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I had the ability to open and close my eyes, use my limbs. It took me a second to figure out where I was.

The last time I was awake, I was lying in the forest, next to the remains of the demon-blessed witch, a couple of hellhounds, and nothing but the scent of brimstone to signify a demon prince had been topside.

And if I remembered correctly, Angela and Sharon had been there?

As if it had all been some kind of fever dream, I woke up in my childhood bedroom. It was dark outside. Whether it was the middle of the night or late evening, I couldn’t tell. The lamp in the corner bathed the room in soft yellow light, illuminating posters, Polaroids, and old perfume bottles.

For a moment, I let myself linger in the fantasy that the past thirteen years had been a hallucination. That I was waking up after storming home from prom drunk. My parents were waiting downstairs with a lecture, my old flip phone bursting with apology texts from Colton. Nothing to worry about but a mild hangover and parental punishment.

But then I wrenched my body from the bed. An eighteen-year-old body did not ache like this.

My bones protested, feeling twenty times heavier than I remembered. A dull, warm throb was centered in my midsection.

But no gaping hole. No intestines spilled out when I stood. My vision did black out a little, and I swayed on my feet, but I didn’t fall to the ground.

My feet were bare. I was wearing a T-shirt that smelled of cinnamon and spice. I lifted the hem to discover I was wearing the same underwear yet no bra.

Dante.

He’d taken me back here, changed me, and put me to bed. My skin was no longer stained with my own blood, muck, and hellhound innards. He’d cleaned me up too. I smelled of soap.

The very thought made my blood boil. But I couldn’t muster up enough fury—my head was still cloudy, my tongue swollen and throat dry.

As soon as I spied a large glass of water on my side table, I downed it, though my empty stomach seized at the liquid entering it so quickly.

I rubbed my eyes as I gazed around the room, trying to understand last night. But when the images came hurtling to my mind, I pushed them away. I was not ready to confront them yet.

I heard a noise downstairs, my body tensing. But then I remembered the threat was gone. Or at the very least, the threat had stopped being cursed. Colton was still alive, as far as I knew.

And how did I feel about that?

Who could know?

Anger… That worked as good as anything. And if it wasn’t a creature of some sort rumbling downstairs, I could hazard a healthy guess as to who it was.

I grimaced as I stomped down the stairs, finding a familiar door open, light spilling from inside.

Both my fury and my step hesitated at the life in the room I hadn’t set foot in since I got there. But I fought a demon prince that night—or maybe it was the previous night?—and I’d slept the whole day. I could handle walking into my father’s study.

When I walked through the threshold, I was presented with Dante, sitting in the high leather wingback chair, boots up on the desk, a worn paperback in his hands, brows knitted together in a frown.

The book closed with a thud as his eyes found me. They were different. Not teasing. Not cocky. Something else. Something more serious. Reverent? Relieved? Lines bracketed his eyes, and his lips were turned downward as if he were wincing. He seemed older. Much older.

“What are you doing down here?” My hands landed on my hips. The vision of him sitting in my father’s study was somehow both sacrilegious and comforting. Comforting because before, the emptiness of it had turned it into a tomb. Sacrilegious because it was my quiet, bookworm father who had previously sat in that leather chair. Now it was a devil-may-care hunter who probably couldn’t even spell Aristotle, let alone quote him.

“Did you want me to wait at your bedside, holding your hand?” Dante’s mouth quirked up. “Not really my style, sweetheart.”

I wanted to tell him that I’d felt lips on my forehead, heard the softly murmured words in my ear in a half-remembered dream. But that would be opening a kettle of fish I was going to let rot in a far-off corner of my mind.

“I’m alive.” The words came out as an accusation. As if it were his fault. As if it were a bad thing.

Maybe it was.

“You are.” Dante pulled his feet from the desk. Good thing too because seeing him sitting there like that had made me want to rake my nails down his cheek.

My hands fisted at my sides. Because Dante wasn’t shocked. Which meant he knew more than he should’ve. He knew more about me than I did.

Dante had been lying to me.