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My sobs began to echo around the cave.

“My, my, I cursed you good,” cackled a voice behind me.

The skin all down my back broke out in prickles. I set Lana down and swiveled around.

I found myselfface to face with the two cloudy glass eyes of Grandmaddox.

“Oops—” She pricked my shoulder with a needle, emptying the contents of the syringe in an instant. “A little dose of your own medicine, Mr. Asher.”

I slapped my shoulder and scrambled backward, my heart’s thunderous beats already slowing under the influence of the venom she’d injected. “No, you’re... you’redead,” I croaked.

Then I realized.

Because she was half human, she wasn’t connected to Lana’s blood network. The venom hadn’t spread to her.

I hadn’t even considered.

I reached for my holster, but my holster was lying in the bones ten feet away. Might as well have been a mile. My limbs grew heavy within seconds, my eyes drooped. My elbows buckled and I slumped against the wall.

“Didn’t think of that, did you?” she said, answering my thoughts.

Stooping over Lana, Grandmaddox produced another syringe, which she pierced through Lana’s unmoving breastplate. A moment later, Lana gasped for breath and rolled over to vomit. Seeing her alive made my heart flutter with relief, like it could breathe again. All around the cave, the rest of the demons groaned and staggered to their feet.

The antivenom.

Grandmaddox had brought the antivenom.

I knew there was one, but I hadn’t thought to worry about it.

At the sight of them waking, I rejoiced inside, even as my plan fell to pieces. It had all been undone, my treachery erased, like it was no more than a bad dream. Lana would live. The woman I’d fallen for. My... mate.

She blinked at the ground, coughing, her chest rising and falling frantically even as my own breath began to still.

She faced me slowly, her hair hanging in limp cords down her sweaty face. In her feral eyes, I saw something harsh, something that blended with the pain already in them. Something I’d seen in my own eyes every time I looked in the mirror these last two years.

Hatred.

I couldn’t react, I couldn’t even move my facial muscles. But oh God, I felt that look like a kick to the gut.

A blurry face loomed in front of me, blocking her from view, and it took all my willpower to focus. When I did, I wanted to scream. But I couldn’t.

Azazel crouched over me, a slow smirk creeping across his slickly handsome features. “A trickster to his last, dying breath,” he mused, waving his hand in front of my eyes. “A pity to see him finally fall.”

Up close, his suit pulsated like a living thing, and his ashy, rippling scent rolled over me like poison.

“He’s your mate, Lana,” he said. “You say the word and I’ll torch him.”

“I don’t care what you do,” she said weakly. “Just get him out of my sight.”

Azazel cocked his head, his gaze thinning. “No,” he said, recanting his earlier words, “death is a mercy he doesn’t deserve,” he said. “I’m going to take him back to Abyssos and cut out his tongue and then impale him on a spit and roast him slowly, so he screams in agony for all the days of his life. That is how we will honor you, Jame Asher... as you have honored us.” His smirk widened.

If Lana disagreed, she didn’t voice it.

Azazel lifted me off the ground and carried me into the portal, where the air opened up and swallowed us.

Then, in the arms of a demon, I plummeted into the deep, dark abyss of hell... where I belonged.

Lana