Chapter 18
GAbrIEL
Cold, damp air slid over stone and skin, colder than death; the rot of the Fossa so embedded in my lungs, I felt like I’d swallowed the Underworld itself.
I’d spent my entire life listening to whispers of this place. The brutality. The cruelty. The tortures.
But nothing prepared me for what they’d done to my brother.
Emberline was frozen, Dante staring out of the darkness like a broken, blood-splattered wraith.
“Dante,” she breathed. “Oh gods, what have they done to you?”
A sound came from inside the cell. A rasp that might have been her name. Or a sob.
Or both.
My blood went cold, my body numb. I couldn’t comprehend what I was seeing, because the male behind those bars… wasn’t my brother.
Not the Dante who’d thrown me into the canal when I was six for setting his bed on fire, laughing while I sputtered curses. Not the Dante who’d protected me from my father until the day he’d vanished without a word.
This… thing in the dark was a ruin.
His face was swollen to the point he was unrecognizable, one eye sealed shut. Bruises painted him in layers—old and new—his skin split in places that hadn’t fully closed. He’d been starved, ribs sticking out in stark relief. Remnants of what used to be pants hung in torn strips.
And beneath that tattered fabric, his leg was…
Gods.
His foot was bent wrong, swollen grotesquely, the ankle turned at an angle that made my stomach lurch. Even through the dark, I saw how he trembled with pain, fighting to hold himself upright out of sheer, spiteful will.
My brother.
I made a sound I didn’t recognize—half gasp, half growl—and slammed my hands onto the bars.
“Dante.” My voice cracked. “Dante, it’s me.”
For one awful second, his unfocused gaze slid past me, as if he couldn’t place me in the world anymore. Then his gaze sharpened.
“Gabriel,” he rasped.
I shoved forward, but Emberline was already there, already peeling back her sleeve, fangs flashing before she sank them into her wrist. Then the wound was pressed against Dante’s mouth, one of her small hands on the back of his head, murmuring so low, I couldn’t catch the words, tenderly stroking the back of his head while he drank.
“Fuck me,” Nico whispered. “We’ll have a hard time getting him out of here with that leg.”
I didn’t say anything. We’d found him. He was alive.
That was all that mattered, I told myself. We’d gotten here in time, Dante was alive, and now all we had to do was get him out of this fucking cell and back to the gate. If I had to drag him there myself through sheer fucking will, then that was what I’d do.
“All we have to do is make it to the gate.” I tightened my grip on my hunting knife and unsnapped the catch on my gun holster. Double-checked my extra ammo. So far, there wasn’t any movement around us, but I didn’t expect that would last much longer.
As if he was reading my mind, Nico murmured, “We’ll have to move fast. If we’re quiet, we won’t attract the attention of the guards.”
Dante pulled away from Emberline’s wrist, reaching through the bars to touch her pale, tear-stained face, a dazed expression on his face. His fingers were cracked, the knuckles split, nails broken. He still wasn’t healing, a testament to how starved he was.
“He took a lot of blood,” Nico observed. “Thank the gods you fed her before we came, but…” His eyes met mine. “We’ll keep an eye on her, then. First thing, let’s get Dante out of that fucking cell.”
“I’m going to kill every last fucking person in this place,” I grunted. “Starting with that Overseer.”
“That bastard’s like a fucking cockroach. The smart play is to get the fuck out of here without running into a single guard,” Nico cautioned. “But first, let’s get that door open.”
Now that reality was sinking in, it was clear we’d miscalculated on several fronts. But the antitoxin was working, my leg was nearly back to one hundred percent, and I still had a few tricks up my sleeve.
“Hey, idiot,” Nico hissed as we both stepped closer. “We’re getting you out.”
Dante’s head tipped back against the wall, hand still clasping Emberline, like he couldn’t let her go. A broken laugh scraped from his throat. “No.”
“Don’t be a fucking martyr.” I checked the bars. Solid as the rock around us. “We came a long way, and I don’t have time for heroic shit.”
“You need to leave me here.”
Dante’s gaze shifted from me to Nico, and back to Emberline, and even through the bruises and swelling, I saw his expression change. From panic to horror to fury.
“I see that look. I tried talking her out of coming”.
I shook my head. “Next time, I’ll let you have the honors.
Just so you know, she’s the only reason we found you so fast.” I kept my voice low, giving the cell block another quick scan.
Not so empty now, as eyes peered from dark cells, curious prisoners creeping closer to the bars.
