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The agent’s eyes darted to her for only a fraction of a second, as though to gauge her sanity—or lack thereof. “You need to step aside, Frau Roth. I have specific orders here. I mean to carry them out.”

Specific orders to kill Andreas on the spot.

The realization sank into her consciousness like poison. They were a death squad, just as Andreas knew they would be. Wilhelm had called for his death. Not only that, but he would have his men kill Andre in cold blood, right in front of her.

The agent’s voice was lethally cold now, and in the narrowing distance outside the bedroom, more agents were making a swift climb up the stairs.

“Step aside, Frau Roth. I’m afraid I can’t ask you again.”

The rifle came closer, a very convincing threat. She had no intention of cooperating with the agent, but in that next instant she sensed, rather than saw, Andreas’s arm come up and around her to reach for the weapon with blinding speed. Heat traveled all along her side with the movement, sending out an electrical current that vibrated deep in her bones.

Andreas locked his fist around the gun’s barrel. His arm was glowing with heat that radiated down to his fingers in rings of pulsing white-hot light. The energy leapt from him and onto the rifle in bright undulations.

Instantly, the agent’s eyes went wide. His head lolled back on his shoulders and his body went into a violent spasm that made his teeth clatter. Claire smelled burning skin and hair. Sickened, she looked away as the Breed male dropped to the floor and convulsed from the sudden dose of lethal power. Before he was dead, another agent came racing into the room, his weapon at the ready.

“Claire, stay back!” Andreas roared at her.

At that same instant, he threw off more heat and light, expelling it like a cannonball that materialized out of the palm of his hand. He threw the orb of fire at the newly arrived agent, killing him on the spot. Flames erupted all around. Fire crept up the far wall and onto the ceiling.

Andreas shot a fierce look over his bleeding shoulder to where Claire stood behind him, awestruck by the terrible power he possessed. “Come on. We have to get out of here.”

She followed him out of the burning room and onto the second-floor landing. Two more agents were scrambling up the stairs to head them off. He stopped them halfway there, unleashing twin fireballs that exploded like bombs, tearing a hole in the silk-papered wall and taking a large bite out of the curving wooden staircase.

As they navigated to the ground level, Claire stayed close to him—but not too close, mindful of the searing energy that rode every inch of his body. When she got so much as a foot away from Andreas, his heat was overwhelming. The incinerating glow that had covered him in the woods last night was back again. If she touched him now, even accidentally, she knew it would kill her.

But as an inferno of his making surged hotter upstairs and in the foyer, and as Andreas dispatched the rest of the death squad that had come to kill him on what could only have been Wilhelm’s explicit orders, Claire knew that this lethal being—this man she had possibly never fully understood—was her best chance of surviving the next few minutes.

So she ran when he told her to run. She stuck as close as she dared. It wasn’t until they both were out of the manor house, feet flying over the cool, moonlit autumn grass outside, that Claire allowed herself to drop to her knees and let the tears fall.

She pivoted around, choking on the crisp night air and her own strangling confusion of emotions. Her house was ablaze. More lives were lost. She wanted to scream, but in the deepest corner of her heart, all she knew was a selfish, swamping relief that Andreas was still breathing.

She swiveled her head to look at him. The large, bright shape of him wobbled through her welling tears. How many times in the past few months had she wished that he were still alive? How many tears had she secretly shed for him and his perished kin?

No matter what Andreas said, she could not allow herself to believe for one second