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“Those are the basics?”

He showed me his palms. “Best I can do.”

His nonchalance was really starting to piss me off. He’d known about my heritage for as long as he’d known me. He worked for some kind of secret society. He had hidden a whole identity from me. Mine. His.

Did anyone in my fucking life tell the truth? My skin burned from the betrayal by the one person I hadn’t realized I’d come to trust most. The person I felt safest with.

He was the most dangerous of them all. Because a male who believed he was born to protect a woman was a lethal fucking creature, make no mistake.

And I’d fallen under his spell. I’d thought of him as I laid dying. I’d reached for him while bleeding in the dirt. I’d pressed my face into his fucking chest as he carried me out of the woods.

My skin felt tight, impossibly so. My blood was hot in my veins, as if it were going to burn through the skin. I didn’t miss how it glowed faintly. I was doing my best to ignore this new trick; I could barely hold on to sanity at that moment. The magnitude of what I was expected to swallow in one sitting was unheard of. But the burn, it promised an escape. A place where I didn’t have to think about any of this.

“You need to learn to control it.” Dante motioned down to my arms.

“You need to learn to not tell me what the fuck to do,” I threw back. Though I felt it. The hum of something big, something terrifying inside me that I couldn’t wrap my arms around.

“You’ll exhaust yourself.” Dante sounded casual, though his jaw was tense. “If you get too angry, try to pull too much of the divine power into a mortal body not properly prepared to sustain it.”

Though I wished I could brush off his words, I felt the truth deep in my body. It already felt like my organs were boiling from the inside out, the pain nearly unbearable. Though the physical pain was somehow comforting, distracting.

“Hadley.” Dante closed the distance between us. “You need to breathe. Right now, your power is tied to your emotions. The more you let the anger control you, the more the power will rise.”

“That’s a pretty way of just telling me to calm down.” I squeezed the skin between my eyes. “Telling women to calm down isn’t advised in the best of circumstances.”

Despite what I said, I was actually trying to calm down. But I couldn’t rid my brain of that day in the hot spring. The night in the cemetery. Saving that kid. Dante kneeling in the dirt, reaching out for me. Finally feeling like I had someone. Someone who might have understood the real me. Who might’ve liked me. Someone who, despite my best efforts, I might’ve liked back.

Then there was Gerald. Sharon, threading lies through my whole life. Colton killing my parents. Shay—the woman I thought might’ve been a friend—a witch, bent on destroying my life. All of it kindling for the flame inside of me. It was going to swallow me whole. Maybe I wanted it to.

“Hadley.” Dante’s voice was more urgent now.

Hands found my hips, and I noted his eyes flare, a muscle twitching in his cheek. He didn’t let me go. Though my body was burning, his hands provided a different kind of heat. Grounding. Calming.

“Look at me,” he urged.

My eyes locked onto his as if I couldn’t control it. The heat in my body dissipated some as our gazes met, something in me clicking, relaxing.

“Breathe.” His voice was deeper, louder, somehow cooler. It was a buoy in a stormy sea. As were his hands. Even though I was angry at him right then, furious, I couldn’t deny that his presence was grounding. That the connection between us didn’t tie me to something familiar, since everything in my body, in my blood, my fucking species had become unfamiliar.

I let myself look into his eyes, let myself breathe, even though it initially felt like I was inhaling pure flames.

But then I smelled cinnamon, spice. Dante. Another safeguard to stop me from spiraling. Slowly, like a resistant receding tide, the power sucked back inside of me.

But it was nowhere near gone. I could still feel it, coiled, waiting, throbbing with a need to be set free.

My helplessness in the face of a power that apparently could kill me was the snap back to reality I needed.

Dante’s body was pressed to mine, his fingers still at my hips.

Somehow, I’d leaned into him. I’d grasped on to him with desperation. As if he were my salvation.

I pushed back, clenching my fists, gnashing my teeth together in an effort not to get angry again.

“I’m leaving,” I said carefully, slowly. “And you’d do well not to be here when I get back.”

Then I left him, standing in my father’s study, angrily wiping away a single tear.

twenty-three