Page 63 of Devoted

He was freshly dressed. His missing hand was still wrapped up in gauze from Valeria’s healers.

Any other vampire would be ashamed.

Rocco wore that injury like a badge of honor.

The old vampire’s condemning gaze swept across the room, stopping on me, his lip curling like he already had a special place in hell all picked out for my corpse.

“You should be the ones rotting in prison cells,” he sneered. “The fact that my daughter thought you were worth saving… well,” that lip curled higher to reveal a yellowed fang. “Speaks to her judgment, doesn’t it?”

“What do you want, Rocco? You’re already drawing air, which is more than you deserve.” I was so out of fucks to give when it came to this bastard. “Go somewhere else to stew in your bitterness and leave us alone to put the Dynasty to rights.”

“To rights?” He snorted. “Is that what you’re doing?” His eyes lingered on Nico, that cunning expression turning thoughtful. “Be careful of who your allies are. You never know when you’ve let a traitor inside the walls.”

“The only traitor here is you.” Gabriel prowled across the room slowly, hands in his pockets, demeanor unruffled, the picture of nonchalance. But beneath my brother’s practiced façade, a hungry fury brewed. A violence I recognized all too well.

I rose from the sofa, crossing my arms over my chest.

The entire room went silent.

“Threaten one of us again and I will end you. In fact, say another word, and I’ll rip out your tongue,” Gabriel said pleasantly. “And if you so much as think of betraying us, I will make it my life’s work to see you suffer.”

Rocco’s grin disappeared, then he looked to his daughter, as if he expected her to have his back.

“Let me take you back to your rooms, father.” With an apologetic look, Valeria looped her arm through her father’s, guiding him out of the room. “One of these days, you’ll learn threats get you nowhere.”

He shuffled away, throwing one last venomous glare over his shoulder.

Rocco might look harmless, but we’d be fools to underestimate him. The fucker was dying to sell us out, and I wasn’t opposed to ending him before he had the chance.

As soon as they disappeared, I settled myself back beside my wife. Gabriel sat down on the coffee table opposite us, his expression serious enough to tell me he expected answers.

“Walk us through what happened after you woke Emilia up. Tell us what you can, and we’ll have Nico fill in the gaps.”

I rolled my eyes. Nico didn’t seem interested in filling in any gaps, but my brother was an eternal optimist.

In a low voice, Emberline explained wandering through the dream realm, her mother’s nonsensical warning that should have been taken seriously, how they found the temple empty and woken up Emilia, then how the circle in the temple had trapped them inside, just like her mother had warned.

Gods. It all made me want to rip out my hair. She was speaking to her parents. Going to the fucking Underworld. After Emilia warned her not to.

“And then?” Gabriel prompted gently. “Who set the trap, bella?”

“Lord Blackwood.”

For a moment, my heart stopped beating, a thousand questions all narrowing down to the only one that mattered. Why—how—was Blackwood in my wife’s dream? Where I couldn’t reach her?

I tightened my arms around her, burying my face in the dip between her shoulder and neck.

“If Blackwood set this trap ahead of time,” Gabriel said carefully, “then he must have known you were coming. Does he know about Emilia?”

“Yes.” She dipped her head, her fingers twining into my shirt. “Blackwood knows everything. He put Emilia in stasis, but Nico managed to break his spell. We’d barely finished when Blackwood caught us before we could leave the temple.”

“There’s no way you could have known he’d be waiting,” I soothed. “But… how could he know you were in a different realm? To set the trap, he must have had some sort of warning.”

Emberline stiffened, her gaze straying over to Nico. “You need to tell them, Nico,” she pleaded. “They deserve to know.”

Nico looked gutted. His eyes filled with misery, one hand twitching as if he couldn’t stop himself. The silence in the room took on a menacing tone as the tension built, my brother shifting closer to Emberline. To me.

“I’m…” Nico swallowed hard. “There’s something I have to tell you…”