A snake…no… a long black braid weaving in the water like a serpent.
Emberline.
For one painful, nauseating heartbeat, the sight didn’t make sense. She never looked that still, like a rag doll. Even asleep in my bed, her body stayed coiled, ready, fingers tensed like she was waiting for a fight.
Now my brave, fearless wife floated limp, arms bound behind her, eyes wide open, staring up at the surface, a good foot above her head now.
I was too fucking late.
I never felt as helpless as I did right now. For one second, I considered wrapping myself around her and dying, too, staying down here so she wasn’t alone. Then the urge disappeared, canceled out by boiling rage.
I’m getting you out of here.
I reachedher in two strokes, hands closing around her shoulders. Her skin was cold when I tugged her toward me, but she was bound tight, and it took me too fucking long to tear the razor wire free, to untie her legs.
I kicked and kicked, hauling her toward the gap, twisting my body to shield her from the edges of the broken grate. Jagged metal gouged chunks out of my back, my shoulders, and my arms until the water tasted like blood, but I barely felt the pain.
The moment we cleared the opening, I swam for the surface, lungs collapsing, vision darkening for lack of air. The water felt heavier now, as if the canal resented me stealing her away from its greedy claws.
“She is not yours,” I snarled into the water. “She is mine, and you cannot have her.”
The surface broke, and we emerged into a rush of air and sound. I sucked in a breath so deep, my chest hurt, then another, swimming for Nico’s outstretched hand. Emberline’s head bounced against my shoulder, her face slack, lips tinged a faint deathly blue.
“Dante,” Nico’s hiss cracked across the canal.
A second later, he was on the edge, reaching down, hauling Ember up. I scrambled ashore behind her, palms flat on the wet stone, water streaming from my clothes, and the night spinning in circles as my brain caught up with reality.
My wife lay on her back—too pale even for a vampire, all the color washed out. Her chest was still, her dark eyes wide, reflecting the stars above.
“Emberline.” I leaned over her and tapped lightly at her cheek. “Ember, wake up. Come on. Take a breath, baby.”
Vampires could survive almost anything. I’d seen gruesome, career-ending wounds that hadn’t ended lives, but… she’d been under a long time, and she was barely thirty.
So fucking young.
My entire body shook, fear I hadn’t tasted in centuries clawing up my throat as I tried to gather my scrambled thoughts.
I could barely keep my hand still enough to press two fingers to her neck, just below her jaw, where a pulse should have been. Horror choked me at the slick chill of her gray skin, the same shade as the stone around us. I pressed harder.
Fucking nothing.
“Anything?” Nico’s rough voice came from far away, swallowed by the roaring in my ears, the horror consuming me whole. I was hyperventilating, trapped in a nightmare I couldn’t claw my way out of.
My wife is dead.
My fingers trembled where they were pressed against that silent vein, my other hand splayed over her sternum,and beneath my palm, there was no subtle rise and fall of breath, no reassuring thud against my bones.
My life was slipping away… no, my life was gone.
Everything had ended when my wife took her last breath.
53
DANTE
Blood stained the pavement around us, still slowly leaking from her wrists, sliced to the bone as I applied compressions, pressed my ear to her cold chest again, my hands shaking as I fed another tendril of magic into her.
Why the fuck had I left her alone?
