Chapter 9

The girl's name is Eliska, and she stops breathing in the back of the stolen car twenty minutes outside Brno.

I'm in the passenger seat when I hear it—not a gasp or a rattle, just the absence of sound where breathing should be. I twist around, see her lips gone blue-gray, chest still.

"Pull over."

Nikolai doesn't argue. The car swerves onto the shoulder, gravel spraying. I'm already climbing into the back before we've fully stopped.

Her skin is cold. Too cold. I tilt her head back, check her airway—clear—and start compressions. Thirty pumps, two breaths. Her ribs feel like bird bones under my palms.

"Come on." Pump, pump, pump. "Don't you fucking dare."

Nikolai appears beside me, his hand on Eliska's throat, feeling for a pulse. His face goes carefully blank.

"How long?" I don't stop compressions.

"Her heart is failing. The repeated draining—her body can't produce blood fast enough anymore. The organs are shutting down."

"So we get her to a hospital."

"They can't help her. Not with this." His voice is soft, that particular gentleness he uses when he's about to say something I'll hate. "There's one option."

I know what he's going to say before he says it. My hands still on Eliska's chest.

"No."

"Sera—"

"She's sixteen. Maybe seventeen. She doesn't get to choose this."

"If we do nothing, she dies." Nikolai's eyes are steady on mine, no persuasion in them, just fact. "If I turn her, she lives. But as something she didn't choose to be. There's no good answer here."

I look down at Eliska's face. The bruises on her throat. The track marks on her arms where they'd bled her, over and over, until her body gave up trying to heal itself.

She'd asked me if I was going to kill her. Back in that warehouse, when I'd cut her restraints, she'd looked at me with those huge dark eyes and asked if death was coming.

I'd told her no.

"Do it."

Nikolai doesn't make me repeat myself. He bites his own wrist, blood welling dark and fast, and presses it to Eliska's mouth. Her body convulses. Swallows reflexively.

"Turn away," he says.

I don't. I watch him cradle her head in both hands, watch his fingers gentle in her hair, watch him snap her neck with the same clinical precision he'd use to open a door.

The sound is small. A branch breaking.

Her body goes limp. Then, slowly, the color starts returning to her face. Not the flush of life—something else. Something that looks like life but isn't.

"How long?"

"Twenty-four hours. Maybe less." Nikolai lifts Eliska carefully, carries her back to the front seat. "We need to get her somewhere safe before she wakes."

I climb into the driver's seat. My hands are shaking. I grip the wheel until they stop.

"Prague," I say. "Luka's place."

Nikolai doesn't argue.

---

Luka takes one look at the unconscious girl in Nikolai's arms and says, "No. Absolutely fucking not."

"We didn't have a choice." I push past him into the apartment. It's smaller than the Brno safe house, just two rooms above a bookshop in Malá Strana. The windows overlook the Vltava, gray water churning under the Charles Bridge.

"There's always a choice." Luka slams the door. "You can't just make new vampires without Consilium approval. They'll kill her for existing. They'll kill all of us for helping."

"Then we make sure the Consilium doesn't exist by the time she wakes up." Nikolai lays Eliska on the couch, arranges her carefully, like she's sleeping and not dead and transforming into something that will wake up hungry.

Luka stares at him. "You've lost your mind."

"Probably." Nikolai pulls out his phone, starts typing. "But we have the evidence. The archive, the photos, the financial records. Everything we need to burn them down."

"You think exposure will stop them? They've survived worse."

"Not like this." Nikolai's fingers move fast across the screen. "Not with proof sent to every major news outlet, every vampire coven, every hunter network in Europe. Not with the Treaty of Shadows in crisis and humans demanding answers."

I watch him work. His face is calm, focused, the same expression he'd worn when he snapped Eliska's neck. Like this is just another problem to solve, another move in a game he's been playing for centuries.

"How long before it goes public?" I ask.

"It's already uploading. Secure server, multiple redundancies. They can't stop it now." He looks up at me. "By morning, everyone will know what the Consilium has been doing."

Luka sinks into a chair. "They'll come for us."

"Yes."

"And you're okay with that? Starting a war?"

Nikolai's smile is thin and cold. "The war started the moment they decided humans were livestock. We're just making sure everyone knows it."

