Page 17 of The Syndicater (Dark Verse 6)

Morana's words made him blink, watching as his daughter's eyelids began to droop. "Images? Of what?"

He heard her swallow. Whatever she was going to say had her bracing herself, which in turn had him bracing himself.

"I think it's her… Luna."

His breath whooshed out of him. Dante stared at the screen of his phone, unable to believe what he was hearing, feeling the impact of the syllables in his chest.

Luna.

At this point, she almost seemed like a myth, an elusive legend they had been chasing for decades.

Luna.

They had never seen her, didn't know what she looked like. Her images? The Shadow Man sent her images? Dante wouldn't be surprised if the man knew they had been looking for her, but the fact that he'd just sent the images was odd.What the hell?

Even though she wasn't his younger sister by blood, searching for her for so many years with Tristan, someone he thought of as a brother, she felt like his own. She felt like a little sister he never knew about until too late, a sister he had never seen or met but needed to.

The blood rushed through his body, his pulse getting warmer as the words seeped into his senses.

"Are you sure?" he asked, even knowing the answer. Morana would never say something of this severity unless she was certain of it. She knew the stakes, probably better than anyone else.

"Pretty much," she answered. Dante let it sink in for a minute before something else caught his attention.

Morana had been the one to call him with this news, not Tristan. He could not imagine Tristan, the man who had relentlessly searched for his sister, sometimes chasing leads with Dante himself, not calling Dante with this update the moment he had it. For all his external disdain, he knew Tristan thought of him as family too.

That only meant one thing.

"Tristan doesn't know," Dante stated, the words leaving a sour taste in his mouth. It didn't feel right that he didn't. He should be the first to know. But knowing Morana, he knew there had to be a reason.

"Not yet," Morana sighed. "A, I want to be one hundred percent sure before I get his hopes up, which I will be in a few hours. Tonight at the latest, hopefully."

That made sense.

"And B, and this is what I wanted to talk to you about…" she trailed off.

Danted waited, letting her assemble her thoughts while his mind wrapped around the idea that they might actually find Luna, the reality of it hitting him right in the solar plexus.

Morana inhaled deeply. "One of the photos is… intimate."

Dante felt himself frown. "Intimate, how?"

"Like… like a photo you would take of Amara if she was wearing your shirt the morning after being with her, satisfied, disheveled but glowing."

"Okay." He watched Tempest distractedly as she fell asleep on Lulu, contemplating what Morana meant.

"It's a lover's gaze, Dante," Morana clarified for him. "And I think the Shadow Man took that photo. There is a reason that he attached that photo with the others, why his text to me was more personal than direct. If my hunch is right, which I have to admit is more often than not, he is her lover, and he wants us to know that."

This was the second time in as many minutes that words sunk into him with impact. He picked the phone up from the rug where he sat, turned it off the speaker, and pressed it to his ear as if the action could somehow send the words deeper inside his brain.

"You're sayingthe Shadow Man," he started, his tone disbelieving, "the fuckingmythin the underworld we didn't even know about until a while ago, that man…is with Luna?Isn't it possible that he simply got the photo from somewhere else like he did the rest?"

It sounded wild, even as he voiced it out. The Shadow Man was a faceless, nameless rogue with some mysterious reason for popping in and out of their lives.

"He could have acquired it from elsewhere," Morana admitted. "But hewantedus to see that image. It kind of makes sense the more I think about it. That's the only thing that can explain why he's been involved in our lives or why he contacted me. He wanted information about a particular shipment, and he was looking into the time we were all taken. She is the only link to all of it."

The more Morana spoke, the more the puzzle pieces fit. Not all of them, but some of them. He had to admit she could be right about this.

"So you think he was searching for her too?" Dante asked.

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