Chapter 13 #2
A muscle flexed in Nico’s jaw, as if every word was a knife twisted deeper and deeper. My chest wrenched as Dante’s accusation hung between them, a horrible awareness dawning.
Nico… knew all of that?
How could he know when I’d never seen or heard of such monsters?
And if he knew what they were, then that meant…
I swallowed, my throat hurting.
“Nico…” Dante’s dark tone held an edge of warning. “You’d better start explaining everything you know about these things. How are you privy to information only our enemies would possess?”
“Are you accusing me of being a traitor?” Nico asked sharply, his chest heaving once before he went still. More and more of those shadows spilled out around him, isolating him inside a storm of seething darkness swallowing everything below his waist.
Gabriel blinked. “Of course not. Don’t be ridiculous. We just want answers.”
“No.” Nico shook his head slowly. “You don’t. Not these answers.”
The temperature around us dropped, ice trickling down my spine at Nico’s hollowed-out expression. As if he knew a secret that would destroy us and was doing everything in his power to protect us.
Because I couldn’t—not for a single heartbeat—entertain the idea Nico would ever betray us. No, this was about something else. Something darker. Something… humiliating. Because that’s what was written all over his features—not defiance, not guilt, but shame.
A dark ripple moved through the shadows pooled at Nico’s feet.
For a split second, I could have sworn a face rose up through that darkness, then an outstretched hand, fingers clawing through the shadows, like something… trying to escape.
Or come through.
“What aren’t you telling us?” my husband demanded.
Nico looked straight at me, and for one terrifying moment, an ancient presence stared out from behind his pale brown eyes, something so hungry, I could barely breathe.
Because a silent understanding passed between us—me and whatever that ravenous thing was.
Recognition, like fingers tracing slowly down my cheek or the brush of lips along my jaw.
Then he looked away, and the moment was broken.
“Drop it.” Nico’s harsh command cracked across the empty beach like a whip. “There are things you are better off not knowing, and this is one of them. I told you what they are and what they are capable of. That is enough.”
Silence followed.
Whatever secret Nico was hiding, it was far worse than I’d originally thought.
“He’s right.” I forced myself to speak, to move on when I wanted answers as badly as everyone else.
Later. Later, once we were alone, when things weren’t so…
tense, I’d ask again. “We know enough to stay the hell away from them.” I searched their faces.
“Blackwood is more of a threat than any of us imagined, which means we have a big problem. My uncle was nowhere in sight. If Blackwood has taken my uncle’s place as head of the Dynasty…
given everything we saw last night, there is no way he can ever get a hold of the Basin. ”
Three pairs of eyes turned toward me.
“We have to destroy the Basin.” When Gabriel started shaking his head, I rushed on, “That relic enslaves. My uncle would use it on us, on the Dynasty, but Blackwood… I don’t think he’d stop with our Dynasty. Or his. In fact, I don’t think he’d ever stop.”
From his sea of shadows, Nico lifted his head. “Can such a thing even be destroyed?”
“Ah, look, he speaks,” Gabriel grumbled, shooting him a sour look.
“Oh, fuck you,” Nico growled, turning away so fast, I only half-caught the flash of anger on his face.
The one that could have also been sorrow.
“I can’t answer that question… but there’s one vampire who can.” I winced. “We need to wake Emilia up from stasis.”
Dante slanted me a look. “That’s even more impossible than freeing Rocco.”
“Something tells me she knows more about the Basin than anyone else.” I couldn’t stop watching the shadows around Nico, the way they ebbed and flowed, as if they were alive. “Which means she would know how to destroy it.”
“There’s one small problem,” Dante muttered.
“You mean besides breaking through her wards, fighting our way through hundreds of priests with deadly magic and getting inside the temple?” Gabriel asked sarcastically.
“I don’t know how to break anyone out of stasis.” Dante lifted his brow. “Do you?”
Gabriel exhaled heavily. “Nope. That’s way beyond my pay grade.”
“I can.” All three of us turned to where Nico sat still as a statue, the beach darker than a storm around him. A storm that was formed from a thousand gasping hands and screaming mouths that broke through the surface, then disappeared.
“I can wake her up safely. The process is not complicated, but the spell is delicate and takes time, so we’ll need a way to get inside the temple without alerting anyone, especially those priests. They answer to Vincenzo now.”
“Why?”
Nico remained focused on the horizon. “Because I can’t give you the information you want on the Drax, but I can do this.”
“That’s not an answer,” Gabriel snapped.
“Well, it’s the only one you’re fucking getting, so drop it.”
Something about the exchange set every instinct I possessed on edge. Gabriel wasn’t just upset, he sounded betrayed. I looked over to find Nico staring at me, something like sorrow lining his beautiful face.
This couldn’t wait.
We were on the brink of a war and now was not the time for us to splinter apart.
“Can you give us a moment?” I asked, my gaze still locked with Nico’s, as if neither of us was able to look away.
Something told me that he was drowning—those shadows were an abyss waiting to swallow him up, and he could either tumble inside and be lost forever, or I could pull him back onto solid ground.
And I was not about to let him fall.
“Don’t be long, tesoro,” Dante warned, giving Nico a hard glare before heading back to the villa. Gabriel paused, shook his head, then followed, cursing beneath his breath.
Leaving me alone with Nico and about a million questions.