Free Haunted by the King of Death by Felicity Heaton

knocked again.
    “Fucking hell, what are you doing here?” A light female voice cut through the quiet morning air and he whirled to face the owner, his right hand reaching for a sword that wasn’t there.
    The black-haired mortal standing on the steps below him arched an eyebrow at him, her golden eyes eerily bright in the low light.
    He should have come armed, but he had feared tipping his cousin over the edge.
    Beside the female, a bare-chested demon brute towered, his dusky horns curling around the curve of his pointed ears and beginning to flare forward as he glared at Grave, seven foot of pure muscle and menace. There were other reasons not to attack the mortal female. She was mated to the demon king who was looking at him as if he was searching for a reason to tear out his entrails.
    Charming considering that Grave had gone to war on this demon’s behalf, risking his life and those of his men to assist him in his fight against the Fifth Realm of demons only a few months ago.
    The door behind him opened again and he spun on his heel, heart leaping into his throat as his claws extended and he prepared for a fight.
    That same heart plummeted into his stomach when he found himself facing a slender female with dark hair that tumbled in gentle waves around pale shoulders and green-to-blue eyes that felt as if they were peering down into his soul, pulling out all the darkest memories it held.
    All of his sins.
    Behind her, Snow loomed in the shadows, his all-black clothing a stark contrast to her fair skin and white dress. His right hand gently rested on her left shoulder, a possessive and protective gesture that warned Grave this was the female Snow had chosen as his mate, the one he had heard about.
    Aurora.
    An angel.
    Or former angel.
    Though she hadn’t chosen to turn into a fallen angel, she had chosen to fall from grace for his cousin.
    Grave eyed the male, seeing only the brutal vampire he had witnessed on the battlefield countless times and the one who had slaughtered almost all of their family, destroying their bloodline.
    He closed his eyes when a sharper image of his mother flashed across his eyes and gritted his teeth as he looked down at her where she lay in his arms, broken and dead, ripped from him.
    On the heels of that soul-destroying memory, another more brutal and devastating one followed, hitting him hard now that his defences were down.
    His sister.
    His little sister.
    He stood on the paved drive of another remote chateau, his back to the building and eyes on the snow-white dress that fluttered in the night breeze on the grass, near a pair of black heeled ankle boots and a delicate black-and-red lace choker.
    Gods, he relived her terror and her pain, the fear that she too had bloodlust because of their family’s insistence on keeping their bloodline pure, that they had bred into her the same terrible disease that had caused Snow to take most of their family from them. She had been inconsolable, convinced that she would one day lose control and harm her family.
    She had been the gentlest creature the world had ever seen, pure of heart and kind of soul, unable to hurt anyone even to feed from them.
    She had done the unthinkable.
    Unbearable.
    She had walked out into the morning and disappeared.
    Bastian and Night believed her dead, because her young body wouldn’t have been able to withstand even weak pre-dawn light. Grave couldn’t bring himself to believe that she was gone. He didn’t feel any sense of loss, not as he had when he had held his mother.
    He stared at the clothes, studied them closely. Even a full day in sunlight wouldn’t have been enough to disintegrate her body, and there was no evidence that she had burned to death, nothing but her clothes.
    She wasn’t dead.
    Was she?
    The same terrible darkness he had experienced in that moment welled up in him again, his eyes shifting to reflect the blackness pumping through his veins, an undeniable thirst to maim and kill, to spill blood in