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And a stainless-steel autopsy table with fresh blood on it.

Which he’d tossed into the corner like litter.

He could totally remember busting into the facility. He’d been looking for Bella for weeks after that lesser had broken into her house and taken her. Everyone thought she was dead, but he’d refused to believe it. He’d been tortured by the need to get her free . . . a need he hadn’t then understood but couldn’t deny.

The break had come when a civilian vampire had escaped from this “persuasion center,” as the Lessening Society called them, and tracked his location by dematerializing out from the clearing at hundred-yard clips through the forest. From the map he’d drawn for the Brotherhood, Z had come here looking for his female.

The first thing he’d found had been a scorched circle of earth right outside the door, and he’d thought it had been Bella, left for the sun. He’d bent at the knees and put his hand to the ashed circle, and when his sight had gone blurry he hadn’t known why.

Tears. There had been tears in his eyes. And it had been so long since he’d cried, he hadn’t recognized what they were.

Coming back to the present, Z braced himself and stepped forward, his boots crossing over low-napped, weedy grass. Usually, after Vishous used his hand on a place, there was nothing left but ash and small bits of metal, and that was true here. With the forest undergrowth already grabbing hold, soon the clearing would be filled in again.

The three pipes that were set in the ground had survived, though. And would continue to exist no matter how many sapling pines sprang up.

Kneeling down, Z took out his Maglite and angled the beam into the hole Bella had been in. Pine needles and water had filled it in part of the way.

It had been December when he’d found her in the earth, and he could only imagine the cold that had surrounded her down there . . . the cold and the darkness and the tight squeeze of the ribbed metal.

He’d almost missed these earthbound prisons. After he’d thrown the autopsy table across the room, he’d heard a whimper, and that was what had brought him over here, to these three pipes. As he’d popped the mesh cover off the one the noise came from, he’d known he’d found her.

Except he hadn’t. When he’d pulled on the ropes that had led into the hole, a civilian male had emerged, a male who was shivering like a child.

Bella had been unconscious in the one she’d been in.

Z had gotten shot in the leg as he’d worked to get her free, thanks to a security system that Rhage had only partially disarmed. Even with the bullet tearing into his leg, though, he hadn’t felt a thing as he’d bent down and grabbed onto the ropes and slowly pulled. He’d seen his love’s mahogany-colored hair first, and the dizzying relief had been like getting blanketed by a warm cloud. But then her face had become visible.

Her eyes had been sewn shut.

Z got to his feet, his body revolting against that memory, his stomach churning, his throat getting tight. He’d nursed her afterward. Bathed her. Let her feed from him even though giving her the corroded shit in his veins had brought him to the edge of hysteria.

And he’d serviced her in her needing as well. Which was how Nalla had come to be.

In return? Bella had given him back the world.

Zsadist took a last look around, seeing not the landscape but the truth. Bella might be smaller than him and might weigh a hundred pounds less and might be untrained in the martial arts and might not know how to shoot guns . . . but she was stronger than he was.

She had gotten through what had been done to her.

Could the past be like this, he wondered, looking around at the empty clearing. A structure in your mind that you could burn down and get free of?

He moved his foot back and forth over the forest floor. The weeds that had poked up through the skin of the earth were like green whiskers, and they were concentrated in the area that got the most sunlight.

From the ashes came new life.

Z took out his phone and composed a text that he never