The bar top was cold against her cheek.

  She registered that first — the particular chill of lacquered wood, the sticky ring left by someone’s glass pressed against her temple — and then she registered the American accent coming from the man pressing her face against the wood.

  She shifted her head to catch a glimpse of the two men who had confronted her.

  She took them in quickly, the way she had learned to take in threats — whole first, details after.

  The one with his hand on her shoulder was blond, sharp-featured, with the kind of looks that had probably once defined him and now seemed like an afterthought to whatever else he had become. His eyes were doing something at the edges. Something not entirely human.

  The one standing slightly behind and to the left was darker, shorter, with an expression that had settled somewhere between hostile and calculating. He was watching her the way someone watched a problem they were still deciding whether to solve or remove.

  “Give me one reason,” the voice said again, lower this time, closer, “why I shouldn’t kill you right here and now.”

  The bar’s red light swam at the edges of her vision. Around them, the nearest cluster of patrons had quietly redistributed themselves elsewhere, with the practiced efficiency of people who knew when something was about to happen and had decided, reasonably, not to get involved.

  She breathed in through her nose.

  “Because,” she said, with considerably more steadiness than the position warranted, “I’m not fighting back.”

  A pause. The pressure of his claws did not increase, but it didn’t retreat either. They simply stayed on her shoulder, dripping venom onto her shawl.

  “That could mean a lot of things.”

  His eyes had gone fully inhuman now, burning with a brightness that had nothing to do with the red lighting of the bar. They were different than the steel blue of the other one — almost reptilian.

  Eliza looked at him quizzically for a moment, and then she took a chance. “Because I know what you are,” she said — not accusatory, just factual. “A killer… and a kanima.”

  The man behind him bared his teeth, razor sharp and vicious. “And I know what you are,” he growled. “Lucien Nox’s whore.“

  “Actually,” she said, flashing the ring on her left hand behind her, “I’m his wife.”

  The man holding her against the bar retracted the claws on his free hand and grabbed hers, studying the ruby ring.

  “Although if you know the whole story,” she added as he turned her hand in the light, “I suppose there’s not much of a distinction.”

  “A binding ring,” he observed, casting a weighted glance in his companion’s direction.

  “What does that have to do with being a kanima?” the shorter one asked.

  “I know what a kanima is,” she said quietly, her voice barely rising above the electronic music pulsing throughout the building. “I know what it means to be made into something by someone else’s will. To have your body act without your consent. To come back to yourself afterward and have to live in the wreckage of what was done in your name.” She held his gaze steadily. ”I am not comparing our circumstances. I’m saying I recognize the shape of what you’ve carried. And I am asking you to consider that what I have to say might be true.”

  She slowly raised her head and was almost surprised when the man retracted his claws and allowed her to stand. She turned slowly to face them. The energy around him had changed, like she had struck a chord to a sad song he hadn’t heard in a while.

  “Who are you?” the man asked. “What’s your name?”

  A pause.

  “You first,” Eliza challenged.

  The man stared at her for a few moments before rolling his eyes. “Jackson.” He said it with the same sort of pride Eliza had grown accustomed to during her time with Lucien. “That’s Ethan.”

  Another pause.

  “Eliza Lovelace.”

  Ethan narrowed his eyes.

  “She’s lying.”

  Before she knew what was happening, Jackson wrapped a long, reptilian tail around her throat. His grip wasn’t strong, but it was enough to feel threatening. “Eliza Lovelace?” he said, letting out a snicker. “Sounds like a stripper name. What, did you decide to leave your husband in your big Parisian castle and become a stripper?”

  “I’m not buying it,” Ethan said with a smirk.

  Eliza looked to the ground and took a deep breath. She exhaled slowly. “Lucien called me Elizabeth,” she admitted. “Elizabeth Bloodworth.”

  Jackson exchanged another look with Ethan, then looked back at Eliza with an annoyed expression. “Is that supposed to mean something to me?” he asked.

  Eliza looked at him with a mixture of surprise and relief. “With the way Lucien made it sound,” she said, “yes. I thought I might.”

  She reached up slowly and removed the tail from her throat herself, setting it aside with the careful neutrality of someone handling something dangerous and choosing not to treat it as such. Jackson let her.

  “Can you blame us for not knowing?” Ethan asked with a laugh that bordered on bitter. “Your kind is secluded. Secretive. Sure, we hear rumors, but…”

  “Nothing conclusive,” Jackson finished for him.

  “The only reason we know who your husband is,” Jackson said, “is because he came in here, with you, six weeks ago and massacred anyone who couldn’t escape. We’re lucky to be alive.”

  “Lucien Nox,” Ethan continued, “heir to one of the oldest, most powerful witch bloodlines in Europe. A dark practitioner possessing the rare gift of --”

  “Mind manipulation,” Eliza finished for him, “and possession. Hence why you can’t hold me accountable for what happened here.”

  Ethan and Jackson exchanged one of their wordless conversations — the kind that had clearly been refined over years of proximity, entire negotiations conducted in the span of a glance.

  “Why should we believe you?” Jackson asked.

