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“I did more than that.” Roth sneered. “I arranged to get rid of you, as well. You vanished for a year without a word of excuse. Everyone wondered if you were dead. And yet Claire still wanted you.”

He practically spat the word.

Jealousy and pride, Reichen thought, sickened that something so petty had caused so much pain.

Roth’s stare was sharp, cuttingly so. “I suppose after I realized that, my hate for Claire exceeded even the hate I had for you. I would have enjoyed killing her, Reichen. Just as I enjoyed ordering the deaths of your Darkhaven kin and turning that human whore of yours into my Minion.”

Reichen roared with fresh anguish and outrage. He was through with Roth now. Sick to death of the bastard’s ugly words. He brought his hands out before him and felt the fires travel from his core through his limbs. Out to his fingertips that stretched toward Wilhelm Roth.

“Die, you sick fuck,” he snarled.

And then he released a double-barreled blast of flame and heat at the face of his most treacherous enemy. Roth’s death was instant, a mercy Reichen granted only because of Claire.

Reichen was still screaming with animal fury, still torching the empty floor where Roth’s ashes had piled up, when he felt the first rumblings of the explosion building under the soles of his feet.

The walls around him trembled.

Then the earth heaved violently with the force of the lab’s detonation.

Claire knew the precise moment that Wilhelm Roth took his last breath. It came to her as a sudden flood of peace—an impossible sense of freedom that lit up her veins and gave her limbs a renewed strength to carry her forward as she raced the few remaining yards toward the old barn where the warriors had just spilled out.

Roth was dead.

Andreas was alive.

God… could the hell of the past several days, of the past several decades that she and Andreas had been separated by Roth’s machinations, actually be coming to an end?

She wanted to believe it. Needed to believe it.

Claire clutched hope close, even as the ground beneath her feet gave a prolonged, bone-rattling shudder.

“Jesus Christ!” shouted a low male voice up ahead of her in the dark. “Did you feel that? This son of a bitch is about to blow!”

Claire kept running, denying what she was hearing. It couldn’t be true. It could not be happening. Not when Andreas hadn’t yet come out to safety.

“Get back, get back!” Rio’s rolling accent sounded from somewhere close. The big warrior came crashing through the trees with Renata, Hunter, and a couple of others from the mission. Rio reached for Claire, tried to pull her along with them, but she dodged his grasp and kept on running.

There were more shouted warnings, more urgent movement in the night-dark woods, as the shudder deep within the earth rumbled louder.

There was a violent jolt, then a deep, thunderous boom!

Strong arms and a warm, hard body wrapped itself around Claire, twisting her around to cushion her fall as the percussion blasted her backward, off her feet. She screamed but could hardly hear her own voice as the forest shook and roared with the force of a seemingly endless, ungodly explosion.

“Stay down, Claire.” Tegan’s voice blew hot against her ear. “I promised him I’d get you out of here in one piece.”

“Noo!” she cried, beyond caring if she lived or died, watching in horror as the derelict barn blasted skyward in a blinding mass of flames and heat and thick, roiling smoke. The plumes of fire shot out in all directions, showering large chunks of splintered wood and burning embers down onto the forest. More heat erupted from out of the hole bored into the earth beneath the barn, the entrance to the bunker from which Andreas had yet to escape. “Oh, my God… no! He’s still down there! Andreas, no!”

She vaulted to her feet. Tegan’s hold was firm on her arm, but she shook him off with a desperate cry. “Let me go, damn you!”

Adrenaline and despair sent her flying over the debris-strewn ground, through the thick growth of trees that was illuminated with unearthly