It wouldn’t take much for this whole thing to go sideways.
“You have to leave.” Dante’s breathing hitched, turning into a wet, rattling cough. “Listen to me. You can’t escape the Fossa or the Overseer. Leave me behind. Get Emberline out of here before it’s too late.”
My jaw clenched. “We’re not leaving you in this fucking hole.”
“He’s right about the Overseer,” Nico agreed from behind me, and I wanted to punch him in the throat.
Dante’s chest started heaving. “You think you’re saving me, but you’re not. I’m a… I’m a…” His eyes were wild, unfocused. “You have to leave me here. Get out before this becomes a slaughter.”
“We’re all walking out of here together,” I snapped, focused on achieving that goal without any of us dying. “Nico, get this cell door open.”
He studied the lock, the hinges, and the chain points. “It’s old iron. No magic. Mechanical. But I can pick it.” He dropped to his knees. “But I need something…”
Emberline set a long, thin needle in his hand, so delicate it looked like a sliver of silver. I didn’t see where it came from, but Nico nodded.
“This will do perfectly.”
“You’d better hurry,” Emberline whispered. “I think someone’s coming.”
I felt it too, the way the silence shifted from silence to danger, the way the prisoners sank back into the darkness of their cells. “Work faster,” I urged. “We’re about to have company.”
“Gabriel, you need to leave me here. But first… there’s something…” Dante’s voice dropped, his hand reaching for me through the bars while Nico tinkered with the lock. He grasped my hand, pulling me closer. “Giovanni is poisoning Marcello. Silver oxide. The new chef is putting it in his food.”
The news hit me like a fist, everything about his sudden turn making perfect sense.
Dante’s swollen mouth twisted into what might have been a smile, if his face wasn’t so ruined. “He’s been dosing him for months.”
“That’s…” My heart slammed against my ribs. My father—our father—was ours to take down, not become one of Giovanni’s many victims.
Dante’s grip tightened, nails biting into my skin. “When he dies, Giovanni is coming for you next. Don’t know how, but you need to leave this place. I am begging you, while you still...”
“Got it,” Nico said triumphantly, handing Emberline back the thin needle, which she promptly… tucked back into her braid? Gods, did she ever run out of surprises?
The next second, Nico hoisted my brother to his feet, even as the stubborn bastard kept trying to shove him away, insisting we leave him behind. Like that would ever happen.
Giovanni was killing Marcello. My brain tried to reject the idea as too monstrous. But poison was so like Giovanni. The dirty work handed off to someone else.
“If you won’t leave for me,”—my brother’s eyes flicked toward Emberline, and there was nothing soft in his expression, only dread—“do it for her. At least get her out of here while you still can.”
Emberline’s eyes flashed in the dark. “I’m not leaving you…”
“Shut up,” I told him violently, throwing his other arm over my shoulders. He weighed half of what he should. A once-powerful male carved down to bone and rage.
Yet underneath all of that, the Dominico stubbornness was strong.
“Easy,” I murmured, even as my throat burned. “I’ve got you.”
Dante’s head lolled onto my shoulder. “This is… stupid.”
“Technically, you are correct,” I grit through my teeth. “But lately, stupid is our specialty. You’ll be glad to know we’re getting better at it by the day.”
Emberline hovered close, hands trembling as we navigated the maze of corridors. Dante’s leg wasn’t healing, not even from her blood, but he was moving, which I doubted he could have ten minutes ago.
“Leave me here,” he kept groaning. “You don’t understand, I’m dangerous. Dangerous to you. Dangerous to everyone.”
Dante kept ranting as Nico and I dragged him between us. Each step had him hissing in pain, that leg dragging behind us. The labyrinth twisted and turned, darkness leading to even deeper darkness, a never-ending maze meant to confuse and trap and devour.
I didn’t know how she knew where she was going, but Emberline guided us, murmuring directions. “Right. No… left. Straight. This way.”
I glimpsed the shimmer of stars in a velvet sky, then Nico froze, head snapping up as the faint scrape of a boot against stone slithered out of the darkness behind us. “Faster,” he urged. “We’re almost to the entrance. Once we’re out in the open, we can at least fight.”
Dante turned into dead weight, his body sagging. “I told you,” he rasped. “Gabriel… just… listen to me…”
“Keep moving,” I ordered. “I see the light up ahead.” After the consuming darkness of the tunnels, the sliver of moon in the night sky was bright as the sun, illuminating the sweep of red rock and sand. I tasted freedom on the desert air.
