Chapter 44
DANTE
Iknew exactly where my wife was.
And who she was with.
I stormed to the other side of the kitchen, anger turning to frenzy, my temper about to become an explosion I couldn’t control.
Knowing where Emberline was… that should be my main concern.
Not the fact that Nico was with her.
Nico, who would keep her safe. Nico, who would lie down in the line of fire for her. Nico, who was fucking in love with my wife, and now that they were together, alone, I felt like I was being boiled alive in my own skin.
Our blood bond was an insistent pull pulsing beneath my ribs, like a second heartbeat tugging me north—across the water, deep into the snow-covered Dolomites. Every now and then, the bond sharpened with a flare of her awareness, a rush of adrenaline… curiosity.
Not fear, godsdamnit.
Because if Emberline was afraid, I’d have a good excuse to go after her, all this jealousy covered up by the very reasonable, very sane explanation of keeping my wife safe.
Not because I was drowning in rage. Not because she snuck out of the house without telling me. Nope. That bullshit definitely would not fly.
I braced my hands on the edge of the kitchen counter and bowed my head, jaw locked so tight, my teeth ached. Surrounded only by the unsteady hum of the old refrigerator and the faint crackle of the inferno building inside me.
The fire that never really went out.
I could follow the blood bond, kick down Rocco’s doors, and make some lame excuse about her disappearing without leaving me a note. But I wouldn’t.
Because Emberline would always do the right thing. Because she’d made me a promise. Some small part of me relaxed, an unfamiliar warmth flooding into my chest like honey. It took me a second to realize what it was.
I trusted Emberline. Surety settled inside me deep, like a lodestone I could build something on. These weren’t just words; this was the truth. Nico might love her, but I could trust her. She would never betray me like my father; she would never hurt me like I’d been hurt in the Fossa.
I’d never known anything like this before.
This cold, sure knowledge I would stake my life on.
A rough laugh scraped out of me, and I pushed away from the counter.
After being sold out by everyone, I’d finally found someone who had my back.
Three someones, actually, if I counted my brother—which I did—and Nico, who was truthful about his feelings, even when he knew it might be the last thing he said.
I huffed out a bitter laugh. Ballsy move, even for him.
The bond flared again—Emberline, moving faster now—and something inside me surged in answer. Mine.
But Ember wasn’t mine. She belonged to no one but herself, as wholly as I’d ever seen anyone belong to themselves. Proud and defiant and completely her own person, and I would damn myself before I’d ever dim that light of hers down a single watt.
She deserved more than a brute who couldn’t get through a day without losing his temper.
My wife deserved a male who kept his godsdamned promises, no matter how hard that was.
Who backed up his words with actions.
She deserved someone who strove to be the very best version of himself, whatever that might look like now. I squeezed my eyes shut and instantly regretted it, the darkness instantly dragging me back into the past.
Back to the Fossa.
Stone under my spine. Iron at my wrists. The stink of spilled blood soaked deep into the walls. I could still feel the straps cutting into me, holding me down while I fought like a wild animal.
If I’d known what was coming, I could have fought harder. Would have stolen a soldier’s knife and ended myself long before that night in the bowels of the prison.
The Overseer stripped me of my dignity and my choice. “Hold him down,” he’d laughed. “Let’s see if this one is strong enough.”
The witch obeyed.
She’d set an old clay pot beside my head, the surface flaking, something foul and oily leaking out around the top.
Her withered hands were stained with something that wasn’t ink. More like centuries of magic had turned the skin black as coal. She didn’t care about me, the prisoner strapped to the table. To her, I was only a vessel.
A container to be cracked open and filled, then stitched back together to see if the seams held.
Or if they burst apart.
“Open him up.” Her cackle was the sort of mad sound I’d heard trickle out of the cells in the dead of night, full of madness and malice.
They cut me apart. Flayed me to the bone as if I was nothing more than meat on a hook.
I screamed until my throat shredded, the witch tracing runes on my skin, on my insides, against my bones with her blackened, cursed hands.
She whispered in a language that scraped through my memories; when she plunged her hand deep into my chest and squeezed my heart in her fist, something answered.
The creature did not enter me gently. The ifrit—a desert being forged of fire, violence, and pride—clawed its way in, a living storm forced into too-small flesh, flooding my veins with heat that should have burned me to ash on that table.
But I didn’t die. And when I opened his eyes again, the world was cloaked in flame.
The ifrit claimed me that night.
I became a prisoner in my own body, awake, but trapped inside my head as some cruel, howling being stretched my skin around itself like a disguise. Fire bloomed from my hands, from my mouth, from every crack in my ruined flesh as the witch fled the boiling cataclysm.
