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I was moments, milliseconds away from giving in.

“Hadley!”

The roar of my name somehow penetrated the invisible wall. The shout was so primal that it crept under my skin, into my heart. The voice was familiar. Dante.

I remembered who the fuck I was. I was Hadley fucking Harris. A hunter. And I wasn’t about to die a coward.

I jerked my head upward in defiance, glaring at the demon. “I am no man’s,” I ground out, fury lighting the way.

I raised my hand upward, intending to use it to push, punch, rake my nails down the side of the demon’s face—anything violent. Anything that would say Hadley Harris’s last moments were fighting, not surrender.

But that didn’t happen.

Instead, something deep inside me cracked. And warmth, unimaginable, golden warmth spread through my ruined body, lighting up the clearing while almost blinding me.

But I saw it.

I saw that light, a brilliant hue, erupting from my palm. And then the world tipped on its axis.

I looked at my hand.

Then at the demon.

Or the space the demon used to occupy.

There was nothing but a patch of scorched, smoking ground.

No remains. Nothing.

I’d just incinerated a demon—a demon prince—with a burst of light from my hand? What the fuck? That wasn’t a human thing to do.

I wasn’t a human?

Holy fucking shit. I wasn’t human.

And the only things that weren’t human were monsters.

I was a monster.

There was an irritating ringing in my ears as blood steadily dripped from the wound in my stomach. The pain from the drool, my shattered cheekbone, my ribs, calf… It was all gone.

My eyes found Dante’s. His trademark calm was fractured, his jaw slackened in shock, hand on the revolver he always carried.

He had to shoot me.

Because I was a monster.

And that’s about when everything went black.

twenty-two

“She needs a hospital.”

I heard the bark of a laugh. But even through the fog in my brain, it sounded forced. “The absolute last thing she needs is a hospital.”

“Her organs are fucking falling out of her stomach,” the other voice boomed.

The fury in his tone at my injury seemed dramatic. He wasn’t the one with the gash in the abdomen. I was. Which was burning like a thousand sons of bitches right about now.