But it was already too late.
They stepped out of the darkness as though they’d been birthed from the shadows themselves—four guards, bigger even than the ones we’d fought earlier. The bottoms of their faces were covered by those masks—but on their cheeks were marks. Brands, a raised emblem of some sort.
Like the other guards, their eyes were pale. Almost… transparent. Unnatural.
A chill crawled up my spine.
Emberline inhaled sharply. “Not them again.” Her expression was grim and determined, a knife gripped in each hand.
They crushed us like a hammer.
Metal armor. Brute strength. No mercy.
“Try to stay out of this.” I pinned Dante between my body and the wall, bracing him upright.
My blade was moving before my mind fully caught up, muscle memory taking over.
Close quarters meant that the next two minutes were nothing but heavy bodies slamming into one another, weapons sweeping through the air with a deadly hiss of metal, elbows crushing larynxes.
I drove my blade into the closest guard’s neck, between that mask and the burnished breastplate. He staggered backward and collapsed beside my brother, a heaving pile of bloodied metal.
Emberline… where the fuck was Emberline?
Nico took out another one, twin blades carving low, foot sweeping the brute’s legs, then brutally finishing him off with a strike—like me—to the throat, the only vulnerability on these assholes, given the armor protecting every inch of their bodies.
Only two guards stood between us and freedom, and I lunged…
Then the sound of approaching footsteps multiplied.
More thundered out of the corridors around us, some holding torches, illuminating the passageways, birthing five more guards. Ten. Twenty.
“Gabriel!” Nico shouted over the clash of metal. “We’re getting boxed—”
A guard slammed into me, shoulder to chest, driving the air out of my lungs. I stumbled, catching myself against stone. His big, booted foot pulled back, then crushed into my stomach.
Pain flared in my ribs.
Another impact hit me from the side, and something in my tweaked leg tore. I was still not at a hundred percent, weakened from the poison on that blade. I raised my blade, but it was knocked out of my hand, then a fist like a hammer shattered my cheekbone.
Dante made a sound—half roar, half broken plea—tried to stand, and his leg collapsed beneath him. He went down hard.
Somewhere, outside of the chaos, Emberline screamed his name, and the corridor went still. All movement stopped, like someone had pulled a plug, the guards falling back in unison, hands on their weapons, down on one knee, heads bowed, like they were making room for a king.
Torches were lit along the corridor, and from the darkness ahead, he emerged.
The Overseer.
The pale-eyed bastard walked like this entire place was his kingdom, like every rock and stone belonged to him, and pulled behind him…
Was Emberline.
“No,” Dante groaned, prostrate on the stone, trying to push himself up with shaking arms, her blood still staining his cracked lips. A boot slammed into the back of my knee, and I hit the ground.
Nico was shoved beside me.
Then the Overseer was right in front of us, the guards sweeping in to form an impenetrable circle of armor and muscle, cutting off the starry sky and our hope of escape.
Eyes bright with rage, Emberline fought—because of course she fought—the Overseer dragging her along in his iron grip, so tight, he was nearly breaking her arm.
She snarled like an animal, stabbing her knife down into the top of the Overseer’s hand, and all the bastard did was pluck out the blade and toss it away like an annoying thorn.
“What have we here? A rescue attempt?” Unlike the guards, he didn’t wear a mask, but he did have the same brand on his cheek; the raised scar pulled, the wider he smiled. “Just when I thought your final day would be a bore, the gods serve me up you three on a silver platter.”
“Fuck you, asshole.” Emberline bared her fangs, thrashing wildly.
“Let me guess,” the Overseer’s cold eyes landed on me. “The brother… and the stolen wife.” His gaze turned even colder when it fell on Nico. “And a member of the Vendetarri. Never forget… I trained you, and I know how to break you.”
Nico snarled something foul, and a guard drove him back onto his belly.
Dante was braced upright now, his ruined body trembling. I saw his play the second before he moved, launching himself into the Overseer’s side, knocking him off balance, his grip on Ember loosening as the two big males crashed to the ground.
She slipped free, dragging another knife out of her belt, Dante hissing in pain as he tried to pin the Overseer down.
“Run, get her out of here. Please, Gabriel, save her,” he screamed before he was tossed aside, slamming against the wall.
The Overseer rose to his full height, wiping the blood dripping from his broken nose, a gloating expression on his face. “One last day,” he smiled, “one day of the worst hell you could ever imagine just got even worse, Prisoner 1445.”