This time she kisses me, and there’s nothing brief about it. We don’t pull away until we’re breathless, our lips swollen and our bodies gasping for air.

“I love you,” I tell her one more time. As I do, I slide a finger over her ring—the promise I made to her before I ever had a clue that we were going to end up here.

“I know.” She smiles before holding her hand up between us. “So are you ever going to tell me what you promised me with this beautiful ring I’m never taking off?”

My chest feels tight in all the best ways—and so does the rest of me—at the idea of Grace wearing my ring for an eternity.

I think about telling her. It’s not that I’m worried she’ll freak out—I know now that she loves me and she isn’t going anywhere. But still, I gave her this ring before I’d ever told her I loved her. Before I’d ever even kissed her. Maybe she needs a little more time to get used to us before I tell her what I promised her before we were even an official couple.

“I’ll tell you,” I finally say as I drop one more kiss on her too-sexy-for-my-own-good lips. “If you guess it correctly.”

She narrows her eyes at me. “That doesn’t exactly seem fair.”

“I thought you figured out by now that I don’t play fair.”

She rolls her eyes. “Big, bad Hudson Vega?”

“I don’t know about bad,” I answer. “As for big…”

She pretends to think about it for a second, then says, “I think you promised to never let your ego get in the way.” She gives me a mock-innocent look. “Oh, wait. Too late for that.”

“Next guess?” I ask, grinning right along with her now.

“Hmm, how about you promised to never leave the toilet seat up. Which I would really appreciate, by the way.”

If there’s one thing I can say about Grace, it’s that eternity will never be boring with her. Lucky, lucky me. “We’re going to live a very long time, Grace. I can’t be making rash promises like that.”

“Okay, then how about—” She breaks off as Eden yells to us to get the lead out, that she has places to be.

Grace rolls her eyes. “Dragons always think the world revolves around them.” But her voice is teasing as she starts pulling me up the beach to where Macy and her portal await.

On the way, we catch up to the other gargoyle, who hasn’t spoken another word to us after he gave Grace the Crown. Part of me expected him to run somewhere we couldn’t find him after we freed him, but he has been chained up for a thousand years. It’s hard to imagine there was anywhere he’d really want to go.

And since there’s no way Grace is going to leave him here on this island alone—she doesn’t have it in her to abandon anyone—he’s making the trip back to Katmere, too. At least I think he is. He didn’t say anything, but he nodded when she asked if he wanted to come with us.

Macy’s grin is fierce as we approach the spinning portal and so is Jaxon’s, even as he says, “Don’t rush on our accounts.”

“Believe me, we won’t,” I shoot back, but I’m smiling just as big. Because he’s not dead and neither is his soul, thanks to Nuri. Despite everything, I owe her a debt I can never repay.

“Ladies first,” Jaxon says as he waves Grace toward the portal. She elbows him a little on her way but then turns and blows me a kiss before diving headfirst into it.

And she wonders why she never lands on her feet on the other side…

I make a mental note to give her a heads-up on the problem as I wait for Eden, the gargoyle, and Jaxon to go through. Then, after checking to make sure Macy’s got everything she needs to follow us through, I step into the portal and fall, fall, fall through it.

And can I just say how much better Macy’s portals are than the average? The girl’s got a gift.

After about a minute, the portal ends, and I step through, expecting to find Grace and the others waiting for me. Instead, they’re racing toward the school like the hounds of hell are after them. And maybe they are, considering the forest all around me is burning.

Macy tumbles onto the ground behind me, and she screams as she gets her first look at the devastation burning around us. “What’s happening?” she demands.

“I don’t have a fucking clue.” I pick her up and throw her on my back before fading straight for Katmere’s gates.

Jaxon is already inside, but I get there just as Grace and Eden land. “What’s going on?” I demand as Eden slides the other gargoyle onto the floor, then shifts back to her human form.

“I don’t know,” Grace answers as the gargoyle settles on the entry steps and the four of us race up the stairs.

