Chapter 35 Dante
My hands clamp around the knife embedded in my gut, her name spilling from my lips in a broken, obsessive litany. The front door hangs half open, rattling against the wind. Rain pours inside, cold air rushing over my skin and raising sharp, prickling goosebumps.
With a grunt, I try to rise. My palm flattens against the floor, fingers whitening as I force pressure into them. My feet shift beneath me, fighting for balance—only for the slick river of my own blood to betray me. I slip, crashing back down hard, breath knocked from my lungs.
Shock leaks out of my bones slowly, leaving a gaping void for pain to flood in. My lips part around a silent scream as agony detonates through my veins, hijacking every thread of consciousness. Hot needles of burning torment scatter through my body, swallowing me from the inside out.
There’s so much red—on me, under me, soaking into the floorboards—that it feels like I’m bleeding out only to be filled back up with something darker.
Estella did this. She was terrified, feral, cornered, and her mind did the one thing it thought would push me away.
Despite the physical devastation ripping through me, a smile cracks across my face as Cane’s words echo in my head.
She’ll love you to death.
She stabbed me because she loves me. If she felt nothing, she wouldn’t have fought, wouldn’t have cared enough to break. This is her devotion, her loyalty carved into flesh.
My smile widens, and the twisted relief of it propels me forward.
Slowly, bracing myself, I push up again. My teeth clench so tightly they ache, but I stand anyway. The pain is worse than it should be because she almost pulled the knife out before shoving it back in, realizing too late that removing it would bleed me dry.
A rough laugh slips out of me.
Yes. She loves me. Hard, brutal, and fucking honest.
I stagger from the spot, palm dragging along the cool wall for support. Then, dizziness surges, tilting the room on its axis. The air thickens, suffocating my brain, jumbling my senses into a disoriented blur.
“No. No, fuck,” I rasp, slapping myself weakly to stay awake. “Don’t black out, you fucking—”
My pulse kicks into a frantic sprint, hammering up into my ears. Heat spreads through me in an unnatural wave, nausea clawing its way up my throat. Flashes of light—white, then black, then white again—strobe across my vision. My eyelids stubbornly drag downward.
My breaths shorten, and I feel my body slipping into shock. Moments ago, emotions drowned me, numbed me, but now that I’m alone, all of it crashes back in with full, merciless force.
I spit out a curse, the word squeezed so tight it throbs at the back of my skull.
My breathing accelerates, fast enough to hurt, and my heart pounds so violently it slams into my ribs like it’s trying to break out. My hands claw desperately at anything that can anchor me, but my limbs go numb, dead weight attached to me only by pain.
I topple.
My body hits the floor hard, bones trembling from the impact as my head crashes against the boards with a dull crack.
And that is the last thing I register before consciousness tears away completely.
Darkness gnaws at the borders of my mind, nibbling at what little clarity I have left, dragging its cold tongue across the inside of my skull. My eyelids feel weighted, pinned shut by something heavy and unseen. It feels like any breath could be my last.
But Estella’s face breaks through the black.
Her name, her eyes, the way she looked at me before she drove the knife in—it forces me to claw upward, fighting the undertow that wants to claim me. I stir, faint noises bleeding into my ears, twisted and warped beneath a high, metallic ringing.
I push through the numbing haze swallowing my body. The agony that once scorched my gut is gone. No flame, no tearing pressure—just a hollow absence, as if someone reached inside and pulled everything out.
Did I bleed out?
Is this what purgatory feels like?
Whatever is happening feels distant, slipping through my fingers whenever I try to grasp it.
“Sir? Can you hear me?” The voice drifts closer, and a shadow forms over me. Just a shapeless blot at first, swimming in and out of the blur. “Yes, he’s waking up. All good.”
I frown, every muscle in my face protesting with stiff, reluctant effort. “What—” The word dies in my throat, shredded by dehydration. My lips are cracked, my mouth sand-dry, my throat tight enough to split. It feels like I’ve been without water for years.
The shadow leaves my field of vision, footsteps shuffling around me. Memory flickers back, sharp and demanding.
Where is Estella?
The man returns, and this time the blur sharpens enough for me to make out the features beneath it. I’ve seen him before—patching Jason up after he sliced his arm on a rusted hook during a rooftop chase on one of the missions. I think his name is Samuel.
I brace my palms against something soft beneath me—a mattress, maybe—and try to push myself upright.