Soldiers burned, despite their armor. I smelled them cooking alive.
And I couldn’t stop myself.
I was a ghost in a body that no longer belonged to me.
I slammed back into the present, back into the shitty kitchen.
Sucked in a breath of acrid smoke.
Flames crawled across the floor and up the walls, heat climbing my spine, coiling around me like a hungry serpent. My fingers gripped the counter, and the wood blackened, a line of smoke curling up from where I touched the wood.
“Not now, you fucker,” I muttered. “Stay in your box where you belong.”
The blood bond flared again—fear, this time—and the creature seized the opportunity, surging toward her distress like a predator pouncing on prey.
The demon was starving, deprived of violence and blood and chaos.
And without the tattoos, without the ink and the magic, it was growing impossible to keep the demon contained.
Some of him had crept out the other night in the garden, turning me into a savage, nothing but a hard cock driving into wet, soft flesh, drowning in her taste as I spurted every drop of my seed into her. Full of the primal need to mate.
I took a breath, wresting the ifrit back down into his box.
Flames licked up my arms without burning me; fire could never hurt me, not now.
I was immune to flame, but this house wasn’t.
The cabinets above the stove caught fire first. Paint blistered, blue-tinged flames curling along the edges, and I staggered back, knocking into the table. Everything I touched began to smolder.
“Get… the fuck… back inside.”
The ifrit pushed harder.
For a second—just one—I wasn’t in control.
The world sharpened as the creature surged up my throat, racing for freedom.
My lips parted, and smoke curled out with my breath.
Yes.
“No.” I slammed my fist into the wall hard enough to split the skin on my knuckles, the pain allowing me a brief moment of control. Enough for me to stumble out the back door into the garden, into the slow, steady drizzle that snuffed out the ifrit’s appetite like a candle flame.
I sank to the ground, splashing into a puddle, back firmly against the wet brick wall where there was nothing to burn, my hands shaking. Water streamed down my face and my shoulders, soaking me and cooling the fire.
Water was my friend right now. My only ally.
“And that,” I said hoarsely. “That’s why I’m not going to Rocco’s.”
Why I’d been trying to leave, ever since I’d gotten back.
Because it was only a matter of time before my control slipped altogether, and I woke up in the ruins of a life I’d never deserved.
I rubbed my chest, closing the lid on the box, body going limp as the heat faded away completely. But the truth was staring me in the face. Without the tattoos, I was a walking time bomb.
The demon and I had spent years as the Overseer’s favorite pet. Brought out to fight whenever the audience demanded the sort of spectacle I could provide. Barely capable of short, intermittent moments of sanity.
Then I’d met Albrecht.
Old. Already half-dead when they tossed his broken body into the cell beside me. The Overseer thought I’d kill him that first night. I found him interesting instead.
Or rather, the ifrit found him interesting. It hardly mattered what I thought.
We’d watched each other for weeks. Me nibbling the skin off my fingers, and Albrecht telling me about his life, as if I wasn’t a half-mad monster who breathed fire.
Months passed before I realized I was… thinking again. Reasoning again.
I asked him why he was there, and he told me he was a vampire with Druid blood. A bloodline older than any in our species. So dangerous, he’d been condemned to the Pits.
I’d laughed in his face.
He offered to fix me. “You are broken,” he explained, quavering voice full of the kind of certainty that made me pay attention. “The witch put something inside you that does not belong. If you are not careful, that spirit will consume you.”
“Yeah, no shit,” I’d rasped, my throat ruined from years of breathing fire and ash. “Can’t you tell? It already has.”
“Not quite yet.” Then he’d ground small obsidian stones into a fine, black powder. Mixed it with his own blood, humming with something strange. Pagan magic, he’d explained. Strong enough to hold a spirit at bay. Strong enough to give me back my mind.
I told him there wasn’t anything more powerful than the being locked inside me, twisted with hate and a need for blood.
“Your scars are lines of weakness the ifrit can exploit, but I can make you stronger. So strong, you will become unbreakable,” he’d promised, then he’d begun.
A few runes a day, until I was covered in a web of markings, woven together into an inescapable prison, strong enough to contain a supernatural being.
He covered every silvered scar on my torso, murmuring words I didn’t understand.
Every marking burned, but not like the fire trapped inside me.
These were colder, heavier, as if they’d been forged in the Underworld and branded into my flesh.
Once it realized what was happening, the ifrit fought Albrecht tooth and nail, slamming against the prison he was building, trying to break through.
“The creature is strong, but this will hold,” he explained when he was finished. “But if the marking ever fails, you must have the will to keep the demon contained yourself.”
“And if I don’t?”
His eyes met mine.
“Then the creature will wear you until there is nothing left.”