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“Why am I alive, Dante?” I asked him quietly.

“You eat your greens?”

My hands heated uncomfortably, and my vision blurred slightly. “I’m not in the mood for bullshit, Dante. Tell me everything you know.”

His hazel eyes slid down to my hands, which felt as if I’d put them in front of a fire. When I looked down, to my horror, they were glowing.

A weak reproduction of the blinding light from the woods. But glowing, nonetheless. Human hands didn’t glow.

“You’re a Nephilim,” Dante said quietly.

I didn’t say anything, couldn’t. My mind had emptied, and a tinny sound rang in my ears. My tongue seemed to double in size as I worried I might throw up on his boots.

“They’re half human, half angel.” He looked up from my hands. “The result of an angel mating with a human.”

“I know what a fucking Nephilim is.” I threw up my hands. “They’re a fairy tale. Angels don’t exist.”

He tilted his head, shrewd gaze on me. “But demons do? How can you so readily believe in absolute evil without its counterpart?”

“Because besides the idea of celestial beings floating around in the sky is bullshit, this world is evil,” I spat at him. “If some kind of all-powerful good existed, childhood cancer wouldn’t. Starvation en masse wouldn’t be accepted as the way of the world. The mere existence of Nickelback means there is no higher power out there to protect humanity.”

“Angels are not tasked to protect humanity.” Dante made air quotes with his fingers. “It was once, was their holy goal. Maybe some of the good ones still exist.” He shrugged his shoulders. “They aren’t dissimilar to demons, just with a better PR team. And they don’t tend to involve themselves with humans much, nor hunt them for sport like demons do. Which, in the eyes of our clergy, make them saviors, apparently.”

The nonchalance in which he spoke of angels had my head pounding. He accepted their existence. Not just theirs, mine.

Nephilim. The word battered against my skull.

“And you really believe that I am some kind of celestial half-breed?” It was insane. Beyond insane. But so was having glowing hands and somehow healing from mortal wounds without medical intervention. I should’ve been dead ten times over.

Yet there I was, arguing with Dante with little more than a stomachache.

“Got any other plausible explanations for blasting a demon prince off the face of the earth?” I wanted to smack the asshole, speaking in such a matter-of-fact way.

I struggled to keep the panic clawing up my throat at bay. The anger. Fury. I focused on the latter two, hoping they’d tether me.

“You’ve known this about me the whole time?” I asked him quietly. “You knew what I was and lied to me?”

Dante watched me carefully. He was smart enough to understand that in my anger, I would shoot him somewhere vital. But I no longer needed a gun. Apparently, I was fully locked and loaded at all times. All I needed to do was aim my fingers in his direction, and he’d be nothing but dust.

However tempting that was, I wasn’t going to do it just yet. I had to interrogate him first. Like I would have with any enemy. That’s what Dante was. Another enemy.

“Would you have believed me, Hadley?” He dragged a hand along his chin, his tone careful, gentle. “If I had walked up to you and told you what you were?”

Fuck no, I wouldn’t have believed him. No matter what he’d said. I would’ve labeled him as crazy and stayed as far away from him as I could. Technically, I’d tried to stay far away from him without thinking he was crazy.

And look how that turned out.

“So stalking me across the country was the answer?”

Dante pinched the bridge of his nose, taking a visible breath before locking eyes with me again. “It is my job to follow you. To protect you.” He spoke without any apology. As if it were something I would just accept.

I just stared at him. Felt the heaviness of the words, a backstory there that I wasn’t going to go digging for, not when I already had enough to deal with.

“I don’t need protecting.” I wiggled my fingers. They were getting hotter by the minute, glowing brighter. “You do, though.”

“Yeah, didn’t think that nugget would go down well.” He scrubbed a palm down his face. “A lot of what I say, you’re not gonna be ready to hear right now, so I’ll go with the basics.” He shifted his body, his shoulder pressing into the wall. “I work for an organization that exists purely to protect you, and people like you, from the demons who seek to use you as a weapon in a holy war.”

I choked out a laugh because what else could I do? Although my shoulders sagged under the weight of the nonsense being thrown on top of them, I couldn’t dismiss it as bullshit. I knew, knew in my bones, that Dante was telling me the truth. That he wouldn’t lie to me. He’d just kept the secret of my existence a secret from me.