All Chapters of BLOOD & RHYTHM: Chapter 21 - Chapter 30

The moment of hesitation cost me. One second I was standing between them—Alexander with his desperate love, Markus with his poisoned truths—and the next, something flew through the broken window. Fast. Too fast to see. Too fast to dodge. The cross struck my shoulder. Not hard enough to pierce—it was the flat of it, not the tip—but the silver burned. Oh God, it *burned*. I screamed, stumbling backward, my hand flying to my shoulder where the metal had seared my skin through my shirt. 

The journal was thicker than I'd expected. Alexander had given it to me hours ago, but I hadn't been able to open it again after that first glance. Instead, I held it in my lap, my fingers tracing the worn leather cover, my mind racing with possibilities I wasn't ready to face. "You don't have to read it now," Alexander said quietly. He sat across from me, giving me space, but I could feel his presence through the bond—steady, patient, waiting. "Yes, I do." I took a deep breath. "If I don't do it now, I never will." 

We didn't find Markus. He found us. Three days after I'd read my father's journal, three days of planning and searching and preparing, he came for us in the place we'd let our guard down. The manor. I'd returned to Alexander's side that first night, unable to stay away any longer. The apartment felt wrong now—empty, cold, devoid of the presence that had become essential to my existence. The bond pulled at me constantly, a thread connecting my heart to his, and I'd finally stopped fighting it. 

Markus was gone before I could ask another question. One moment he was there, his words still hanging in the air like poison. The next, he had melted back into the darkness outside the broken window, leaving me alone with Alexander and the wreckage of everything I thought I knew. I stood in the center of the music room, my hands shaking, my breath coming in short, sharp gasps. The Stradivarius lay abandoned on the floor where I'd dropped it. The fire had died to embers. And Alexander—Alexander watched me from across the room with an expression I couldn't read. "Luna." His voice was careful. Measured.

The morning light crept across the music room like something alive, touching the broken glass on the floor, the abandoned Stradivarius, the bloodstains that marked where Alexander had fallen. I watched it move, mesmerized, as if seeing sunlight for the first time. Beside me, Alexander sat perfectly still. He didn't need to breathe, didn't need to blink, but I had learned to read the small movements that meant he was thinking. The slight furrow between his brows. The way his fingers tapped against his knee. The almost imperceptible tension in his shoulders. He was thinking about my father. About promises made and kept. About seven years of watching from the shadows, waiting for a moment that might never come.