Page 92 of The Devil's Pawn

Dante strides over to Dominic, who reaches into his pocket and hands Dante what appears to be a torch, taking one of the knives in exchange.

“She’s too good of a person to have parents like you,” Dante tells my father.

The torch roars to life.

“Stand him up,” he says of Carlito, who’s uncharacteristically silent.

“Before you die—before I take that from you—you’re going to know what real pain is like. And once she’s satisfied that I’ve taken enough, onlythenwill I allow you the mercy of death.”

Carlito’s chest widens, his face showing fear now. It’s in the way he breathes. The way he stands. I don’t need to see it up close to know it’s creeping into his blood, the way mine was.

Dante flips the knife in his palm, eyeing it with concentration. He wields the weapon with expertise, and that alone should have me cowering, but it doesn’t.

He doesn’t scare me.

He never did.

Nothing about him ever will.

The knife strikes so quickly, I almost miss the first cut. He slices Carlito straight across his shoulder. Blood oozes out, absorbed by the white fabric of his shirt.

Dante doesn’t stop there. The screams of the man who ignored mine fill the room. Cut after cut, Dante doesn’t leave an inch unmutilated. Carlito’s cheek leaks like a steady fountain, and the blood from his forehead drips into his eyes as he cries.

He flips the torch on, nearing it toward Carlito’s face, and then a scream like no other drowns the space. A shiver runs down my arms and nausea swirls in my throat from the stench of incinerated flesh.

My father’s mouth falls, even his fear on full display.

Dante growls like a beast as the torch runs over every wound on what’s left of Carlito’s body.

The smell.

The torture.

It’s finally too much.

“Stop,” I say, my inhales and exhales rivaling. “Enough. It’s enough.”

Dante stares at me through someone else’s eyes, his unblinking gaze possessed. Rapid, short breaths fly out of his mouth. He removes a gun from his waistband as Dominic drops Carlito back onto the floor, and without parting his eyes from mine, he points the weapon and shoots.

My eyelids drift down as the bullet rips into the man I once thought I’d be forced to marry. Now he lies dead before me.

Even with my bruises and scars, both on the outside and in, I’ve won. I’ve made it. I’m alive, and I no longer have anything to fear. Not when Dante is with me.

Will my father meet the same fate?

I don’t think I can watch him die. It’ll be too much for my heart to withstand, especially with Dante being the one to do it.

Dante rushes to me, dropping the weapons on the floor. His hand clasps the side of my neck, those eyes spilling with ferocious adoration. He’s both rays of sunlight and blackened smoke. One can’t exist without the other.

“You know I love you,” he says. “But what I have to do next, I don’t want you to see.”

It’s as though he’s read my mind, or maybe it wasn’t that difficult to assume that I shouldn’t witness my own father’s death.

“I need you to still want me after this is over,” he whispers, slanting his forehead over mine, his lips trembling as they brush over my mouth.

The way he just said those words…their emotional grip tethers to my heart. My palm slants over his cheek, moving a fraction, while my gaze searches his with depthless fervor.

“I’ll always want you, Dante. Always,” I murmur softly, just for him. “I’ve never been surer of how much I’m falling crazy in love with you. Saying it here with all this ugliness isn’t perfect, but I think it’s time you realize that I’m not going anywhere. You’re not the villain, no matter how much you’ve made yourself out to be.”

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