Macy lets out another little scream as we burst through the front doors to find that the common room on the first floor is completely wrecked. Couches are ripped to hell and back, chairs and tables smashed to bits. Both TVs are broken, and everything else is in pieces. Even the chess table near the stairs is shattered.

Jaxon races back into the room, a wild look in his eyes.

“Where’s my dad?” Macy asks, her voice loud and shrill.

“Gone,” he answers hoarsely. “Everyone’s gone.”

“You mean the students?” Grace asks. “Maybe they went home for break—”

“They don’t go home,” Macy says as she starts running down the hall, screaming for Foster. “Not en masse. Only the seniors leave.”

Grace heads after her cousin, but Jaxon and I exchange a look before racing toward the stairs at a dead fade. We make it to the fourth floor at the same time. He turns left and I turn right, but it takes less than a minute for me to make it down the dorm hallway and back. The doors are all broken or hanging off the hinges, and there’s no one around. No one.

“They’re gone,” Jaxon says grimly. “They’re all gone.”

“Yeah.”

He shoves a hand through his hair. “What the fuck happened? Macy talked to her dad a few hours ago, and everything was fine.”

But my mind is already working, a terrifying scenario playing itself out in my head. “What if everything that just happened was the distraction?”

Jaxon’s eyes narrow as he looks around, arms up. “But what is this supposed to be distracting us from?”

“No, not this. I meant on the island, with the Crown. I wondered why the wolves never joined the fight until the very end, and now I think we know why. What if the island was the distraction and this…” I look around at the claw marks in the walls, the broken lights and torn-up banisters.

“This was the main event?” he asks, horror coloring his tone.

I get what he’s feeling, what he’s thinking. People died on that island today. A lot of people. Jaxon himself is only alive because Nuri sacrificed her dragon for him. For that kind of carnage, that loss of life, to be nothing more than a distraction?

Eden comes racing up the stairs. “We found Marise.”

“What?”

“Grace and Macy are with her in the infirmary. She’s the only one we’ve found so far—”

I take off, jumping down the stairs and landing on the foyer floor. I’m about to fade to the infirmary when the front door bursts open again.

I whirl, prepared to fight, but it’s just the Order and Flint finally arriving.

“What the fuck?” Mekhi demands as they lay Luca’s body on the floor and cover him with a fallen blanket. “What happened here?”

“Where is everyone?” Byron asks.

“We’re about to find out. Marise is in the infirmary.”

We fade to the infirmary, where we find more destruction. Grace and Macy have turned one of the beds back over and have Marise on it, but the vampire looks weaker than I’ve ever seen her.

“It was your father,” she tells Jaxon and me.

“That’s impossible,” Jaxon tells her. “We were just fighting him—”

“His troops with an army of wolves,” Grace interrupts. “They stormed the school, took all the students and teachers. Exactly as we feared.”

“All of them?” Byron demands, looking around like he thinks a bunch of students are going to pop out of the fucking woodwork.

“Yeah, all of them,” Jaxon grinds out. “There’s no one upstairs, and everything’s broken all to hell.”

“You mean we’re it?” Macy whispers, looking us over one by one.

And I get what she’s thinking. There are ten of us—eleven, if you count Marise. Against all of Cyrus’s considerable forces. Yes, we have the Crown, but that’s all we have.

How the fuck are we going to fix this?

“This is an act of war,” Flint says, and he’s looking more than a little rough around the edges. Mekhi had faded with him here, but now he’s leaning against a wall, his weight on his only good leg.

“The second act of war today,” Byron adds grimly.

They’re right. It is. Rage boils inside me, but I tamp it down, try to think through this whole fucked-up mess. No wonder he wanted Grace, Flint, and me in prison. No wonder he had everyone challenging us for the last few weeks, knocking the shit out of us, getting us grounded.

Of course this was his endgame all along, just as they’d feared. Kidnap the kids of the most prominent members of the Circle. Hold them until you get what you want—total and absolute control of everything. And who’s going to fight you? The parents whose kids you are holding hostage?