Page 153

Can’t breathe. Can’t breathe can’t breathe can’t breathe.

He stood and moved away from my body, his footsteps fading.

And now my anger and soul-destroying betrayal meant nothing because he was leaving—he wasleaving.

He killed me, and then he walked away, that’s how little he valued this. Us. Me.

And I had given him everything.

My vision was fading, fading...

For the best. The pain would all be over soon. Perhaps then my broken soul and shattered heart would be at peace.

But a new, strange feeling blossomed inside me.

I hunger for vengeance.

Foreign, this desire to hurt another. Unnatural this wish to harm a mate. But Mother above, I clutched the emotion close to me,savoredit. I swear I felt the brush of the primus’s dying essence, heard an echo of his laughter.

And then the darkness swallowed me up, and I felt nothing at all.

Asher

I wove throughthe demons’ fallen bodies, the cave now eerily silent, and climbed the stairs back to the surface. My soul stayed down there with Lana. My heart. My conscience. I was too numb to feel anymore, too hollow.

Back at the car, I wadded up a sock and ducttaped it across the stab wounds along my abs, my hands shaking violently. More than once I had to grip the car frame to steady myself, more than once my face contorted in a silent sob... but no more tears came.

It was too monstrous to shed tears. Too soulless.

The stomach wounds weren’t lethal. I wished they were.

To die, that would be merciful.

Rather than live with what I’d done.

The job wasn’t finished. From the trunk, I pocketed the Bic lighter I’d bought and hauled out the gasoline container I’d filled at the gas station this morning. Breathing heavily, I heaved it back down to the cave.

The venom alone should kill them, but I’d learned not to take chances.

I only trusted a demon to stay dead once it was a pile of ash.

I descended the cavern steps, the smell of sulfur thick in my nostrils. Once more I passed over bodies, not giving any of them a second look—none of them but one.

I dropped the container down on the bone-littered floor next to Lana, then paused to catch my breath. Of their own will, my eyes found her face.

I thought I’d feel some sort of bitter satisfaction at the end of it all, but even that had been robbed from me somewhere along the way.

Her body lay at my feet, all but discarded. As though her life wasn’t important, wasn’t cherished... wasn’t beloved. Her sightless eyes were still open, her body contorted. That beautiful face of hers didn’t look like it conceded to death without a fight.

I’d held this woman last night, and she’d felt sorightbeneath me. How badly I’d wanted more nights like that with her.

Instead it had all come to this.

I fell to my knees at her side. An ominous buzzing rang in my ears, the sound of time stretching out like a taut cord. My body gave a violent shudder, as if resisting every second that took me further away from her, from my Lana, from my fateful decision, from that brief, blissful time when she had been mine. I gathered her in my arms and, head bowed over her body, I wept.

Oh God, what have I done?

I had just murdered the girl I loved.