Chapter 13
EMBERLINE
The next morning, I thought I was imagining the distant cry of gulls and the steady pulse of waves, then remembered where I was. They were here.
They were mine.
I ran my hands over the two warm bodies pressed against mine, golden sunlight spilling across the whitewashed ceiling overhead, as though the world was a safe place where nothing terrible happened.
As though Blackwood hadn’t gone to great lengths yesterday to get Luca and me alone.
Maybe he only wanted the Basin.
Maybe it had only seemed like he’d personally targeted my brother and me, planting doubts about how our mother died. Maybe that awful story was payback for the other night in my father’s office, and I cursed myself for taunting him.
For drawing his attention in the first place.
And where was my uncle? Why hadn’t Giovanni been waiting for us in the council chambers, so very eager to torture the Basin’s location out of us? Instead, we’d found Cesare Blackwood, along with the sort of Eldritch horrors I thought only existed in human horror movies.
I closed my eyes again.
The images came anyway.
Spiders creeping down the well-appointed walls of La Sala like they’d been birthed from the shadows.
Hundreds of them, hanging from the ceiling like mutated bats.
The Ashbound, with their flaming bodies.
Gloved soldiers standing in a line, casting streams of black magic.
Gods. My entire body went weak. We were facing an army of monsters.
An army we were not prepared to fight.
I sat up, sheets tangled around my legs as my pulse kicked higher, heart racing with adrenaline.
“Bella?” Gabriel lifted his head, blue eyes still bleary from sleep. “Bad dream?”
“Something like that,” I murmured, climbing over my mountain of a husband, who grumbled about it being too damn bright, then rolled over and pressed a pillow against his head.
I padded to the bathroom and closed the door, leaning my back to it. Outside, the sea glittered beneath an equally blue, cloudless sky. Peaceful.
Meanwhile, the world was collapsing beneath our feet.
I dressed quickly and headed downstairs, passing knots of uniformed staff and Demente soldiers, speaking in hushed voices. No one smiled. All of them cast glares that told me I wasn’t especially welcome here, and I walked faster.
This was Rocco’s work.
The old vampire might be harmless as far as Valeria was concerned, but he was manipulative enough to undermine her authority.
To overthrow her, if he saw the chance.
Now that he’d returned, this island was not the safe haven we’d been promised, and we’d do well to watch our backs.
I reached Luca’s door, pausing to remind myself he was a grown-ass male and didn’t need his sister checking on him, and after a brief internal debate, I moved on.
The kitchen was empty, so I grabbed a piece of fruit and gulped down a cold cup of coffee, then headed outside, the heat of the day already building.
Summer was at its peak, and I navigated the sunbaked stone path that led down to the curving swath of beach. The Adriatic stretched endlessly before me, dazzlingly blue beneath the sun.
So blue, the water didn’t even look real, a delicate turquoise where the waves kissed the beach, turning darker in the depths, the rich color of indigo. I kept walking until the villa was out of sight, then settled on an old driftwood log, digging my toes into the sand.
And waited.
An hour later, the three of them prowled down the beach toward me. Gabriel leading the way, barefoot along the water’s edge, hands shoved deep into the pockets of his loose linen trousers, feet splashing up foam with every step.
Dante stayed well above the tide line—apparently his demon was averse to salt water—shirt straining beneath those ridiculously muscled arms and chest, powerful legs eating up the distance between us, cargo pants rolled above his ankles.
Nico followed ten paces behind, still dressed in yesterday’s clothes, still stained with flecks of dried blood, like he hadn’t found the energy to change.
His expression was so desolate, my stomach knotted around itself, worry thick enough I could practically taste it. Even from this distance, something was off. The shadows swirling around his ankles were thicker.
Wrong.
Darkness spread across the sand like oil seeping through water, and I couldn’t even tell the others because I was the only one who could see his magic.
Why was I the only one, though?
How could Nico appear in my dreams, real enough to touch?
“There you are.” Gabriel’s grin danced with wry amusement when he stopped in front of me, the breeze tossing his hair around his face. “You’re getting sunburned.”
“I didn’t expect you slobs to laze around half the morning when we have work to do.”
“Gods, you’re merciless,” Gabriel teased, sitting down on the log beside me, then lowered his voice. “I think we’re far enough away no one from the villa will hear us. And the soldiers usually stick closer to the grounds.”
“That was the plan,” I said.
