Chapter 60
DANTE
One heartbeat, I was on the marble steps of the DiRavello palazzo, watching in horror as my home exploded.
Home—where Emberline was.
Home—that was currently on fire.
The next, I was gone—following the tug of my wife’s fear like a moth to a flame.
I aimed toward the familiar sigils I’d carved into the bones of the ancient house, the powerful hum of magic that was mine and mine alone. The ancient magic I thought was unbreakable. Impenetrable.
I was almost there when I slammed into a wall of nothingness.
The world lurched sideways.
The tether of fear vanished, the sigils… were gone. Midair—nothing but a collection of diffused atoms—I frantically searched out her scent, her power, our bond, the lodestone that kept me grounded.
Oh gods, had I saved her last night, only to lose her today?
Panic had me reforming too soon, and instead of the rough wood floor of my bedroom, I materialized into a plume of choking smoke, nothing but emptiness gaping underneath me.
I plummeted straight into the fire.
But I’d been re-born in a firestorm, forged into a monster that flames could no longer touch. The monster trapped inside me basked in these flames, licked his lips and smiled.
This was like coming home.
I hit broken stone and burning beams hard enough my ribs shattered. The impact drove the air from my lungs in a sharp, agonizing rush. Searing heat engulfed me, hot enough to melt bone, my shoulder crunching into a chunk of masonry, one hand slamming down into burning embers.
There was no house.
Only a ragged crater of rubble and smoldering blackened beams. The neighboring walls were blackened, scorched, and cracked, as if they’d barely survived the blast.
I peered through the conflagration, heat licking my face.
There was no trace of my wife.
No citrusy scent, no bed with tangled sheets, no half-full coffee cups.
Just ruin.
Ruin… and the strong reek of ozone. Spent magic, in addition to human-made chemical accelerants. Brimstone and some strange foulness that had me straightening slowly, scanning every smoldering inch of the wreckage, muscles locking in place.
Some mortal shouted in the street. I barely heard, holding my shattered ribs as I stumbled into the inferno, not feeling the blaze licking at me from every direction.
My wards had been carefully layered—a series of ancient, powerful protections woven where they mattered most—around the places my wife would be.
Around the training room. Around the bedroom.
Around her.
“Where the fuck are you, Ember?” I choked, voice raw from the smoke, peering through the furnace-hot air.
Any normal vampire would be ash by now, but I was immune to fire. Immune to heat. I pushed deeper into the churning destruction.
She’d been here when I left. I’d kissed her on the forehead because if I’d aimed any lower, I wouldn’t have left at all. I’d walked out that door thinking she was protected.
Nico had been watching, I told myself. He would have gotten her out.
“Ember!” My voice scraped out again, rough as broken glass. I shoved aside a slab of stone. A pile of swords from the training room was half-buried in the rubble, bent and blackened from the force of the explosion.
No… not blackened from the explosion.
That was blood.
I reached down and touched a blackened, bent blade, my fingers coming away red. Rich, viscous, and clinging to the ridges of my knuckles in deep crimson smears, already beginning to dry.
I didn’t need to taste it to know it was hers. Emberline’s scent hit me a heartbeat later—citrus, lavender, and something sweet only I would recognize. The smell of her sliced straight into the center of my chest.
“No,” I whispered.
She bled. Here. In this inferno. My wards collapsing around her.
Nico would have been close, but… I scanned the destruction.
How could he have saved her from this?
“I told you to stay inside,” I whispered, voice cracking. “I promised you’d be safe.”
My knees gave out completely, dropping me onto the jagged stones. Pain lanced up my legs, but came from far away, muffled, as if my body belonged to someone else. I stared at my blood-smeared hand, at the ruins of the life I’d been pretending was real, when something inside me simply… broke.
The sound that ripped from my chest didn’t feel like it belonged to a vampire. I roared like an animal, the feral beast from the pits, a howl and a plea mixed together. The cry bounced off the broken stones, swallowed by smoke.
Then a different sound cut through my grief—a low, pulsing thrum at the edge of the destruction.
I lifted my head, instincts finally winning out over the shock. The hairs along my arms rose as a familiar, unpleasant vibration crawled across my skin. These weren’t the remnants of my wards coming back online.
This was something older. Crueler.
Horrifyingly familiar.
A circle flared to life around the crater, a ring of pale light that carved itself into the shattered rubble with an almost-surgical precision. Sigils snapped into place, one after another, encircling the ruins at specific points.
A containment field.
I staggered to my feet, those instincts screaming as black-clad figures dropped down from the edges of the crater, boots hitting stone in synchronized formation.
Half a dozen, then a dozen more, faces masked, bodies covered in reinforced leather and steel.
All with a crude symbol burned into the front of their breastplates.
A symbol I knew all too well.
“Dante Dominico,” the closest guard announced, voice muffled by the mask. “By order of—”
I didn’t let him finish.
I lunged.
Grief drove me forward, overshadowing the broken ribs and torn flesh. I hit the nearest guard like a battering ram, knocking him back into another. Bone crunched under my fingers as I snapped them in half, dropping them to the ground, necks bent at a grotesque angle.
Another came at me from the side, and I caught him by the throat, slamming him into a broken wall hard enough to crack his vertebrae. I pulled him closer, his eyes rolling back in his head, blood dribbling from the corner of his mouth.
“You will never take me alive,” I snarled. “And tell him he should have sent more guards.”
“Tell… him… yourself,” he rasped, then went limp.
Power surged all around me, the sigils projecting lines of arcing light up over me, around me. The edges of my vision dimmed for a heartbeat, then the magic in the air pulsed again, stronger this time, pushing against my skin like two sets of toothy jaws closing.
They weren’t here to fight.
They were here to pin me down long enough for the spell to trap me.
“Prisoner fourteen forty-five.” A deep, amused voice barked. “Stand down.”
I dropped the corpse and whirled to face my worst nightmare. The Overseer stood at the lip of the crater, cloak trailing, brutal hands spread. No mask, his neck bare. All the better to showcase the brand marking his throat in dark, raised lines—a heavy black chain, the mark of The Fossa.
My lips peeled back from my fangs in a feral snarl.
“You’ll never take me back there,” I hissed.
He just snapped his fingers, and the circle around us flared blinding white, the sigils firing another burst of magic up into the air.
For half a second, I felt nothing.
Then pain ripped through me, detonating behind my eyes, through my bones, melting flesh off my body like butter. Fuck, I forgot how bad this hurt.
It wasn’t the physical kind I could push through. This was different—slicing down to my bones, threading through every exposed nerve. My muscles locked, then spasmed violently. My knees hit stone, fingers clawing at the ground as if I could somehow dig my way out.
The guards moved in, keeping just outside arm’s reach, the symbols on their armor pulsing in time with the circle. They didn’t need to touch me; the spell did all the work. A spell that had kept me contained for almost fifty years. A spell I’d never figured out how to break.
Blood dripped from my nose. My hearing disappeared into a roar.
I thought of Ember suffering here as she died. Of the house that had been ours for less than a week and was now nothing but rubble.
“Fuck you,” I forced past clenched teeth. “I’m going to kill you all.”
The tips of the Overseer’s boots appeared in my line of sight, slightly dusted with ash, before he leaned down.
“You thought you could bribe us, like money has any meaning in our world. Pain is my only currency, Prisoner fourteen forty-five. I hope you’ve enjoyed your little vacation, because it’s time to come home. ”
My vision tunneled. The world narrowed to the circle of light and the taste of my own blood. Somewhere, very far away, rough hands grabbed my arms, my shoulders, my broken ribs screaming.
Darkness rose up, thick and inevitable.
I let it take me.