The corners of Dante lips tugged up into a delicate little smile, so unlike himself. “I think that’s why they call it faith.”
My jaw quivered.
“We’ll be together,” he told me then, his voice low as he stared into my eyes. “Whatever we’re to face in the tenth Trial, whatever we find in victory or defeat, we’ll go to it together.”
He took my hand and lifted it between us until we were both staring down at the massive emerald glittering upon my finger in the soft moonlight.
“I meant what I said. I’m here for you. I never meant to claim your future. If I could, I would give you a choice in this. But we’re standing on the precipice of the unknown and all I can promise you is my heart. It’s yours, Adrian Bexley. It has been for some time. I’m sorry our world is like this, that it pushes us to make decisions we wouldn’t otherwise make, to participate in things we wouldn’t choose for ourselves. If nothing else, I’m grateful that it pushed me to you. So I will love you. With all of my heart. If not in this world, then in the next.”
Then he did something so uncharacteristic, I was left staring after him in surprise long afterward. He bent down and kissed the back of my hand before dropping it gently to my side.
Dante turned away and strode toward the gate, unlatching it and stepping out of view, on his way back to his palatial,ancestral estate. I watched him go until he was gone, my mind whirring. I stood still in the moonlight and closed my eyes, just breathing, trying to still my beating heart and return to rational thought.
A faint click of an opening door and an oddly familiar whoosh of it sliding open had me tearing my eyes back open. I looked over just in time to see a head of strawberry blonde hair disappearing into the house next to ours.
Chapter Thirty-Three
“It’s that mass, that swirling darkness. It reminds me of something but I can’t quite put my finger on it. It seems… familiar in a way. And it calls to me. It calls to all of us. But those who go into it never return again.”
-Matthan of House Alosia after the First Culling; 1 Age of Sanctum
The Deck was more crowded than I’d ever seen it. Someone had graciously cleared a pathway from the First Ring down to the Deck and to the ninth tunnel. If they hadn’t, I wasn’t convinced Dante and I would’ve been able to squeeze through the crowd enough to reach our next Trial. As it was, the crowd had hardly allowed each other enough room to move. Acolytes and priests were interspersed throughout, their eyes firmly on the gathered Third Ringers and Deckers rather than on Dante and me. Something about that bothered me, but I was too distracted to question it.
“Adrian!“ someone screamed my name. A boy, I thought, but before I could spot him in the crowd, another called to me from closer, then another farther away.
“Ignore them,” Dante warned under his breath. I bristled at his tone but kept walking. Gone was the boy who’d kissed my hand in the backyard last night. Gone was the man who’d declared his love for me and promised me forever, in whatever capacity it might come. In his place was the partner who’d shown up at my doorstep this morning and announced there was no point in waiting any longer for the next Trial. Hoping a lack of preparation might mean we’d lose, I’d agreed and slipped into the Trial uniform he’d brought with him from the estate before following him into the fray.
The crowd was pushing in closer now, and we seemed to be walking faster. I had the strangest feeling in my gut, like something was wrong.
“What—”
“Saint Adrian!” an overzealous woman cried, making a show of bowing low to the ground as we passed. “Saint Dante!”
I froze. The woman was clad in all white, a color typically reserved for the acolytes and their holy order. As she bowed, a few others stepped through the crowd to bow beside her, all of them wearing white, all of them crying out for Dante and I, calling us Saints.
I almost bit my tongue when someone shoved me hard from behind, and I stumbled forward.
“Move,” Cosmo growled from behind me, a hint of urgency in his tone. But I couldn’t understand why. And where was Dante? As I turned to look for him, a scream pierced the air, and all the people who’d gathered close in an attempt to get a glimpse of us started scattering chaotically in different directions.
I turned in the direction of where the chaos had originated. The woman in white lay face down on the cobblestones, bludgeoned and bleeding. My stomach turned. I lurched forward, instinctively wanting to help, but was pulled away by a firm hand on my shoulder.
Before I was forcibly turned back toward the tunnel, I caught a glimpse of what had occurred. The white robed worshippers had fled, all but the unconscious woman who’d led them and two younger men who were being brutally beaten by small groups of three or four officers, their black uniforms stark against the morning sun. Everyone else in the crowd had scattered and stood on the fringes of the Deck, watching in horror or pleading with the abusers to stop. But the Fellowship either didn’t hear them or didn’t care. And the acolytes standing behind them only watched on with grim expressions, making no move to stop the brutality.
Come on, Adrian.
In my shock, I’d forgotten to mentally shield myself from Dante. I cursed and put that barrier back into place. Had he sensed my horror and unease? Why hadn’t I sensed his? I turned to find him waiting for me, just up ahead at the entrance to the tunnel. I blinked. When had we come so far?
“What the hell was that?” I spat when I reached him.
“Come on, Adrian,” he repeated, out loud this time. “We need to go.”
He reached for me, but I pulled away.
“Not until you tell me what just happened.”
Dante sighed, a deep exhale full of sorrow and exhaustion. Then he looked up at something behind us and nodded.
Someone again shoved me forward, hard. It was an officer, the same as those beating the innocents on the Deck. Why he was doing this? The officers of Sanctuary had lately begun to treat me as something like a deity myself. They would never dare put their hands on me. Unless, of course, someone was instructing them to.