  Eliza stepped closer so that her face was only inches from his. “Does it sound like I’m lying?” she asked quietly.

  Jackson studied her for a moment, his jaw set.

  Eliza took a step back.

  And then, she began:

  “Like the Nox family, the Bloodworth line is one of the oldest and most powerful witch bloodlines. My parents were Bloodworths. Were,” she repeated with the particular flatness of a fact that had long since stopped being news to her. “Witch hunters killed them when I was a baby, then took me to raise as their own.” The ghost of a smile floated across her lips. It didn’t quite reach her eyes. “My name was Eliza Boucher.”

  “Boucher,” Jackson repeated. “That’s French for butcher.”

  “Born to killers. Raised by killers,” Ethan summarized. “You’re not making a very good case for yourself.”

  “Nous chassons ceux qui nous chassent,” Eliza said softly. “Something I saw on a pendant in my dad’s study once. It means —“

  “We hunt those who hunt us,” Jackson finished for her. “It’s the hunter code — or it used to be.”

  “There’s a new movement,” Ethan explained. “Led by one of the oldest hunter families in the game — and his new protégé. They threw the code completely out the window. Now it’s just kill them all.”

  Eliza sat with this for a moment.

  “Well, my parents didn’t raise me as a killer. They raised me as human,” she continued. “No knowledge of the supernatural, no knowledge of what I was, no knowledge of what they were — what they really were. I thought I had a normal family. I thought I had a normal life.”

  “So what happened?” Jackson asked with an air of impatience that she was beginning to associate with him.

  “When I was sixteen, my powers began to manifest. That’s the same for all witches, on their sixteenth birthday,” she explained. “Small things at first. Objects moving. Plants growing or dying when I touched them. Dreams that weren’t really dreams.” She glanced down at the ruby ring on her finger briefly and then back up. “And then Lucien found me. He came for me on my sixteenth birthday. Eight years ago today.”

  Ethan shot Jackson an uneasy look.

  “You ran away with him?” he asked.

  “No,” Eliza sighed. “I wish it were as simple as that. He found me, because my birth parents had promised me to his family before I was born. An arrangement between bloodlines — the families wanted an heir that possessed both of our gifts.”

  Jackson looked at her with an annoyance she determined must be routine for him. “And your gift would be?” he asked.

  Eliza hesitated. “Life absorption. Resonance drain. I feed off of life force. Emotions. The stronger the emotion, the stronger my power,” she began. “But it comes at great cost. It must be controlled. Respected. The Nox family, their followers — they don’t care about the cost of anything.”

  Jackson and Ethan exchanged another look.

  “What happened to your parents?” Ethan asked. “The hunters.”

  Eliza looked down at her untouched glass of whiskey. “He killed my parents. He killed my boyfriend,” she said. “He killed them all.”

  “Well,” Jackson began, “this certainly has been — depressing. But it begs the question — what are you doing here?” His eyes narrowed to slits and flashed in the red light of the bar. “You leave your psychotic husband because he doesn’t respect your power and show up to the werewolf bar he attacked six weeks ago. Why?”

  Eliza picked up the glass of whiskey just for something to do with her hands and looked back and forth between Jackson and Ethan as she spoke.

  “The attack on Nocturne — that was a message from Lucien,” she explained. “It was a message to me just as much as it was a message to the patrons of this bar. About… all of our places in his world.” Her eyes grew distant. “I don’t expect you to care about what he did to me —“

  “Good,” Jackson said.

  Ethan shot him a disapproving look, then turned his attention back toward Eliza.

  “But I know you’ll care about what he’s planning for you. All of you,” she said.

  This caught Jackson’s attention. He gestured for her to go on in that hurried way of his.

  “To him, werewolves are just another dumb animal to be corralled, controlled, and slaughtered. The same goes for humans.” She paused for a long moment, letting this sink in with the full weight it deserved. “Lucien envisions a supernatural hierarchy, with witches at the top and humanity enslaved. And he intends for me to rule this new world by his side.”

  She tugged at the ruby ring on her finger, the permanent reminder of his claim on her.

  “That’s awfully narcissistic of him,” Ethan observed wryly.

  “This isn’t just some vanity project,” Eliza said. “He’s been moving pieces into position for years. The attack on Nocturne was one of them. London is one board. There are others.”

  The silence that followed was heavier than the previous ones.

  Jackson looked at her for a long moment — really looked, with the stripped-back directness of someone who had decided that whatever social machinery usually filtered that kind of gaze was not worth the effort tonight.

  “You’re not going to find what you need in London,” he said finally.

  Eliza waited.

  “You need Beacon Hills.”

  She stared at him blankly.

  “Is that name supposed to mean something to me?” she asked.

  “It’ll mean something to Lucien,” Jackson said with pride and conviction. “It’s in California. It’s my hometown. It’s where I was turned. It’s where… well, it’s where a lot of things happened. Most importantly, it’s where this new hunter movement began. With the Argents. With Scott McCall.”

  She didn’t say anything. She let him continue at his own pace, because she could see that he was deciding something in real time and interrupting it would cost her.

