Chapter 22
DANTE
For a second the world was nothing but rushing air, snapping branches, the green smell of crushed olive leaves.
Then pain as we hit ground in the darkness, muscle and bone colliding with immovable rock.
Thanking the gods I ended up on top, I plowed my fist into the side of Nico’s face before his shadows threw me off to the side like I weighed nothing. I dove back on top as rage took over reason.
Elbows drove into ribs with sickening force, fists slammed into jaws hard enough to spray blood across the sand.
We tore at each other like starving wolves, every punch landing with bone-jarring accuracy, every blow answered by another just as brutal.
We’d spent years sparring with each other, but never had a fight felt this primal.
I wanted to hurt Nico.
I wanted him to hurt.
Ribbons of ice-cold shadows wound around me and sent me spinning through the air, landing wrong on a chunk of coral rock, the toothy surface tearing the fuck out of my side.
Nico lurched to his feet, holding his arm. “This has nothing to do with you. This is my fucking problem, and I’ll deal with it.”
“You dragged my wife into your past and nearly got her fucking killed.” I spat out a mouthful of blood. “So, I’d say this is my fucking business.” I lunged, and he evaded. Barely. Motherfucker. I was going to rip his godsdamned head off. “Who else was in that dream? Who was helping you?”
Who the fuck else did I have to rip apart with my own hands?
“This is my mess to clean up, Dante, so stay the fuck out of it. Just…” Something in Nico’s expression broke. Not fear, exactly, more like the exhaustion of carrying too much for too long.
Slowly, he exhaled, shoulders slumping in defeat.
“Yes, I know who cast the shadows.”
I glanced up at the row of faces peering over the balustrade, outlined by the starry night sky.
“Do you happen to have a name?”
“His name is Romulus.” Nico rubbed the back of his neck, then looked up… at my wife.
“Does he have a last name?”
“Romulus Decarus. My father’s steward.”
“You’re telling me your father’s own steward… helped you escape? Helped Emberline and Luca escape when Blackwood trapped them in the council chamber? Is this some kind of joke?”
He shook his head. “No joke. Rom has served my father as long as I can remember. But Rom’s… decent. He’s helped me before.”
“Yeah, you’d better explain that fucking statement,”—I held his stare—“because what you just said makes no godsdamned sense.”
He swiped blood from the corner of his mouth. “Growing up, Rom was my… surrogate father, you could say, so a few years after I left my father’s house, when I needed help, I went to Rom.”
“Help for what, Nico?” Emberline peered over the edge, her big, wide eyes framed by a curtain of dark hair.
He hesitated, then held out his hand.
In his open palm, a kernel of black magic hatched. Not his usual shadow magic, the power I’d become so familiar with over these decades. Something different.
A plume that reeked faintly of oil and char. Like the magic the guards possessed.
Exactly the same as the magic that spawned those soul-sucking Drax.