Page 131 of Devoted

CHAPTER 50

DANTE

Iheaved myself over the lip of the boat, flopped onto the deck like a fish.

The Basin was gone.

We stole a boat tied up to a rotting wooden piling, drove to the middle of the lagoon in the hours before sunset, and located the spot—off an unnamed island—where my marker, a small, weighted buoy, was gone. We circled the same spot three times, my stomach sinking further and further until I’d dove off the boat to search for myself.

Nothing.

Nothing but clumps of algae and a few curious fish.

Nothing except a deep divot in the silty bottom that had yet to fill in, which meant we’d just missed our chance to move the relic to a safer location.

“So, they have the Basin. The real Basin.” Gabriel stared over the water, the city lights reflected in his eyes. I’d never seen him look so defeated before. Not broken—Gabriel would never allow himself to break—but stripped bare. A king without a kingdom, standing within sight of the throne he’d been born to inherit.

His last advantage stripped away because of my fucking mistake.

My little brother was exhausted, I realized. Worn down, not from the mantle of power he’d been forced to accept, but by a war he hadn’t been prepared for. For the ugly side—the death and the blood and the innocents in the way.

He was clever and strong enough to rule this Dynasty, the way a bunch of bloodthirsty vampires should be ruled. I was trained to fight and bleed in the trenches of the Fossa… my entire existence once pain and violence.

But Gabriel wasn’t built like that.

And all of this—the dead Dynasty members he was grieving, the threat of our people’s enslavement, the dark magic turning one of us into a monster—those were horrors my brother couldn’t rationalize his way out of.

Those stained your soul.

“It was here four days ago… now it’s fucking gone.” I was pissed at myself. Pissed I hadn’t moved the fucking thing somewhere more secure when I’d had the chance. Pissed I’d been arrogant and proud and, most of all, complacent.

“No wonder Giovanni’s meeting with the lesser houses to sort out territories. He thinks this war is over and he holds all the cards,” Gabriel mused quietly.

“He thinks he does,” I reiterated, using my shirt to dry off, then yanked on my pants, stuffed my feet back into my boots.

“We have to tell the others.” I started up the boat, hit the throttle, and we shot across the water. “We need to move,” I shouted over the engine’s roar. “Tonight. Once Giovanni uses the Basin against us, it will be too late for us to strike back because we’ll be fucking mindless slaves.”

How could I have been so fucking stupid? Gods, if I were my brother, I’d be kicking my ass right about now.

“We’re running out of options, Dante,” was all Gabriel said, in that calm, even tone that served him so godsdamned well at council. “The Basin is what they’ve been after. Now that they have it, we might be a little more than an annoyance to them.”

“I plan on being a fucking lot more than an annoyance, brother. Mark my words on that.”

We dumped the boat off in Murano, then dematerialized back to the villa, neither of us ready to continue that conversation any further when we both sensed some shift in the air, something wrong.

Gabriel was three steps ahead of me, and I followed him through the villa doors. We’d barely reached the entry hall when Valeria intercepted us. One look at her face and my rage dissolved to dread.

“What’s happened?” I looked past her down the hall. Silence.

Not so much as the murmur of voices.

Her lips trembled. “Luca’s worse. Much, much worse.” Valeria’s tearful expression crumbled as she took in my still-dripping hair and Gabriel’s barely restrained temper. Then she jerked her head toward the infirmary.

“You should go. Emberline is with him now.”

The smell hit me before I reached the door, the pungent reek of rotting flesh overlaid with something sharply medicinal and plenty of ozone—an indicator of recently spent magic.

Pagan magic. Old and patient, reminding me of the Druid in the prison.