When Valentine’s sire is forced to take a mate by his Clan leader, Valentine is reduced to stoking the castle’s furnaces as nothing more than a cindered servant to the new matriarch. With his sire Libertine incarcerated and Valentine forced to wear a cursed collar, there seems no way to escape Belladonna’s hold on them. When a stranger appears, Valentine is surprised by how quickly he trusts the other vampire. He accepts the request to go to the castle of his Clan Lord, the ancient and powerful Hades, to uncover who is working to overthrow him. His reward is freedom for both him and his sire. No one is meant to know who he really is, and Valentine pretends he’s one of Hades’ favorites while in the castle, adopting the name Cinder and playing his Seductive nature to its full. But his world is shaken to its core when Valentine finds himself falling for the enigmatic Cole. As a Seductive, Valentine never imagined he’d want an Alpha Predator as a mate. Worse yet, it may be that Cole could be the very one he’s been sent to uncover. When the battle for dominance begins, where will Valentine’s loyalty lie?

Cinis

“You’d best mess your hair and face up.” Arsen rubbed his hand in a pile of cinders and daubed it gently onto Valentine’s face. “Both look too clean for someone stuck down here. Whatever happened at Hades’ castle? I was panicking. I thought I was going to have to physically track you down.”


“I just got…my eyes opened to the cruelty of Alpha Predators. They all think we’re all just playthings or prey.”


“Did someone hurt you, Valentine?” Arsen bristled, his shape shifting again, becoming bulkier and his voice deeper.


“Not where it counts.” Valentine could hardly confess to being heart broken. Not when Arsen had fallen in love with gargoyles who didn’t have human forms. “Someone I thought I could trust seems to be in on the conspiracy. Honestly, Arsen, I hate it. I don’t know who to trust.”


“You can always trust me.” Arsen gripped Valentine’s arms tightly. “If you need me, send one of the gargoyles. Ah, hell fire and damnation. The talisman.”


Chapter 29