  “Scott McCall is an alpha,” Jackson continued. “A true one. Which is… rarer than it sounds. He built his pack out of nothing. Humans, wolves, whatever needed a place to be. And he has a history of —“ He paused, and something briefly crossed his face that she couldn’t quite name. “Doing things that weren’t supposed to be possible. Defeating things that were supposed to be unbeatable.”

  “He leads with trust instead of force,” Ethan said. “Which sounds idealistic until you’ve watched it work.” A pause. “It works.”

  Eliza turned the name over in her mind. Scott McCall. California. An ocean and a continent away from everything she had ever known, every ghost she carried, every address Lucien had filed under her name.

  Which, she supposed, was precisely the point.

  But she couldn’t help but feel a tightness in her chest. “How do I know this isn’t a trap?” she asked. “How do I know this isn’t some elaborate setup to get me closer to Beacon Hills so your alpha can repossess Lucien’s weapon?”

  Jackson and Ethan shared another one of their wordless glances, one that seemed to say she’s asking the right questions.

  Jackson studied her for another long beat, weighing something behind his eyes — not just whether she was telling the truth, but whether bringing her into Scott’s orbit would detonate something none of them were prepared for.

  “First of all, Scott’s not our alpha,” Jackson said. “Our alpha was killed in your husband’s little move here six weeks ago.”

  “We think Lucien possessed him,” Ethan explained. “Made him attack an allied pack. They either killed him in self-defense, or they were possessed, too.”

  “Second of all,” Jackson continued speaking as if Ethan had never said anything at all, “if Scott lets you anywhere near his pack, he’ll expect you to fight.” He said this more carefully. “But if what you’ve said about Lucien is true, he’s going to be your biggest ally against him. And if you’re lying — if this is just some elaborate setup for Lucien to get closer to Scott’s pack — then Scott won’t hesitate to act.”

  “Act how?” Eliza asked.

  Ethan’s mouth twitched. “You don’t want the detailed version.”

  Jackson didn’t smile. “Scott doesn’t kill unless there’s no other option,” he said. “But that doesn’t mean he can’t neutralize a threat.”

  Eliza held his gaze. “If I were working with Lucien, I wouldn’t be standing here alone.”

  “That’s not an answer,” Ethan said.

  “It’s the only one you’re getting tonight.”

  Silence stretched between them again, but it felt different now — less like a standoff, more like the edge of a decision.

  Jackson exhaled through his nose and reached for his phone.

  Ethan arched a brow. “You’re really going to call him?”

  “I’m going to text Lydia first,” Jackson corrected dryly. “If there’s even a whisper of Nox activity in California, she’ll have already felt it.”

  At the name, something flickered in Eliza’s expression — recognition of power when she heard it.

  Jackson typed quickly, jaw tight. A moment later, his phone buzzed.

  He read the message, expression shifting almost imperceptibly.

  “Well?” Ethan asked.

  Jackson looked up at Eliza.

  “She says she’s been having nightmares for three nights,” he said. “A castle. Fire. A woman with a ruby ring standing in the middle of it.”

  Eliza’s fingers tightened around her hand. The ring throbbed around her finger.

  “What is she?” Eliza asked.

  “She’s a banshee,” Jackson explained, sliding the phone back into his pocket. “And she hates being right.”

  Ethan studied Eliza one last time — not with hostility now, but with wary calculation.

  “You realize,” he said, “Beacon Hills has a habit of turning into ground zero for supernatural disasters.”

  “I’m not afraid,” she said softly.

  Jackson extended his hand — not in friendship, not yet, but in agreement.

  “We’ll arrange it,” he said. “A meeting with Scott.”

  Ethan nodded once. “And if you try anything —“

  “I won’t.”

  Jackson’s eyes flashed faintly — not fully kanima, just enough to remind her what he was capable of.

  “For your sake,” he said, “I hope that’s true.”

  Eliza looked between them, feeling — for the first time in eight years — something dangerously close to hope.

  “When?” she asked.

  Jackson glanced at Ethan.

  “Give us twenty-four hours,” Ethan said. “We’ll talk to Scott. Derek. The rest of the pack.”

  Jackson stepped back, reclaiming his drink as though the confrontation had been nothing more than a minor inconvenience.

  “Don’t disappear,” he said casually.

  “I won’t.”

  Ethan gave her one last assessing look. “Welcome to the beginning of your next problem, Eliza Lovelace.”

  She almost smiled.

  “I’ve survived worse.”

  Outside, somewhere in the city, the night continued its ordinary business, entirely unaware of what had shifted inside a bar with red lights and a bartender who bought rough stones with no qualms about where they came from. Twenty-four hours. An ocean to cross. A pack of strangers who had no reason to trust her and every reason to turn her away.

  She thought of the carved heart in the forest she would never go back to.

  She thought of Liza + Jack, and the girl who had stood there with ink-stained fingers and the absolutely catastrophic confidence that love was enough to keep people alive.

  That girl was gone. She had made her peace with that tonight, in a forest, with her fist between her teeth.

  But perhaps something had survived her after all.

  Beacon Hills, she thought.

  And she let it be a beginning.