“Whoa, easy. Easy.” His hand presses gently between my shoulder blades, steadying me. “Here. Drink this.”
A cold glass touches my fingers, and I wrap my hand around it, lifting it to my mouth. The moment the water hits my tongue, I lose control. I drink like a man dragged out of a desert, gulping until the last drop is gone, until I’m sucking air from the bottom of the empty glass.
Clarity drips back into me. A low sound leaves my throat because, fuck, it feels like life itself is flowing back into my veins.
“That bitch cut you good,” Samuel says. His dry chuckle scrapes the air like sandpaper.
My lips twitch as something sharp and ugly flares through my chest. I turn my head toward him as he takes the glass away. Under the harsh light, he looks exactly as I remembered: capable hands, steady eyes, the calm of someone who’s patched up too many bodies to be rattled by another bleeding man.
My gaze drops to the torn fabric, revealing a row of new stitches tracking across my stomach, the skin around them flushed and seething. My eyes widen at the sheer size of it.
“I sanitized and stitched it up. You’ll survive,” Samuel says casually. “Good thing she didn’t pull the knife out. If she had, you’d have bled out before I got here.”
Tearing my gaze away from the stitches, I let my head fall back, the thud against the wall echoing through me.
My vision drifts over the room, and I pull in a breath—stale air thick with old pain and fresh desperation.
Everything feels tight, skewed, suffocating.
I need to get out the moment my legs can hold me without folding beneath me.
“Where is she?” I growl, the words scraped from the bottom of my chest.
He scratches the back of his head, shifting his weight from one foot to the other. “She’s being handled,” he says. “Don’t worry.”
A spike of awareness cuts clean through the lingering haze. The negative emotion surges, pushing past the drugs still fogging my mind and slowing my thoughts. It takes a long, sluggish moment to catch up with the weight of his words.
Handled.
I turn fully toward him. “What do you mean she’s being handled?” My voice hardens. “Where is she?”
He exhales, long and heavy, and his lips purse into a thin white line. “Look… I’m sorry. But I’m not supposed to tell you anything.”
My nostrils flare, and my fists clench. I look down at my hands, flexing my fingers as the strength slowly creeps back into them. My brain kicks into motion like an old engine sputtering, rattling, then roaring awake. The worry multiplies, swelling until it’s a physical weight on my ribs.
“You do realize I created all of this,” I say through grinding teeth. Samuel looks around sharply, surprise flickering across his brow. “That means you report to me. Not Jason.”
He folds his arms across his chest in a show of authority he doesn’t quite have. “He told me everything, kiddo. You can’t just turn against your own people. Besides, you need Jason. You won’t survive this battle without him.”
His words strike like icy water, slicing the last of the fog from my mind. My jaw pulses, a muscle ticking like a trigger as anger floods my veins with renewed clarity.
Jason stripped me of my position.
Betrayed me. Took control. Turned everyone against me.
My heartbeat spikes as I replay Samuel’s words, fueling the fury, feeding the acid that burns hot in my chest. I nod slowly to myself, because he’s right about one thing.
Jason won’t stop. There is no version of reality where he leaves me and Estella alone. He will hunt us down across cities, across continents, across planets if he has to—dragging his righteousness behind him like a badge he never earned.
And I made him this way.
I remember him at the beginning—green, terrified, hesitant. Always asking if we should do it, if the cause was worth it. He followed me because I seemed sure, because I carved the path and he walked it. He thought he became a hero somewhere along the way.
But heroes don’t betray their own.
He judged me for becoming a man consumed, but he’s lost too. I’m obsessed with a woman, while he’s obsessed with the fantasy of goodness.
An illusion. A lie he feeds himself because it makes him feel clean.
He’s gone too fucking far, and it’s on me to stop him.
I rise from the mattress, my body protesting but holding, and take a step toward Samuel. His eyes flick nervously between me and the exit, his anxiety swelling as I close the distance.
Still, he doesn’t move aside.
“Samuel,” I warn, my voice low and taut. “Let me out. I promise everything will be fine. I understand loyalty—believe me, I do. But I need to find her.”
I’m not asking for much. I just need my Estella.
He swallows hard, a bead of sweat breaking free and sliding down his temple. Still, he shakes his head. “I’m afraid I can’t do that.”
I nod again, the decision settling inside me with the weight and permanence of granite. I prowl toward him, and he snatches the gun from the table—the same one Estella had tried to shoot me with.