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Chapter 8

Lana

My knees werepulled up to my chest, my arms wrapped tightly around them.

Azazel.

I stifled a shiver. I had met the man several times, and I love all my people, I do, but Azazel’s ways were unsettling—and he terrified me.

He’d come for Asher like he had so many Infernari during the war.

Had Azazel known I was in that house? Had the primus dominus? After all my sacrifices, it felt like a betrayal.

I still felt the scratch of soot deep in my lungs, the eye-watering urge to cough, the whistle in my throat that stung every time I tried to breathe, forcing me to take tiny sips, right at the edge of breathlessness.

But there was another ache in my body, this one deep down, paralyzing... humiliating.

I wished I had died.

I wished the hunter had left me to burn.

I gently tapped my head against the vehicle’s metal wall, sinking into despair.

Jame Asher had saved my life.

Not just spared my life this time, but actuallysavedit. To Infernari, those details mattered a great deal.

Azazel would have killed me, but Asher had risked his life to rescue me. A human had saved me from an Infernarus.

No, no, no.

I closed my eyes and swallowed.

It couldn’t have been just any human either.

It was the sworn enemy of my race.

I should have killed him when I had the chance.

The whole situation left me hollow. My body shook listlessly with the car as it drove into the night. I laid my cheek on my knees, my heart and soul hurting for what I would now have to do.

I don’t know how long we drove for. It was probably hours, but crammed in that cage, with the smell of sickness and blood and death, it felt like a miserable eternity.

I felt ill. Not just carsick, but a bone-deep chill that was spreading. I’d stopped shivering a long time ago. Whatever this was, it felt ominous.

Wounds weren’t the only thing that could kill Infernari. We could die from a broken heart. It happened to widowed mates all the time. Outside of that, it was less common.

But lifebreathers—healers—were prone to this sort of death as well.

I closed my eyes and centered myself. And then I tapped into my major affinity.

There was an entire world inside of me. A web of lives that stretched on and on, each interconnected with each other. Azazel was one of them, as was Fidel, as was the primus dominus.

This was the great secret that all healers held within them—we were physically bound to each and every Infernarus. This was why I couldn’t kill easily, why I could heal at a distance, why I had a reputation amongst my people for being too forgiving.

Me and every other Infernarus were all connected. That knowledge, it made the divisions we created amongst one another meaningless. Because we weren’t different, we were all the same blood.

They were why I was fighting.