She arched a brow. “Anything?”
“Anything at all.” Nothing mattered now. Not my vendetta, not my plan to clean up the Dynasty. Only Emberline mattered, and I would sell my soul to save my wife.
Emilia closed her eyes, reached out, and placed two fingers against Emberline’s throat, just below the jaw. Then her hand slid lower, pressing over Emberline’s heart as I held my breath.
“You were almost too late,” Emilia’s voice drifted lower. “Her soul is unmoored, and she is very nearly gone.”
Something inside me tore.
“But not far,” Emilia muttered, almost to herself. “Drowning is…you are fortunate. The line between here and there blurs in water… and factoring in the cold… there might very well be a chance. Yes, this could work, if the gods smile upon us tonight.”
Slowly, Emilia opened her eyes.
“Understand,” she intoned, the warmth leaching from her tone, leaving something colder behind, “what you are asking is not a healing. This magic is expressly forbidden, according to the Compact. You are asking me to cheat death, and the cost will be high.”
“The cost is mine to pay,” I vowed, as Nico shot me a pointed glare. “And if that means she survives, then I will pay whatever price you ask, Lady Emilia.”
She straightened, folding her hands.
“Very well,” she decided. “I will grant you this favor. I will call her back.”
Relief slammed into me so hard my knees almost buckled. I buried my face in Emberline’s wet hair, fighting back my tears. “Thank you, I?—”
“Do not thank me yet, boy.” Emilia’s voice was a cold lash across my hope. “You will not like the cost.”
“I already told you,” I met her serpentine stare with the same one I’d used on adversaries in the pits. “Any price. I will pay in blood or whatever currency you desire, even my life. Because no cost is too high to save the female I love.”
She studied me for a long, slow moment.
“In that case,”—her eyes narrowed down to slits—“let this be a test of your will. You survived The Fossa; perhaps you will survive this, too.”
She gestured to the priests. “Quickly. Prepare the lower chapel. We’ll need plenty of salt, light all the candles, and one of you fetch my black book.”
“Follow me.” She ran those cold eyes over me, and I felt like my skin was being peeled back, one layer at a time. “Do try not to bleed on the floor any more than you already have. The stone remembers.”
54
DANTE
The DiSangue chapel’s ceiling was low enough that the top of Nico’s head brushed the chiseled rock. Every wall was lined with niches, each holding a single burning candle, so much red wax dripping down the walls, they could have been bleeding.
In the center of the chamber, a stone slab served as a sacrificial altar.
Iron cuffs were bolted to the four corners, a pile of chains piled at the foot, as though they’d been recently used.
Emilia nodded to the slab. “Lay her there.”
It took a second for my muscles to unclench, another to lower Emberline onto the cold stone before I stepped back, frowning. She looked too small, too fragile, too much like an offering. Her braid had come loose, and dark hair spread around her in damp, curling waves, water seeping into the sandstone. There was a dark bruise on the back of her head, deepened to a sickly bloom.
Cuts on her wrists, one of them to the bone.
Anger flared, deep and hot, etching into my bones like a promise.
She’d been struck from behind and tied up while incapacitated by a coward. A coward I was going to kill, in all the ways I’d learned over these past decades but never been cruel enough to use.
I was cruel enough now.
I stood at the head of the altar, smoothing a strand of hair from her face, tracing the slope of her cheek, wiping away the traces of my blood, the canal water. “I’m right here, Ember. Right here, waiting. Come back to me,” I whispered. “Please come back.”
