The elevator doors hissed shut, cutting off the sight of Asher standing in the hallway like a storm cloud. I leaned my forehead against the cool mirrored wall, my breath hitching in my throat. My own reflection looked back at me—pale, wide-eyed, and looking every bit like the prey I had become.
The Aethelgard.
The name felt like a curse. Everyone in the underworld spoke of them in past tense, a fallen dynasty of shadowed enforcers who had been wiped out in a purge twenty years ago. But they weren't dead. One of them had been a friend to me at least. I saw him as such until the night he tried to force himself on a five months pregnant me. He was wearing that ring on that very night. I could still feel the phantom weight of his hand on my stomach, the cold metal of that hawk ring pressing into my skin as I fought for two lives instead of one. How I escaped that incident that night was a story for another day, a secret I had kept locked in the darkest corner of my mind.
