Page 66 of Underworld
After I’d killed her.
“No,” I breathed as Dante stumbled away from me.
I crashed to my knees and my wings spilled around me like a cape as my throat caught on a sob.
Kaito’s weapon vanished in a whirl of magic as he grabbed Dante by the collar and yanked him back. “She wasn’t supposed to find out this way.”
My head shot up. “You knew?”
Of course Kaito had known.
He knew everything, and yet, he still kept secrets from me.
Kaito’s lips formed a hard line as Dante blinked at me. “Lily,” he said, coming out of his rage-induced haze. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean—”
Hendrik smashed his fist into Dante’s face, making my Hunter lash to the molten ground. “You’re an idiot,” he growled. He hit him again and Dante let him.
“Defend yourself,” I screamed at him.
I couldn’t hate him for telling me the truth.
I had tried to kill him, just like I had killed my own mother, except Dante couldn’t die. Not by my hand. As my Virtue, and as a Hunter, he could survive almost anything, even a fatal wound across his throat.
Whatever rage had been in him seeped away and only misery was left behind.
Hendrik’s magic flared with it, like gasoline pouring onto an open flame. His pitch-black eyes glittered with power and he raised his fist to strike again.
I moved faster than I had in all my life. I caught his wrist and stopped him, supernatural strength billowing through my form. That had been the first power to come back to me after the mind wipe, a self-inflicted release of power to protect myself from the truth.
It was time to face it. Cole worked off of rage and deceit. If I made peace, if my Virtues could come together, we could take away all of his power.
And then he would be forced to make a decision. Stand with me, or get out of the fucking way.
A rim of red struggled around Dante’s irises as the three of us held our breath.
“Oh no you don’t,” I said, threading my fingers through his hair and forcing him to look at me. Searching his gaze, I mercilessly tore along our Virtue bond.
Dante gasped and arched, his skin glowing hot in retaliation of my intervention.
It would hurt.
But this was something that needed to be done.
“Where are you…” I clawed my way through his mind, searching for a deal that never should have been made.
A red thread, all but lost in the chaos that linked Dante and me, twined through the Hunter’s psyche. It pulsed malevolence and tasted of Cole, of heat, of sin.
Traits I could relate with, and because of that, I would free him.
Power burned inside me on a level I didn’t recognize and itreachedfor that pulsing, angry red.
Dante jerked, then screamed, the noise stretching out and out as I sliced through that red with my magic. Mynewmagic, the magic that came to me in my death and rebirth, along with my wings.
My magic as a fallen angel, as the future Queen of Hell, and as the Champion of the Third Echo of Calamity.
The angry red pulsed fiery hot. As Dante sagged against me, it exploded out of existence.
Wrapping my arms around him, I looked up at Kaito. The aftereffects of what I’d done still clouded my eyes, a haze over my vision, but it cleared when my mentor sank down next to me, surprise in his gaze, it disappeared entirely.
