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

Willing to sacrifice himself to protect Seth and his clan Lord, Valentine ducked his head and extended his arms, interlacing his fingers together so that his long, diamond-hard claws aimed at the giant cobra.


However, he didn’t try and spear the great beast. Instead, as it surged down to attack the defenseless Seth, Valentine flew underneath its head and gouged deeply into its most vulnerable flesh.


Droplets of black blood cascaded onto Valentine. The poison it contained burned him and he screamed, but the snake also screeched. Its trajectory faltered, and it struck the ground to Seth’s right instead of the man himself.


A multitude of roars echoed around, and Valentine hesitated as he arced in mid-flight ready to aim again for the cobra. Then he hesitated. Beneath him dragon gargoyles were leaving their plinths. They still looked stone, rather than flesh and blood, but they all came to stand and form a protective circle around Seth.


Chapter 33