“Say it again.” His pale blue eyes burned.
“Say what?”
“My name.”
“Dante Dumas,” Selene said. “You’re the whipping boy.”
Dante’s smile was different. There was something darker to it, a hundred years of untold suffering and the life he lived before folded beneath.
“My pain to benefit the crown, always.” He stared into the shadows as if he were reading them. His eyes sparked with some new understanding. “You weren’t supposed to come back.”
“You told me to bring you the death of a dream,” Selene said.
“An impossible task.”
“I’m—”
“Relentless. I remember. There are things at play here more important than promises and games played with shadow. You have to go, Selene. Now.”
Selene’s heart stuttered. She had to tell him about her father, about all that had changed. She couldn’t leave now. She’d crossed the sky to be here on wings made of shadow.
“The prince is putting up mirrors all throughout the opera house. Enough light to banish the dark.”
And set you free.Selene was afraid if she said the words out loud, she’d render them untrue.
“I don’t need the mirrors.” Dante’s eyes went sharp and cold. “There was always another way.”
There was sorrow in the pools of his ice-blue eyes. Something was wrong. Perhaps he had remembered something far too terrible to name. Maybe what she’d seen that first day had been closest to the truth—he was a monster and not a man bound in darkness.
“Do you know what you have done?” He had the oil spill knife in his hands. He was drawing lines down his arm. Cuts so deep. The blood slid into shadows almost as soon as the knife cut into the skin.
“I don’t care.” Desperation clung to the edge of her words. “Ask me what I want.”
“Selene—”
“Ask me who killed my father.”
Dante breathed out slowly.
“Ask me!”
“Who killed—”
“He’s not dead. I have my father again. That’s what I want. That’s all I’ve ever wanted.”
There were tears running down her cheeks. Rage still simmered inside her. All those wasted years. The lies that had been watered and fed, grown up from the ground to create a poisonous garden. She thought she could forgive that, eventually. As long as she had her father.
She waited for Dante’s uproarious joy. For him to smile and tell her that everything was finally the way it should be. But he just stood there cutting moons into his skin. He looked like she’d told him that the stars had winked out of existence. Like she’d told him that he’d never be free.
“Say something,” she said desperately.
“This isn’t the way it was supposed to be,” he whispered. He did not stop cutting into his flesh. Healing and splitting and bleeding and healing again. “Magic has a price.”
Selene took a step toward him. “You have your name. I have Father. And I’m going to get you out.”
“What have you brought me, Selene?” Dante said.
The question startled her. All she had was her father’s painting. She reached into her pocket and pulled out the paper. It didn’t hurt her in the same way it had to give up his watch. He could paint her a thousand pictures. He could paint the whole world and she’d be there with him.
