My gaze drifted to the bottom of my throat, and my breath stuttered. The crescent shaped moon that had once ghosted my skin had vanished with my wolf.

I snapped my attention back up and looked at my eyes. My sapphire-blue irises, sparkling with stardust, stared back at me. Vibrant, humming power swirled in their depths—another world shining through them, as though night and galaxies were reflected within a bottomless chasm.

I stood rigidly, still in disbelief at what I was seeing. So much about myself had changed.

Shuddering, I snapped my attention away from the mirror and retreated to my bedroom. Tessa and I were back in Chicago, and had been ever since hell had been unleashed on my life.

Hurrying to my closet, I grabbed a pair of socks. I had another appointment at the SF this morning that I shouldn’t be late to. Commander Klebus was already pissed at me for going after Jakub alone. I didn’t need to give her another reason to be irritated.

But even though I’d gotten an earful initially, she’d also reluctantly agreed that without Jakub whisking me to his hidden Philadelphia warehouse, the SF never would have found it. Jakub had hidden his lair under so many illusion spells that even the SF sorcerers hadn’t been able to detect it. But my mate had been able to find it through our blood bond. It was the only way the SF and Kaillen had found me and Jakub’s building.

My heart stopped. Kaillen. My Mate.

A humorless smile lifted my lips. I supposed I should start referring to Kaillen as my former mate now.

I swallowed the lump in my throat and whipped a shirt over my head, my fingers trembling when I straightened the hem. I then began hunting for my shoes.

I’d been at the SF office nearly nonstop since the entire ordeal in Philadelphia, in which a new portal had been created, I’d been transported to some other world, I’d unwittingly killed dozens of supernaturals, and the SF had put a stop to Jakub once and for all.

And while those deaths were haunting me, causing me numerous nightmares while I slept and feeling indescribable guilt when awake, I felt even worse because killing all of those supernaturals wasn’t what was haunting me most.

Instead, it was the death of my wolf and broken mate bond. There had been moments in the past few days where that realization had hit me so suddenly that I couldn’t breathe. It’d felt as though I were drowning as I gasped with the knowledge that the wolf I’d grown to cherish in the short time I’d had her, and the man I’d fiercely loved, were both gone.

Klebus had seemed to sense the despair in me. She’d worked hard to find me answers to what had happened. From what the SF had learned, it was my otherworldly powers activating to their full potential that had destroyed my wolf, as though the connecting portal’s power—those other octopus arms I’d felt—had sensed my wolf and obliterated her foreign presence. And once she was gone, it’d given my otherworldly powers even more room to grow.

Klebus hadn’t commented yet that I’d been a female supernatural with a wolf inside her—although I could tell that she had put two and two together as it explained how I’d broken the blue cuffs while I’d been at Tessa’s safe house. The commander obviously knew something had happened between Kaillen and me to create my wolf, but she had yet to ask, and I had yet to volunteer it.

I had a feeling my pain was written across my face for her to see, and even her shrewd non-beating vampire heart had been moved by it enough not to pressure that information from me.

But despite all that I’d lost, and how hard we’d fought to stop Jakub—we hadn’t.

The SF database had indeed confirmed that Jakub and his cohorts were members of the European mafia. It was why he’d had so many supernaturals at his disposal since that organized crime ring was huge. And it also explained how he’d still achieved his goal even though we’d eventually caught up with him. Because inside that concrete room in Jakub’s hidden warehouse, a shining and brand-new turquoise portal waited. A portal to a world nobody had ever heard of, yet was a world I was somehow tied to and Jakub had known existed.

Commander Klebus had told me on day two that opening the portal had been Jakub’s goal all along. During one of his interrogations, he’d told her “they” were still coming, and that he would be rewarded for what he’d done. As if that’d made his capture by the SF worth it. As though that justified those twelve innocent supernaturals’ deaths—deaths that now rested on my consciousness and had caused me numerous nightmares.

But following that admission, Jakub had stopped answering the SF’s questions. Commander Klebus said that now he was simply waiting.

But waiting for what?

My hands felt clammy as I tied my shoes.

It still tugged at me, that visit to the other realm, as though something was beckoning me to return to that concrete circular room and venture once more to that desolate planet.

I shook my head, shrugging off these strange new instincts. It shouldn’t be possible. It should all have been a dream, but it wasn’t. And inside me, as much as I was trying to fight it, a deep instinct had awoken, and my forbidden and awakening magic now breathed like fire in my veins, no longer contained or caged, but free and so much more powerful.

I fingered my new tattoo again, then slipped a jacket on.

A part of me knew that my awakening magic and forbidden power had been born from that world I’d visited, that they were remnants of an ancient time from long ago. It was why Jakub had called me the key. He’d known that the powers inside me had been the way to open the gateway to whatever that realm was I’d visited. Because my powers had most definitely come from there. I’d felt it and seen it, when those tentacles had reached through the void and clamped onto me, as though a mother were welcoming her child home.

I shuddered just thinking about it.

“Are you ready?” Tessa called to me from the living room. A second later, she appeared in my doorway, her expression solemn. She also had her jacket and shoes on. “You know, he stopped by again this morning, asking to speak with you.”

My entire body stilled as I pictured Kaillen at our front door. “You told him I was busy, right?”

She twisted her hands. “I did, but he still knew you were here.”

I lifted my eyes to my dresser’s mirror and gazed one last time at the exploding stars in my eyes. “He made his choice,” I said simply. “A clean break is the best way to deal with this.”

Tessa took a deep breath, pain evident on her face.

I knew that my heartache was written all over my expression. Despite trying to hide it and pretend that I was fine, she could see everything.

But it was, what it was.

After Klebus had taken me out of Jakub’s warehouse, Kaillen had returned to the fae lands to check on Barnabas and Fallon. Apparently, Jakub had been able to sense them in the forest, with whatever powers he’d harvested from his zombie supernaturals that had given him such extreme magic. He’d knocked all three of them unconscious with his stolen power, not an easy feat to do to someone such as Kaillen, but that was why their power had diminished in those final moments and I hadn’t been able to use it to see Jakub through his cloaking spell.

But the hunter had woken first, healing faster than his friends, so he’d transported back to earth to rally the SF before they’d stormed Jakub’s warehouse while Barnabas and Fallon remained unconscious in the fae lands.

I didn’t fault Kaillen for returning to check on his friends right after what had happened in that warehouse, not at all. But what hurt so damned much—what hurt so intensely that I couldn’t breathe every time I thought about it—was how he’d looked at me in that room. With such finality and grief. As if he agreed with his wolf and thought his mate was dead, even though I’d been standing right in front of him.