My phone buzzes. Text from Irina: News is breaking. Father knows. He's moving up the timeline.

I show Nikolai the screen. He reads it, nods once.

"Then we move now," he says.

---

The news coverage starts at 3 AM. I watch it on Luka's laptop, volume low so we don't wake Eliska—though I'm not sure she can wake, not yet, not while her body is still dying and remaking itself in the space between heartbeats.

The first headline: "Secret Blood Trafficking Operation Exposed—Consilium Implicated in Human Rights Violations."

Then another: "Treaty of Shadows in Crisis as Evidence of Vampire-Run Blood Farms Surfaces."

And another: "Leaked Documents Reveal Systematic Abuse—Consilium Faces International Outcry."

They use the photos we took. The warehouse in Brno, the cages, the medical equipment. They use the financial records, the shell companies, the names of every Consilium member involved.

They use Mara's name.

I read the article twice. It's clinical, factual, the kind of journalism that doesn't editorialize because the facts are damning enough on their own. "Among the victims identified: Mara Kovač, 19, daughter of Consilium enforcer Viktor Kovač. Sources indicate she was killed after attempting to expose the operation."

My sister's face stares out from the screen. It's her university ID photo, the one where she's smiling, hair pulled back, that stupid peace sign she always threw up when someone pointed a camera at her.

She looks so young.

"Sera." Nikolai's hand on my shoulder. Not pulling me away, just there. Steady.

"They spelled her name wrong." My voice sounds far away. "It's Kovač with a háček. They wrote Kovac."

"We can send a correction."

I close the laptop. Stand up. My legs feel like they belong to someone else.

"I need air."

Nikolai doesn't follow me onto the balcony. Smart. I need to be alone right now, need to feel something other than this numb static filling my chest where grief should be.

The city spreads out below, all Gothic spires and red roofs and the river cutting through like a scar. Somewhere out there, my father is reading the same articles. Seeing Mara's name. Knowing I'm the one who exposed him.

Good.

I want him to know. Want him to spend whatever time he has left understanding that his daughter—the one he didn't kill—is coming for him.

The balcony door opens. Nikolai steps out, hands in his pockets, careful not to crowd me.

"Luka's monitoring the response," he says. "The Consilium is scrambling. Emergency sessions, damage control. Cassia Vex released a statement denying everything."

"Of course she did."

"The hunter networks are mobilizing. They're calling for a full investigation, threatening to void the Treaty if the Consilium doesn't cooperate."

I lean against the railing. The metal is cold enough to hurt. "Will they cooperate?"

"No. They'll try to bury it. Discredit the sources, claim the evidence is fabricated." He pauses. "But it won't work. There's too much, from too many places. And the humans are angry."

"Good."

We stand in silence. Below, a tram rattles past, windows glowing warm against the pre-dawn dark.

"You did this," Nikolai says quietly. "You exposed them. Saved those people. Gave Mara's death meaning."

"Don't." The word comes out sharp. "Don't try to make this noble. I didn't do it for meaning. I did it because I wanted them to hurt."

"I know."

"And it doesn't change anything. Mara's still dead. Those people are still traumatized. Eliska is still—" I gesture helplessly toward the apartment. "Whatever she is now."

"A survivor," Nikolai says. "Like you."

I turn to look at him. His face is shadowed, unreadable in the dim light spilling from inside.

"Is that what I am?"

"What else would you call it?"

I don't have an answer. Don't know if there is one.

My phone buzzes again. Another text from Irina: He's leaving Prague. Tonight. Private airfield, 6 AM. This is your last chance.

I show Nikolai. He reads it, then looks at me.

"It's a trap," he says.

"I know."

"He wants you to come. Wants to finish what he started with Mara."

"I know that too."

Nikolai's jaw tightens. "And you're going anyway."

It's not a question. He knows me well enough by now—knows that I've been moving toward this moment since I found Mara's body, since I learned what my father really was, since I stopped being his daughter and became his enemy.

"Yes."

"Then I'm coming with you."

"Nikolai—"

"Don't." He steps closer, and there's something fierce in his eyes, something that makes my breath catch. "Don't tell me to stay behind. Don't tell me it's too dangerous. Don't tell me you need to do this alone. We're past that."

