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Dante turned to look at me and his eyes seemed to see me for the first time since we’d found ourselves here.
“Hendrik is a part of me,” he said matter-of-factly, then turned back to her.
My stomach flipped again, but this time it wasn’t nausea.
Dante and I had become close, but that was the closest he’d ever come to saying I meant something to him.
My memories might be fuzzy, but he’d never said words of love to me. We were simply two angry creatures trapped in the same place, able to find comfort in each other’s suffering.
I frowned, remembering that we were part of the same mate-circle.
Which meant that we shared a mate.
That deeply concerned me if that were the case. I was not the type to take a mate. As a Dark Mage, I would cease to exist when I died. That had never seemed fair to burden another with, so I’d always vowed to be alone.
Yet, here I was, somehow ensnared to a Hunter and a mate I couldn’t remember.
Instead of answers, I’m only finding more questions,I mused.
A light smile crested the woman’s lips. “In that case, I’m glad. I suspect you’ll need him once I give this to you.” She stroked the object against her chest again as a more somber expression retook her features.
Dante stood, but it wasn’t a battle stance. Instead, he loosely held his dagger at his side. I knew him well enough to know he could lop the woman’s head from her body if she so much as breathed the wrong way, but he seemed like he wanted answers.
Thank Hell.
Because I was tired of the questions.
“Where are they?” he asked, making me frown. It wasn’t the question I had been expecting, but okay. We’d start there, with hisobsession.
The woman blinked a few times, then sighed. She glanced at our feet. “If you’re referring to the witches who took you, they’re gone, Dante.”
He stiffened. “And where did they go?”
Fresh pain made her eyes sparkle and the magic of her suffering reached my senses, but I couldn’t grab onto it. My magic still didn’t seem to work here, even if I could taste the torment I usually would channel into magic.
“That’s not important, Dante. They took you and—”
The Hunter moved so fast that I didn’t even see him close the distance between them. First he was across the field, and the next he was towering over her with his blade pressing against her throat. “They didn’ttakeme, mother. Yougaveme to them.”
Her throat worked on a swallow, but she didn’t respond.
He growled and leaned in. A spike of pain on the wind informed me that he had cut her skin. “Do you deny it?”
She blinked away fresh tears and I was confused by the pity that tightened my chest.
Since when did Icare?
“I made a deal with the witches for my firstborn, yes,” she admitted.
Something unknotted in Dante’s shoulders at her admission, as if hearing it aloud healed something inside of him just as much as it pained him.
His pain bloomed like a sweet aroma, drawing me toward the pair until I pressed my hand on his back.
He didn’t respond to my touch, but he didn’t push me away, either.
The woman glanced at me as she continued. “But I didn’t give them to you, not when I realized my mistake. When you were born, I hid you, Dante. I ran and ran until they found me… until theytookyou from me.”
Dante went tense under my palm. I attempted to draw in his pain, but it didn’t work.
