Endless corridors. Stairwells. Crypts.
While I knew my way around the underground tunnels that Lilith had built beneath Vatican City, I hadn’t been to the surface much. My few visits to the Coventus hadn’t counted.
But now I needed a way out.
An escape.
Somewhere to take the unconscious woman in my arms.
MyErosita.
Mymate.
Fuck.
Her mind revealed so many truths, so manymemories, that I could barely hear my own thoughts.
She was reliving the night we’d met on repeat, thinking about how I’d saved her from being gang-raped. That recollection blended with the present as the wordfittingechoed in her head.
“Seems fitting enough to me.”
My voice echoed in her mind, only I’d never said those words. I’d told Michael to leave her the fuck alone, not drag her off to a room full of low-level vampires.
“You’re going to moan with delight while they rip you apart,” he’d told her.
If I saw him on our way out of here, I’d be ripping him apart instead.
What the fuck was he thinking?I wondered as I phased up several flights of stairs to the catacombs.
There were numerous staircases throughout the underground compound; I’d chosen this set because I wanted to avoid the Coventus—which was in the heart of the former Vatican at ground level.
I didn’t know who I could trust down here. And I didn’t want to risk running into anyone.
Ismerelda’s memories warned me about some sort of weapon Lilith had used to incapacitate me.
Impossible,I kept thinking. But there was no denying the validity of the claim in Ismerelda’s mind.
The same weapon had been used on Ryder. Yet he’d been saved by hisErosita.
And then she helped kill Lilith,I marveled, gathering the truth from Ismerelda’s recollection of events. Ryder had finished the job with an ax, but his hybrid mate had immobilized Lilith first.
Fascinating.
I lost myself in her memories once more, her psyche possessing a wealth of information from my lost time on earth.
Everything I overheard conflicted with everything I thought I knew.
Lilith’s logs had depicted me as the Liege, the creator of this new world. It’d been my vision for lycans and vampires to rule. For humans to be treated no better than cattle. To create a superiority system based on blood.To rid our kind of ourErositalinks.
Gods, what a fool I’d been to believe a voice on a computer. But Michael had played his part well, too. Pretending to be my assistant. Feigning subservience.
Fuck, was he even my progeny?
How deep did the lies go? What was the truth? What was fiction?
Ismerelda’s mind held so many answers—answers I skimmed while trying to focus on my surroundings.
There wasn’t time to properly evaluate her or her memories. I had to get us somewhere safe. A place where I could take my time absorbing a thousand years’ worth of knowledge and experience and figure out what the hell was really going on here.