"Are we?"

"You know we are."

I do know. Have known since he fed me his blood in that warehouse, since he looked at me like I was something worth saving instead of something broken. The bond hums between us, warm and insistent, and I still can't tell where it ends and I begin.

But maybe that doesn't matter anymore.

"Okay," I say. "We go together."

Relief flashes across his face, quick and unguarded. Then it's gone, replaced by that careful control he wears like armor.

"We'll need a plan," he says. "Your father won't be alone. There will be guards, security measures—"

"I don't care."

"Sera—"

"I don't care about the plan. I don't care about the odds. I'm going to that airfield, and I'm going to kill him, and if I die doing it—" I shrug. "At least Mara won't be alone."

Nikolai goes very still. When he speaks, his voice is soft and dangerous. "Don't say that."

"Why not? It's true."

"Because I won't let you die." He's close enough now that I can feel the cold radiating off him, see the way his hands have curled into fists. "Do you understand? I won't let him take you too."

"You might not have a choice."

"Then I'll make one."

We stare at each other. The bond pulls tight between us, and I can feel his fear—real and sharp and utterly foreign on someone who's lived for centuries and seen empires fall.

He's afraid of losing me.

The realization should feel good. Should feel like power. Instead it just makes me tired.

"We should go," I say. "Before he leaves."

Nikolai nods slowly. Doesn't move.

"Sera. After this—after we deal with your father—we need to talk. About us. About what happens next."

"I know."

"Do you?"

I meet his eyes. "One crisis at a time, remember? We kill my father. We survive. Then we figure out the rest."

"And if we don't survive?"

"Then it doesn't matter anyway."

It's not the answer he wants. I can see it in the way his shoulders tense, the way his jaw works like he's biting back words. But he doesn't push. Just nods and steps back.

"I'll get the weapons," he says.

---

Inside, Luka is pacing. He stops when we enter, takes one look at our faces.

"You're going after him."

"Yes."

"You're both insane."

"Probably." I check my gun, count the rounds. Three blessed silver bullets left. It'll have to be enough.

Nikolai is loading his own weapon, movements efficient and practiced. He's changed clothes—black tactical gear that makes him look less like a gentleman vampire and more like what he really is. A killer.

"If you die," Luka says, "I'm not explaining it to the Consilium."

"If we die, the Consilium will have bigger problems." Nikolai slides a knife into his boot. "The evidence is out. The humans are mobilizing. The Treaty is collapsing. They'll be too busy trying to survive to worry about us."

"And the girl?" Luka gestures toward Eliska, still unconscious on the couch. "What happens to her when she wakes up and you're both dead?"

I hadn't thought about that. Should have, but didn't.

Nikolai meets Luka's eyes. "If we don't come back, take her to the Moravian coven. Tell them she's under my protection. They'll honor it."

"Your protection won't mean much if you're dead."

"Then make sure they know she's innocent. That she didn't choose this." Nikolai's voice is hard. "And if they try to kill her anyway, you have my permission to burn their haven to the ground."

Luka stares at him. Then, slowly, he nods.

"Don't die," he says.

"We'll try."

I take one last look at Eliska. Her face is peaceful, almost serene, like she's just sleeping. In twenty-four hours she'll wake up as something new. Something that will have to learn to live with what was done to her, what we did to save her.

I hope she forgives us.

Outside, the sky is starting to lighten. Dawn in an hour, maybe less. We need to move.

Nikolai drives. I navigate, following Irina's directions to the private airfield on the outskirts of the city. It's a small facility, the kind used by wealthy humans and Consilium members who don't want to deal with commercial security.

The kind of place where people disappear and no one asks questions.

We park half a kilometer away, approach on foot. The airfield is quiet, just one small hangar and a runway stretching into the dark. A single plane sits waiting, engines already running.

"There." Nikolai points to a black car near the hangar. "That's his."

My heart is pounding. I can feel it in my throat, my wrists, behind my eyes. This is it. This is the moment I've been moving toward since Mara died.

"Sera." Nikolai's hand on my arm. "Whatever happens in there—"

The hangar door opens.

My father steps out into the pre-dawn light, and even from this distance I can see him smile.