Her bones collapsed at their feet, smoldering.
Gabriel couldn’t speak. Couldn’t breathe. All he could do was clutch at his skull, trying to keep his fucking brains from leaking out.
Demetria, however, was damn near dancing.
“Holy shit,” she said, beaming at Malcolm. “Holy hell-in-a-handbasket, balls-of-the-devil shit. You killed her. You actually killed her.”
“What?” Malcolm shrugged, a smooth, very un-Malcolm-like grin sliding across his face. “I didn’t like the way she was looking at my brother.”
Demetria laughed. “You’re a funny one, Allegedly Dead. Maybe I’ll let you stick around after all.”
“Is that so?” Malcolm gave the woman a once-over, his gaze settling on her sparse purple hair. “I appreciate your generosity, Violet. Maybe I’ll let you stick around too.”
“Deal.” She held out her hand to shake, but Malcolm only grinned.
“I don’t think so. Unlike my brother, Ialwaysread the fine print.”
“Can’t blame a girl for trying.” She feigned a huff of indignation, then said, “Fine. Since it seems you’renothere to kill my cousin’s favorite vampire, I guess I’ll take off—let you two catch up.”
“Demetria, wait,” Gabriel said, finally finding his voice. Panic simmered inside. She’d said it herself—she was his only friend in hell. Now she wanted to leave? “No need to rush off. We’ve only just—”
“Sorry, Angel. I don’t do other people’s family drama—got enough of my own.” She stretched up on her tiptoes, pressed a kiss to Gabriel’s cheek. “You’d better not be here when I get back, or we’re going to have words. And by words, I mean I’mroastingyour fine ass. And no, not in the sexy, candle wax, what’s-your-safe-word kind of way.”
Then, with another laugh and a hard swat on his so-called fine arse, the spunky, violet-haired demon was off, leaving Gabriel to face the pile of bones and his dead brother alone.
Chapter Twenty-Four
With quick, practiced movements, Malcolm wiped the blade clean on the bottom of his shirt, then kicked the still-smoldering bones of the mother into the abyss.
“Best not to leave a trail for anyone to follow,” he explained, sitting down on a flat slab of rock at the edge of the pit to further inspect the blade. “Even in hell, someone’s always watching.”
Gabriel could only stare.
The Malcolm he remembered—the man he’d last seen in Bloodbath—was unhinged. A madman clinging to the vestiges of old regrets, fueled only by bitterness and revenge.
And before that—before he’d gone rogue and betrayed his entire bloodline— Malcolm had been a self-important dickhead who turned his nose up at anyone he’d deemed beneath him and doled out judgment for even the slightest breach of manners.
ButthisMalcolm… He was neither vengeful nor superior.ThisMalcolm—hell’sMalcolm—was hard and cold, utterly devoid of passion. Stripped right down to the essentials, like a man who’d been shipped off to war as a boy and returned an old man, hollowed of his history, his memories, his dreams, devoid of all but the will to survive.
Gabriel met his brother’s eyes, and the emptiness he found there terrified him more than all the demons of hell.
And yet…
Gabriel couldn’t deny the surge of emotion in his heart, the spiraling ache of grief and despair that could only come from staring death in the face and knowing it’d taken something from you—some irretrievable thing whose absence would forever haunt your steps.
In a family as fraught as theirs, betrayal had the power to sever obligation. To eradicate all bonds of loyalty, duty, even of brotherhood.
But it couldn’t sever love.
And now, despite everything Malcolm had broken in life, Gabriel wanted nothing more than to tell him how much he’d mourned him. Privately, wordlessly, in all the small, often imperceivable ways the heart laments the things that could’ve been—thatshouldhave been, if only someone had said the right words, done the right thing.
He wanted to tell him how much he’d missed him. How his death had left a hole in the Redthorne brotherhood not unlike the hole in Malcolm’s chest—a black wound that time would never heal.
He wanted to tell him about Obsidian, how they still kept a place for him at the VIP table—the white rose, a glass of blood, his memory as alive in death as his body had been in life, even if none of them could bring himself to say Malcolm’s name out loud.
He wanted to tell him he sometimes caught a glimpse of him in his brothers’ eyes, heard him in their laughter, felt his presence even in their rage, and was glad of those moments, even as they broke his heart.
He wanted to tell him he loved him.
