Page 142 of His Eternal Claim

I look through the glass again. At the woman wrapped in a blanket. At the woman who still forgets to eat unless I sit beside her. At the woman whose entire world was stolen from her. “Because I have no intention of leaving her vulnerable again.”

“Fair enough.”

“You know,” he says, standing, “if someone told me years ago that the great Zagreus Vitale would burn down the mafia because he wanted to spend more time with his wife, I would’ve shot them.”

“I can still shoot you.”

“See? That’s growth. Old you would’ve done it already.” I throw a pen at his head.

Kyle catches it. The traitor.

He sets the folder beneath his arm and walks toward the door. “Try not to get arrested and thank your boss for me.” He scoffs; the cold Russian bastard is back. “He drives me insane.”

“Try not to get stabbed again.” He leaves without answering.

I sit there for another minute, then stand, wincing as the stitches shift.

Chapter 53

We Were Born to Burn

THE REQUIEM | Present

Iam sitting under the olive tree, a blanket wrapped around my shoulders, but I can’t feel the heat. I can’t feel anything except the tectonic plates of my own mind grinding against each other, pulverizing five years of lies into fine, choking dust.

The psychiatrist called it catatonia. A defense mechanism.

He doesn’t understand that I’m not catatonic; I am just terrifyingly, violently awake. For three days, every breath has felt like swallowing broken glass. Every time I close my eyes, the timelines collide. The sound of Hannah’s bones hitting the brick.

I killed her. I shot my own Mother. And the worst part—the deepest, darkest fracture in my soul—is that I would do it again.

A shadow cuts through the harsh glare of the sun.

I don’t need to look up to know it’s him. My skin recognizes him before my eyes do. He tastes of gunpowder and storm clouds, pulling the air right out of my lungs. My chest aches.

The guilt and the pain are there. And every time I look at him or think of him, I am hit with the realization of what I’d done and what I took from us, from him.

His hand gently gathers the edge of the blanket, pulling it back over my trembling shoulder. His fingers brush the bare skin of my neck. It burns. It feels like an execution and a resurrection all at once.

I reach up, my fingers locking around his wrist, holding his palm against my throat. I need to feel his pulse. I need to know he didn’t bleed out in that dirt.

“Selene,” he breathes.

The sound of my name in his throat is like a poison I want to drink willingly. The dam inside my chest disintegrates.

A choked sound tears out of my throat as I let go of his wrist, my hands flying to my face, my entire body convulsing. The blanket slides off my shoulders into the dirt. I am pulling myself apart, dismantling every wall I spent three days building, and the tears are coming so fast that I can’t breathe.

“Don’t,” I choke out. “Don’t look at me. Zagreus, please—don’t look at me.”

Before I can even gasp for air, the man who commands empires drops straight to his knees in the dirt at my feet, his massive frame shaking as he buries his face into my lap.

He wraps his arms around my hips, locking me against him.

“I’m looking,” he rasps. “I’ve spent years blind, Dolcezza. I will look at you until my eyes rot in my head. Cry. Scream. Break whatever you need to break, but don’t you dare ask me to look away.”

I slide down until I am on the ground with him, tangled in his lap. I am sobbing so hard my ribs ache, my hands gripping the fabric of his black shirt, bunching it into my fists until my knuckles turn white.

“I forgot,” I cry into his shoulder. “I forgot us. I let them give me to another man. I killed your Mother, our child, and I lived in a house full of ghosts. I didn’t know their names. I let her make me believe you were the monster.”