Dust particles floated in the stillness, and the red rays of the eclipse made everything glow like it was dipped in blood.
Like we were all drenched in it.
“Personally, I wouldn’t be getting with other people.” She sucked loudly on her pipe. “But that’s just me.”
The calmness I’d experienced while embracing my mates disappeared.
My control snapped.
I said in a menacing tone, “Don’t you fucking dare speak to us.”
I pushed my men behind me protectively as I glared over at Arabella.
She rolled her eyes and turned to the side, like she was trying to make it clear that she was now ignoring me.
Ruby-red lips parted and slowly blew out a cloud of smoke.
A tortured growl escaped my throat at her haughty expression, and flames trailed across my arms.
She arched her brow as she stared at her pipe, then her body sagged. Dainty fingers rubbed tiredly at her forehead and dragged across delicately arched cheekbones. Cuts littered her skin from Lothaire throwing her into the window before she revealed her identity.
Her flesh slowly knit back together and healed before my eyes.
I hated Aran, but I preferred him to the creature in front of me. The pathetic woman.
She was a fucking joke.
Everything about Arabella—the too-pretty face; delicate bone structure; long, curly blue hair—was proof that Aran had never existed.
She had put everyone at risk with her masquerade.
We trained and fought together in life-or-death situations. Our unit was only as strong as our weakest soldier, and in the heat of battle, trust in one another was sometimes all we had.
She’d betrayed us all.
Behind me, my blind mate asked, “What is she doing? Is the slave gloating?”
“No,” Orion whispered quietly to Scorpius. “She’s smoking and looking at her pipe like she’s bored. Now she’s yawning. She looks sad.”
My mates stepped forward and flanked me.
Scorpius glowered. Malice radiated off him like he disagreed with Orion’s assessment. So did I.
In contrast, my gentle mate stared at Arabella with wide eyes.
Orion’s mind worked differently from others. He was obsessive.
Where others showed interest, he fixated.
He stalked.
We’d met Orion when he was standing over us in the middle of the night, watching us sleep. Even after we’d all realized we were mates, he’d still break into our rooms to spy on us.
Unfortunately, he was showing the same signs of obsession with the lying bitch.
His eyes were wide. He stared across the room at her without blinking.
Since he was our Revered, it was my duty as Ignis and Scorpius’s as Protector to keep him safe. The problem was that we were missing our other Protector.
From the way he was watching her, we needed the help.
“Are you sure she’s not gloating about deceiving us?” Scorpius sneered. “She probably loves that she had us all fooled thinking she was a guy.”
Orion kept staring at her without blinking, and he whispered, “She looks exhausted and worn out. Like she’s in pain.”
I snorted. She looked like a stuck-up, lying brat.
From the revulsion on Scorpius’s face, he agreed with me. He could hear and sense things others couldn’t, and his natural distrust of people made him smart.
After all, people in general were pathetic. They were a means to an end.
Scorpius liked their pain.
I liked their submission.
Orion didn’t care about anyone. Until he did. Then things got dangerous.
Across the quiet classroom, Arabella glanced over at us and scoffed.
Flames burned hotter.
My muscles ached from the strain of holding back fire, and I breathed slowly.
Sometimes it felt like the fire controlled me.
I’d never known a single day of peace.
How dare she smoke casually and act unbothered like she hadn’t ruined our lives? How dare she scoff at me?
Lothaire muttered about Dick and a grand plan under his breath. He was lost in his own world.
I used his distraction and stalked over to the corner. My mates followed.
As we neared, I glanced down.
Arabella’s sweatpants were still askew on her hips and showed off a hint of a tattooed chain.
A horrible reminder.
We were tied together.
When we stood a foot away, she glanced up at me with her bloodshot eyes. They were rimmed in dark circles.
She was weak and pathetic.
“Don’t talk to me,” she muttered haughtily, then looked away.
I snapped back, “Don’t tell me what to do, bitch.”
She gritted her teeth and stared at the wall. “I told you not to talk.”
I saw red.
As I sneered down at the worthless woman before me, the broken pieces of my existence played before my eyes like a nightmare.
The circumstances of how we’d gotten into this position were grim.
Everything had fallen apart so quickly.
The sun god had announced a tournament, and all quads of male devils eighteen and older had been required to enter. He would judge our power and name his kings.
We’d tried to get out of competing because we were missing our fourth mate. Our mate bond wasn’t completed; it couldn’t be until an act of intimacy occurred among all mates.
The sun god’s representative had denied our request and ordered us to compete.
Maybe he’d known.
We’d been the youngest competitors by centuries.
The other devils had laughed when we’d entered the registration room. They’d quickly stopped laughing.
The contest had been a massacre.
Our massacre.
We’d walked into the competition, not knowing the limits of our abilities.
When we’d left, we still hadn’t found them.
The power in our veins wasn’t the stuff of legends; it was the stuff of nightmares.
When the god’s representative had crowned us kings, he’d said, “Good does not balance evil in the realms; devil kings do.”
The sun god had named us his executioners. We were the merciless nightmares of a god’s will.
So much power.
So much responsibility.
Yet we were young, missing our mate, and living in pain.
All devils had been ordered by the sun god to attend our coronation, but as we’d stood before the crowd, no mating song had reached out to us. Our fourth hadn’t been there.
Which meant our missing mate was somewhere in another realm.
Technically, ancient texts on mate bonds stated that any species or person could be fated to a male devil. However, in recent history, only male devils had been powerful enough to sustain a bond. We were a strong species. Second to none.
I’d argued with the representative that the sun god should just locate our mate in the realms. He’d laughed in my face and said that wasn’t how fate worked.
I ground my teeth at the memory.
The academy was our best bet at finding our missing mate. That’s what the representative claimed and why we’d agreed to Lothaire’s stupid plan.
They were all full of shit.
In the ten years we’d been training with Lothaire, he’d only found four male devils living in other realms, and none of them were our mates.
Our mating song hadn’t reacted to them.
When Scorpius, Orion, and I had first met, our fires had sung to one another.
It was a low, heady beat: it resembled the pounding of a drum, the crunch of knuckles against flesh, and the thrumming of a violent heart. Whenever I was around either of them, the song got louder.