Sunny - Mona Lisa Craving

“Mona Lisa, no!” Amber cried, catching sight of us. He quickly cut down the two remaining men he fought—the third one he had already dispatched—and ran toward us, dropping his sword, coming at us unarmed.

I was distracted by the sight, concerned with Amber coming between us, two Queens. Because even though he was a Warrior Lord, our supposed equal, he still was not really equal in the Council’s eyes. If anything happened to Mona Teresa, Amber would be blamed and punished. Maybe even killed.

I froze, my attention drawn away from my opponent, which is never a smart thing to do. She kneed me in the stomach. It was a blow I could have easily blocked had I been paying attention, but I wasn’t. It caught me with full, stunning force, and I felt something delicate, something fragile, tear inside of me. Then I felt pain. Stunning, incapacitating pain as I crumpled to the ground.

“ Noooo! ” someone roared. A man’s voice—Dante’s—but sounding as I’d never heard him before. Amber reached us and pulled Mona Teresa off me, unarmed her. He held her a safe distance away from me, letting her kick and punch and claw at him as he turned his eyes to me. “Mona Lisa.”

Then Dante was there. If his voice had sounded frightening, the look on his face was even more so.

“Get that bitch away from her,” he told Amber in a voice so nakedly vicious that I shivered. “Quentin, find Mother. Bring her quickly.”

His hands when they touched me, though, were gentle. So gentle they brought tears to my eyes. A horrible fear gripped me as I smelled blood and felt wetness pool beneath me, flowing out between my legs.

“Oh God, Dante. Our baby…I’m so sorry.” Wet tears stung my eyes, streaming out almost as quickly as the blood gushing from my womb. I writhed painfully in his arms as a terrible cramp seized me, hardening my belly.

“Easy, dulcaeta, ” he soothed. His eyes, turned that ferocious, glittering silver, left mine and speared someone in the crowd. “Go find a healer,” he growled, and the man quickly ran to do his bidding. When the spasm passed, he eased me gently onto his lap and laid his hands over mine, two sets of hands protectively covering my belly.

“Easy, sweetheart,” he murmured. “Don’t cry. It’s okay.”

But it wasn’t okay. And I couldn’t stop crying, couldn’t stop cramping. I cried and bled as he rocked me, and felt his own tears splash down to mingle with mine.

“I’m sorry, so sorry,” I whispered feverishly against him, over and over again, stopping only when another spasm gripped me.

Soft hands pushed our hands aside. I looked up, and through my pain, saw Hannah kneeling at our side, Quentin and Nolan standing behind her.

“Let me see, milady,” Hannah said urgently. I stopped fighting her and she ripped open my dress at the waist and laid her healing hands quickly over my bared belly. I felt her seeking warmth sink down into my flesh, and like that, the pain, the cramping eased. The bleeding slowed.

“My baby?” I asked, voice trembling.

“I’m sorry,” Hannah said in a bare whisper. “It’s gone already. I could not save it.”

Gone already. Her words echoed hollowly within me as she finished the healing. When it was complete, Dante gently eased out from beneath me, laid me back down. When he stood, I saw that he was drenched in my blood. In our baby’s blood. He turned those fearsome eyes on Mona Teresa. She stood about thirty feet away where Amber had dragged her. The look in those silver eyes held the same awful expression I had seen once before in my dreams—that look of vengeance, of terrible retribution.

“You killed my unborn child.” His words rang out loudly like a death knell. “I will take the lives of your men in return. Be grateful it is not your own life I will seek this retribution on. But I promise you this: If I am to remain cursed, I shall see to it that you share in it with me.”

He turned toward her guards, and long hooking claws almost eight inches in length unfurled from his fingertips with a hiss of energy—twice as long as they had been when he had fought in the challenge against Oswald. He had been holding back, it seemed.

A few of Mona Teresa’s guards had risen to their feet, helping their more severely injured comrades. The six warriors took one look at those claws, that maddened face, those silver gleaming eyes, and scrambled hastily for their swords. Some of them even grabbed it up in their hands before Dante reached them. He walked to them slowly, surely. In no seeming hurry to deliver the death he had pronounced upon them.

Two of them rushed at Dante, with sword and dagger in hand.

I said urgently to his father, “Give him your sword.”

“He doesn’t need it,” Nolan said, watching his son.

Dante turned their blades away like a careless afterthought, deflecting the blows with his wrist guards. Then in a move so fast you weren’t able to track it with your eyes, he sliced them open.

Splashing blood. Tearing cries.

Their intestines were still spilling out from their opened bellies when he sliced down again with those claws and took off their hands. Swords dropped down, daggers clattered to the ground with bleeding limbs still attached.

Turning his back on one eviscerated warrior, Dante concentrated his attention on the taller one, the guard who had raped Tersa. Another slice, aimed higher, and the man’s head came flying off. A flash of light, a puff of dust, followed almost immediately by a second shower of light and ashes as Dante spun around and took off the first warrior’s head, so that they were like two strobe lights going off in quick succession.

The coldness of his execution, his deadly accuracy with those claws, and the lethal consequences of them, struck pure terror in the remaining four men. They fled, or tried to.

“Stop,” Dante commanded. His silver eyes were glowing now, and even standing where I was, distant from where they fought, I felt the power that flared out with that command. They froze, all four of them unable to move, unable to fight against that compulsion. And everyone watching him—Queens, powerful warriors—gasped in fear and realization at what he was able to do.

The four guards stood captured by his will as Dante walked to them. When he stood before them, he said, “You are free.”

They moved. All four going in different directions, trying to escape him. Not one of them tried to attack him.

Dante moved even quicker. Nothing but a blur, then four more flashes of light. Ashes puffed over him, coating him gray, so that he looked like a ghostly specter. A horrifying creature drawn from your darkest nightmare.

For a long moment there was nothing but awful silence. Then the silence was torn apart as Dante threw back his head and screamed. A terrible roar of grief and heartbreak howled up to the heavens. To the distant moon.

One loud, trembling moment…then he was gone. Vanished before our eyes.

KNOWLEDGE IS Afunny thing. I’d always reacted badly to loss, shutting myself down, going into a shocklike withdrawal, like when Gryphon, the first man I ever loved, had left me for another Queen. Then again when he died, was killed by her. It was a lesson I had learned early in life. Don’t love things, don’t grow attached. Because it hurts too much when you lose them.

I’d thought that my extreme reaction was because I had been abandoned as a newborn, then cancer had taken Helen, my adopted mother, from me when I was six, and I had been sent to live in a series of foster homes. But I knew now that the foundation had been laid long before in another lifetime, by another man. A man whose baby I had carried for a brief time. I mourned that loss, that little spark of life. A surprise. Or perhaps not so surprising. When I finally wanted something, that was when it was usually taken from me.