Dante. I whispered his name deep inside me, and felt sadness stir in me. Have I made us enemies once more?
As if my mind had touched him, or my emotions, he blinked his eyes open. He smiled when he saw me, a sweet, unburdened smile.
“Mona Lisa,” he said in a voice that was still half caught up in dreams. Then reality and remembrance came crashing back into those eyes and I watched them cool, harden against me…and wanted to cry as fear renewed itself in me.
He could have killed me, came the sudden realization. At any time, he could have killed me had he wanted to…with his privacy charm, his forceful, compelling eyes. I hadn’t known that it was possible for one Monère to compel another Monère like that. That a nondemon could wield that much power.
“Dante,” I said softly. “What are you doing?”
He sat up, totally alert now, his face so different from its softness in repose. It wasn’t any one detail but the entirety of it—the forcefulness of his nature, his ruthless will—that shaped and changed his features, making them harsh, unrelenting.
“I’m protecting my child.”
“It might not even be yours. Chances are that it’s not. It usually takes longer than two days for a pregnancy test to work; it needs eight days at least, usually. And that’s how I found out, Dante, through a human pregnancy test.”
He didn’t look at me, but a muscle jumped in his jaw. Then he turned his head, and his eyes captured mine…no other word for it. Nothing else to define the sensation of being held by those pale eyes—as if you could not look away, even if your life depended on it.
“There is nothing more guaranteed to rouse my ire than if someone harms or threatens one of my family,” he said in a very gentle voice that sent chills skittering down my spine. Barrabus’s death by my hand flashed again through my mind.
“Save your breath,” he said. “Nothing you say will convince me that the child growing in you is not mine.”
“You…” I wet lips that were suddenly dry. “You can’t think to hold me prisoner for nine months.”
He braced his hands around me and leaned his face down into mine, dominating my vision, my world, for a moment. “There is nothing I cannot do,” he said softly.
It was fear that he was right, fear at what he was determined to do—was doing—and my helplessness before his will that made me lash out at him suddenly, viciously.
“If that is true, then why don’t you break your curse and save your dying bloodline?”
His face grew even harder, if that was possible. Became rock-like. A charged stillness fell with just the sound of our harsh breathing. Then he moved.
He did nothing more than draw back away from me, but I flinched.
He turned away from me, the muscles in his back and shoulders knotted tight. “You do not have to fear me striking you,” he said.
“Just cutting off my head, right?” I said with a half-hysterical sob.
He turned, glanced sharply at me. “You remember?”
“Not really.”
I remember killing your father. I remember the feel of my own death by your hand, but I don’t remember how it was done. I said none of this to him, though.
“Please, Dante. What you are doing will stir not just my men, but everyone that Halcyon can rally from High Court and all the other surrounding territories to hunt you down. And not just you, but your mother, father, and brother. Please don’t do this.”
“My mother was aware of that possibility when she came and told me of the new life you carry. My family will have gone by now. They will be safe.”
“Dante, not just Monère will be hunting us. Eventually demon dead will be tracking us also. I’m Halcyon’s chosen mate. Didn’t your father and mother tell you that?”
He growled, a silent emanation felt more from the vibration of his energy spiking rather than from any real audible resonance. It was even more frightening than simple sound would have been.
“You are my mate. You carry my child.” He crawled over me, lay the entire length of his long body over mine, bracing himself on his arms. That one thoughtful gesture amidst the dominating one—sparing me the pain his full weight would have caused me with my hands handcuffed behind me the way they were—brought those annoying tears welling back up in my eyes. They overflowed, spilled down my cheeks.
His harsh face softened, and a surprisingly gentle finger brushed away the wetness. “Don’t cry, dulcaeta.”
It was a word my inner stirring consciousness half-remembered. An endearment. It made my breath hitch. “Dante, please. Let me go.”
His face hovered over mine, his eyes grave, inscrutable. “I will. If you promise to do nothing to harm the child you carry.”
“What if doing nothing is the greatest harm?”
“How can allowing life to grow be harmful?”
“A part of me is becoming demon dead, Dante.”
He rolled off me to lie on the bed, his eyes staring up into the ceiling. “My mother told me. So?”
“So?” I repeated, incredulously. “I’m becoming Damanôen. Demon living. It’s changing me, Dante. I’m growing fangs in human form and drinking blood. If it’s changing me, how can it not change what is growing inside of me?”
“So you wish to kill our baby before it has even a chance to live? To end its life when you do not even know if it will be affected, as you fear.”
I tried to roll over to face him, but the restraints would not allow it. Scooting back up toward the headboard, I sat up instead. “Dante, you of all people…you know what it’s like to be cursed. If my child is different, not just part human, part Monère—that’s bad enough—but part demon as well, it will be looked upon as a freak, a monster, a curse. Something to be hunted down and killed as anything different, anything perceived as a threat would be. That’s just how our world is.”
“You are determined to view it as a curse. But what if it’s not? What if it ends a curse, instead?”
“What do you mean?”
“You said that fate crossed out paths once more for a second chance. What if that second chance is this child that we have made together? Creating new life to balance the lives taken in the past. Mona Lisa.” His blue eyes deepened. “Please, do not kill our child. Let it live.”
The poignancy in those eyes, and the possibility of his words hammered like a giant spike into my heart. Broke a sob from me. Oh God. I didn’t know what to do. What was true, what was not. I didn’t know what was best for the baby.
Would a baby—our baby—truly undo Dante’s curse? Would fate be so warped as to play our lives this way in this second twining? Of course it would, something in me whispered.
I trembled. Said in a tremulous voice, “Dante, whatever my sins in the past, I will gladly pay for them. But I don’t want my baby to have to pay for the mistakes that we made. To bear the burden of our past deeds.”
Sitting up, he reached a hand out to me and laid a rough, callused palm gently over my stomach. “Of all the things in the past I have done, this one thing, making fresh, innocent life with you…how could that ever be a mistake?”
I didn’t know what to say or do or feel anymore.
As the silence spun out, he drew his hand away and rose to his feet, his expression closing down once more. “Come, we must be on our way. Do you need to use the toilet before we go?”
To my hot embarrassment, I did.
No matter how much I begged and pleaded and then threatened, he would not undo the cuffs. I ended up using the toilet and then standing, a painful flush sweeping over my entire body, as he wiped me down afterward.