Dante settled at my feet, wedging his huge shoulders between my knees. My fingers threaded through his hair. He let out a small sound of contentment as I massaged his scalp, feeling him relax like a big cat in the sun.
Nico picked a dry spot a few meters away, his flat expression unchanging.
For several moments, the only sounds were the gulls and the waves washing up and down the sand and Dante’s low sounds of contentment.
Finally, Gabriel broke the silence. “Let’s talk about yesterday.
Especially what happened after we were separated.
We didn’t mean to leave you behind, Emberline.
When we found the boat missing, we wrongly assumed you and Luca had already escaped.
” He turned his attention to Nico, his expression turning stony.
And because I knew Gabriel would spend the next month castigating himself over this, I just shrugged. “Luca and I headed to the safehouse as soon as we got free, so we didn’t exactly stick around, either.”
“You went for the boat. What then?”
I ran them through our escape, how we discovered the boat missing, the guards appearing out of nowhere, struggling to describe the spiders in any coherent way that would make sense.
How they herded Luca and me toward the council room.
Toward Lord Blackwood.
Like that had been the plan all along.
I left out his taunting us about Ottavia, the details of my mother’s death, because some things… some things I wasn’t ready to talk about.
“Then out of nowhere, thick black smoke filled the chamber, giving us cover to escape. I remembered there was an emergency exit behind Severin’s chair. Thank the gods the door wasn’t bolted on the outside, and we made it to the fondamenta. From there, we dematerialized to the safehouse.”
“Black smoke?” Gabriel asked curiously. “Not from one of you?”
I shook my head. “I don’t have magic, and Luca can only read minds. It wasn’t us. In fact, there was only one other person in the room—Blackwood’s henchman. I saw him once before, the night we stole the Basin, with Blackwood.”
For the first time, Nico seemed interested in our conversation. “This henchman. What did he look like?”
“Immensely tall, white hair, green eyes. Name of Romulus.”
Something sparked on his face, but instead of explaining, Nico drew deeper inside himself.
“Now, you.” I watched the gulls on the shoreline screaming as they took off. “Tell me what happened after Luca and I made the very, very bad decision to head down a dark corridor.”
“We arrived at the dock and found you, Luca, and the boat gone.” Gabriel’s voice took on that tight edge it always did when he was furious.
“We did, however, walk straight into an ambush of Ashbound and Blackwood’s guards, who used their magic to create those eight-legged creatures.
They’re called Drax. According to Nico, if they touch you, they suck out your soul. ”
“Wait…” I held up a hand, certain I couldn’t have heard him right. “They can do what?”
I was going to throw up. We’d been surrounded by them. That big glob of black goop had almost hit me, for fuck’s sake.
“So, when Blackwood threatened to feed me to them, he wasn’t bluffing?”
Dante shoved to his feet, nearly knocking me off the log. “That bastard did what?”
“Just the usual bad guy stuff.” I took a shaking breath to settle myself. “Seriously, I was more concerned with why I was talking to that asshole and not my uncle. In fact, we didn’t see Giovanni at all. Maybe Blackwood decided he doesn’t need the competition and got rid of him?”
No one disagreed, but we’d underestimated my uncle before, and for all his bad guy evil-ness, Blackwood could be underestimating Giovanni, too.
“This adds an entirely new layer of complications.” Dante folded himself back down in front of me, and I went back to massaging. “I’ve seen dark magic before, but nothing like this. How many of those things did you say were inside the council chamber?”
“A hundred? It was hard to count with all those wiggling legs.” I shuddered, my skin crawling at the memory. “The guards cast a stream of dark magic, which created a… sticky nest of sorts that stuck to the wall, then the thing crawled out. Like it was being… birthed.”
Gabriel dragged a hand through his hair. “We saw the same thing. So, the guards are creating the Drax. And Lord Blackwood controls the guards, not your uncle. Is there anything else we should know about… Nico?”
Everyone’s attention slid toward Nico, whose expression immediately hardened, his posture going rigid as a muscle jumped in his jaw. I tasted suspicion on the air, the cold bite of distrust, the way we were separated—us on the log and Nico, alone at the edge of the water.
What had I missed?
Nico was unreadable, and Gabriel was clearly pissed, but something wasn’t adding up.
Dante leaned forward. “You knew what those things were. Where they came from. Warned us what they could do. You even… knew their name. Drax. How?”