Page 111 of Empire of Dark

I knew it now, without a doubt, how Damen had looked at me weeks ago high on the mountain along the cliff. How he had looked at me on Sardinia under the moonlight.

Love.

He had looked at me with love—heart shredding, all-encompassing love.

I had seen it in his eyes, even if he hadn’t said a word, but I had been too chicken-shit to acknowledge what it was.

It was something, after Lyle, I never thought I’d see directed at me again. Something I wasn’t sure I everdidwant to see. Something that I never could have imagined that a malefic was capable of.

Love.

Damen had looked at me with love in his eyes and now this was the exact opposite.

His breath heaved after our connection through the witch was severed. Now there was only hatred, the fury of a thousand vengeful suns pouring out of him, beating down on me.

Hatred I didn’t understand.

Because I was weak?

Because I had no control?

Because I could kill and kill and kill—a bomb ripe to explode at any moment?

I’d witnessed all the carnage I’d caused. I knew what I was capable of and it was horrific. So horrific I couldn’t truly live with what I’d done, what I’d lost.

So I’d hidden myself away from the world.

Just as a monster should be.

I was everything I accused him and his kind of being. A cold-hearted murderer. The truth of who I was had tormented me for the last hundred years. I was no better.

All those deaths. All those screams. All those tortured souls.

He hated me for it.

“Brother, you have outdone yourself.” Boots clomped into the room behind me, a presence that sent ice through my veins with his first word. “Never in a thousand years would I have thought you could deliver this one to me. My white whale. The haunting of my dreams. My littleTatou.”

All the air whooshed out of my chest.

No. Impossible. Cletus was dead. Ash. Air. He had to be. He couldn’t have survived.

Except he did.

I didn’t even need to turn around and look behind me because that was his voice, his exact tone as he saidTatou. French for armadillo. The memory of it burned into my soul, into every recess of my mind, never to be forgotten. He was here. Alive. Ready to take me.

And I had been so very, very stupid.

Damen wasn’t looking at me with wrath in his eyes because of what I’d done. He was looking at me like that because all of it—all of the last several months—had been a lie and he didn’t need to pretend anymore.

He never loved me. Never even liked me. He’d always intended to deliver me to Cletus.

I’d been played.

And the devil himself had just walked into the room, ready to take me to hell.

Again.

The boots on the wooden floor continued forth. One step. Two. Three. The cadence of a predator stalking his prey.

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