Page 53 of Fortune Academy: Year Three
Dante gripped me by the shoulder—hard—and spun me around so fast that I almost toppled over. “Do not walk away from me,” he growled as the black mist moved through the air, dancing upward over our chests.
I really didn’t have time for this shit.
“Look, Dante. I get that you’re pissed off and Cole is getting under your skin.” I wasn’t feeling any of Olivia’s feel-good spell anymore, so the sooner I got to Cole, the better. “Don’t you get it?” I asked as I held up the handkerchief. “This is the key to my true Awakening. I’ve always been incomplete and broken.” I shoved the precious cloth into my pocket before he could rip it away from me. “You wouldn’t understand what that’s like.”
“I wouldn’t understand?” he roared, grabbing for me again but I moved too fast for him to get ahold of my skirt. He presented the long scar across his wrist as the dark fog glided over it, seeming to be interested in Dante’s past pain. “I lived without a hand for a year for you, or have you forgotten that little detail? You know what makes a man feel incomplete and broken? Missing a fucking appendage!”
Tears threatened to stream down my face, even if I knew it was the effects of the rage demon making Dante act like a complete asshole. “I never asked you to do that for me,” I snapped before turning and breaking into a run.
Maybe I wasn’t as fast as the Hunter, but I wasn’t going to make this easy on him.
I pushed all of my supernatural strength into my legs as I fled down the streets. I missed Logan and knew he’d enjoy this. He’d run alongside me and play rather than chase me down like a Hunter homing in on his victim.
Dante kept up pace as he caught up with me faster than I had anticipated. He’d grown stronger after becoming my Virtue, just as all my guys had blossomed into their powers. Except right now he used the gifts I had awakened in him against me and it pissed me off.
Just as his fingers clawed into my hip, I spun, using my momentum to fling him around me and onto the ground. He hit hard and went into a tumbling roll. I went to jump over him but the Hunter kept his eye on me, even in the disorienting spin, and grabbed at me so that I went tumbling down with him.
We became a tangle of arms and legs as the street jabbed rocks into my side, knocking the wind out of me until we stopped and Dante pinned me down. His chest heaved and his wild orange eyes glowed with murder and lust.
“You still don’t remember, do you?” he asked, his anger burning hot and violent as the darkness threatened to close in around us. He yanked down his neckline and revealed the long scar that ran across his throat. “Think, Lily. Think hard.”
I froze, staring at the mark as I felt inevitably drawn to it like a moth to a flame. I traced one finger across it, retracting my dark claw that matched the scar’s shape far too perfectly.
No. That doesn’t make sense. I couldn’t have…
I pulled my hand away. “I don’t like this, Dante. Get off me.”
He grabbed my wrist and pulled my fingers to his throat again, forcing me to feel the raised line. “Not until you remember.”
“Remember what?” I asked. “There’s nothing that—”
My words cut off short as a deep, dark memory struggled to the surface. The darkness all around me sucked me into a place I’d kept walled off from my mind, for my sanity’s sake.
I’d once been more Demonspawn than anything else. All I knew was anger and betrayal. My father, the Incubus King, had only wanted to use me to build an army of more just like me. At first, I’d been the perfect instrument for his plans. I’d embraced my Demonspawn side. Lack of empathy. Anger. Rage.
But most of all… I’d had a need for understanding and acceptance.
I started to question his actions, especially when he hurt people who didn’t seem to deserve it. Empathy wasn’t something a Demonspawn was supposed to have, but I wasn’t just a demon.
That’s when he’d locked me up in the darkness, that vile place where I’d gone when Kaito had given me the Awakening vial. It was where I’d lost my mind.
Where I’d lost everything.
I’d hurt people after that. It was a blur, even now, but I knew I’d done terrible things I could never forgive myself for.
“The blood on me,” I said, remembering that first night in the rain when I’d found myself at Cindy’s bar. I glanced up at my Hunter as my stomach twisted. “It wasn’t my own.”
His expression went grim as he waited for me to finish my thought.
“It… was yours.”
I’d been the one to do this to my Hunter. I’d sliced his throat wide open and left him for dead.
That was the first time he’d tried to hunt me down and failed.
But his blood had done something to me. It had touched a power inside of me that connected with my angel heritage and given me a second chance.
A clean slate.
