My breaths came in quickened drags. I remained as still as physically possible, afraid that if I moved, whatever I was doing would stop and I wouldn’t be able to figure out how to start it again.
Already exhausted, I battled against my waning energy as I stared in stunned disbelief at the quickly blooming skin around the wound. My eyelids dropped, but I forced them back open. Was this process leeching life from me to heal Dante? I made no move to stop it. Maybe I would, if it got to be too much, but for now, I was just amazed it was happening at all.
Once the wound was almost completely closed, Dante stirred, but I hardly realized. My eyes had grown even heavier, and I’d nearly shut them for good.
“What happened?” he asked as he sat upright, peering down at his arm.
“We…we can heal.”
“Stop!” he cried, pulling his arm out of my grasp.
Whatever connection I’d made to heal him snapped, and I was flooded with the remaining energy that had been slowly siphoning off to him. I gasped and sat bolt upright. “No. I think I can heal it, Dante. I think I canregrowit.”
He cradled his partially healed stump, watching me as I swayed, delirious.
“Later,” he barked with a frown. “Right now, we need to get out of here.”
“But the tubes—“
“They’re here.”
I looked up. So they were. When had that happened? And why was it so hard to think? My thoughts were so fuzzy it was hard to grasp onto any of them for long.
We helped each other to our feet and pulled one another toward the exit. We were covered in blood, dripping the viscous fluid onto the stone floor behind us, but we held onto each other tightly, strength surging in one when the other’s failed. Before I knew it, we were spinning away again.
I lost consciousness once or twice on the ride back. I could only imagine Dante did as well.
When we emerged from the dark tunnel to Sanctuary, coated in red, Dante without a limb, me practically falling over, we became the first pair in five hundred years to pass the fifth Trial.
Chapter Twenty-One
“They say that love makes a man do crazy things, that revenge can twist the soul into something evil and unrecognizable, that anger can make a good man bad. But nothing, absolutely nothing, can break you, can change you, more than grief.”
-Journal of Rainier, 379 Genesis Age
Ididn’t leave Dante’s bedside for three days following our victory.
We’d somehow managed to make it all the way back to the estate before collapsing in the foyer. Cosmo had come in raving, demanding to know what had happened. Neither Dante nor I had the strength to answer him even if the Oath would have allowed it. Instead, we let him rant, and I only spoke when he tried to order my partner be taken away from me. We needed each other. Cosmo had tried to protest, likely already considering ways to blame me for his grandson’s state, but I had muttered a string of profanity and threats so vivid, even the patriarch of House Viper balked.
That was the first time Dante had smiled since his mother had caught us in the foyer with her dire warning. It made me smile too, but then I fell into oblivion alongside him.
Apparently, after that, Bria had gone to the gardens to fetch a sedative which Dante had been under ever since, and Myrine had found me all manner of food and water and medications to keep me alert and energized enough to heal her son.
It was a lot of work to regrow a limb. Dante was sedated for the pain, but I used every waking hour to focus on his healing, dozing off only when I had no more energy left to give or feared I would give too much like I had in the Trial itself. I was such an emotional, nervous wreck, I doubted I would have eaten or slept during those three days if Bria and Myrine hadn’t shown up at regular intervals to shove food down my throat or pull me away for some rest.
Finally, on the third evening, Dante opened his eyes. He looked down at his hand and flexed his newly made fingers.
“Thank the Geist,” I muttered before blacking out again.
I didn’t wake up for two days. When I did, it was in Dante’s bed. I opened my eyes to an enormous breakfast Myrine had ordered made for me and brought in on a cart that could slide over the bed for me to eat without having to get up. She never said a word, but she smiled at me for the first time, and that was enough. I was halfway through a stack of waffles the size of my pillow when Dante entered the room.
He hesitated for only a moment as his eyes met mine. The green in them shimmered as he closed the door slowly behind him. I heard the distinct click of the lock and then he was pulling his shirt up over his head. I inhaled sharply but he simply strode across the room to the closet and reached inside.
“I’m sorry,” I said, trying to ignore the way every muscle in his upper body shifted and flexed as he pulled a new shirt off one of the hangers.
He frowned. “For what?”
“Um, cutting off your arm?” I replied, incredulous that he even had to ask. But to my even further astonishment, he simply waved his hand as if the matter were of no consequence.
