Page 37 of Devoted

“Gods, you’re merciless,” Gabriel teased, sitting down on the log beside me, then lowered his voice. “I think we’re far enough away no one from the villa will hear us. And the soldiers usually stick closer to the grounds.”

“That was the plan,” I said.

Dante settled at my feet, wedging his huge shoulders between my knees. My fingers threaded through his hair. He let out a small sound of contentment as I massaged his scalp, feeling him relax like a big cat in the sun.

Nico picked a dry spot a few meters away, his flat expression unchanging.

For several moments, the only sounds were the gulls and the waves washing up and down the sand and Dante’s low sounds of contentment.

Finally, Gabriel broke the silence. “Let’s talk about yesterday. Especially what happened after we were separated. We didn’t mean to leave you behind, Emberline. When we found the boat missing, we wrongly assumed you and Luca had already escaped.” He turned his attention to Nico, his expression turning stony.

And because I knew Gabriel would spend the next month castigating himself over this, I just shrugged. “Luca and I headed to the safehouse as soon as we got free, so we didn’t exactly stick around, either.”

“You went for the boat. What then?”

I ran them through our escape, how we discovered the boat missing, the guards appearing out of nowhere, struggling to describe the spiders in any coherent way that would make sense.

How they herded Luca and me toward the council room.

Toward Lord Blackwood.

Like that had been the plan all along.

I left out his taunting us about Ottavia, the details of my mother’s death, because some things… some things I wasn’t ready to talk about.

“Then out of nowhere, thick black smoke filled the chamber, giving us cover to escape. I remembered there was an emergency exit behind Severin’s chair. Thank the gods the door wasn’t bolted on the outside, and we made it to the fondamenta. From there, we dematerialized to the safehouse.”

“Black smoke?” Gabriel asked curiously. “Not from one of you?”

I shook my head. “I don’t have magic, and Luca can only read minds. It wasn’t us. In fact, there was only one other person in the room—Blackwood’s henchman. I saw him once before, the night we stole the Basin, with Blackwood.”

For the first time, Nico seemed interested in our conversation. “This henchman. What did he look like?”

“Immensely tall, white hair, green eyes. Name of Romulus.”

Something sparked on his face, but instead of explaining, Nico drew deeper inside himself.

“Now, you.” I watched the gulls on the shoreline screaming as they took off. “Tell me what happened after Luca and I made the very, very bad decision to head down a dark corridor.”

“We arrived at the dock and found you, Luca, and the boat gone.” Gabriel’s voice took on that tight edge it always did when he was furious. “We did, however, walk straight into an ambush of Ashbound and Blackwood’s guards, who used their magic to create those eight-legged creatures. They’re called Drax. According to Nico, if they touch you, they suck out your soul.”

“Wait…” I held up a hand, certain I couldn’t have heard him right. “They can do what?”

I was going to throw up. We’d been surrounded by them. That big glob of black goop had almost hit me, for fuck’s sake.

“So, when Blackwood threatened to feed me to them, he wasn’t bluffing?”

Dante shoved to his feet, nearly knocking me off the log. “That bastard did what?”

“Just the usual bad guy stuff.” I took a shaking breath to settle myself. “Seriously, I was more concerned with why I was talking to that asshole and not my uncle. In fact, we didn’t see Giovanni at all. Maybe Blackwood decided he doesn’t need the competition and got rid of him?”

No one disagreed, but we’d underestimated my uncle before, and for all his bad guy evil-ness, Blackwood could be underestimating Giovanni, too.

“This adds an entirely new layer of complications.” Dante folded himself back down in front of me, and I went back to massaging. “I’ve seen dark magic before, but nothing like this. How many of those things did you say were inside the council chamber?”

“A hundred? It was hard to count with all those wiggling legs.” I shuddered, my skin crawling at the memory. “The guards cast a stream of dark magic, which created a… sticky nest of sorts that stuck to the wall, then the thing crawled out. Like it was being… birthed.”

Gabriel dragged a hand through his hair. “We saw the same thing. So, the guards are creating the Drax. And Lord Blackwood controls the guards, not your uncle. Is there anything else we should know about… Nico?”