Page 201 of Fallen Omega

“Her mother.”

“She’s dead.” He looks at me. “Isn’t she?”

I nod. “On paper.” I know how easy it is to die and keep living. I know how to invent yourself in plain sight. Thing is, I never have had to. “We’ll get her back and then you, me, and Dante will have a talk.”

It’s not going to be pretty.

It took Julien and four others to restrain the wounded Dante. And Dante isn’t a forgiving soul. He’s going to be hell for the next, oh, hundred years.

Lizette’s passed out when we get back in and Darcy takes over. Everyone’s down in the living area on our private third floor in Pandora’s, where if we’re honest, we live a lot of the time.

Dante’s patched up, halfway healed and growling at her when Darcy stands him down. Stands us all down.

“No. I’m going to bathe her, dress her wounds, and then you can beat your chests. But she’s going to sleep.” Darcy pauses, looks each of us hard in the eye. “Properly sleep. It’ll help her heal.”

“She’s the boss, bosses,” Julien says, drinking his whiskey.

He’s still got his feed up, and upstairs each entrance is watched. We’re open for deliveries, which won’t arrive until later, and then Julien will head up and handle it with Mason. Maybe some back up under the guise of extra helping hands.

We exchange a look as Darcy leads away a groggy, weak Liz.

I’ve moved on from all those emotions. And what I should be, where I should be, is cold. Dark. Perfect clarity calm.

I’m not.

Things are alive inside and won’t go down.

Fury is moving through me, it’s out now, and I don’t know how to get it back in.

There’s blood on the black t-shirt Dante wears. I can smell it. The thigh of his jeans is also stained dark brown.

But beneath the rips, cut clean by a knife, a knife I know Ghost carries—carried—because I have one the same, that cuts like everything’s butter, goes in clean and deep and nasty, the flesh is already healing. It looks right now like a nasty scrape. By tonight it’ll be a scar. Tomorrow? Probably gone.

He heals fast.

And it’s not a knife designed to bring about slow healing. It’s a knife made to kill.

Fast. Deep. Surgical.

Dante’s fucking lucky he’s standing.

Lucky he’s alive to tell the tale.

He strums his fingers on the wall, then takes off to his office. I follow, along with Knight. But I stop him before he goes in. “Grab everything on Candy and the Council president. And Lizette’s father, both under Connor and Elias.”

He frowns. “Why?—”

“When you see it, you’ll see it. If I’m wrong, you won’t.”

He nods and starts to go. “Nice to see the human under the cracks.”

“Fuck you.”

“Yeah, I love her, too.” His gaze drifts to Dante’s door, and he shakes his head. “The thing with the girls?”

I don’t knock, just walk in.

Dante’s got a giant motherfucker hand cannon that he’sloading a clip into. I lean against the wall and pull out my cigarettes, lighting up.

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