born, all he wished for was to help his father rise to power and fame. He worshiped his father.

It was in his very name.

Moab—Hebrew for of his father.

In life, in the horror leading up to the war, Moab had his signature kill proof.

The beheading and scalping of any vampires who stood in his way.

“It seems we have not one enemy to wipe from the face of the earth,” Cyrus says solemnly, “but two.”