Chapter 157 DANE

My nose was filled with her scent: her skin, her shampoo, a delicate perfume… and her arousal.

Familiar. So damn familiar it made my chest ache.

I hadn’t felt anything in so long. What was she doing to me?

I knew the Nameless was holding my memories. He said they weren’t important, so I had never cared. Before I came here, he told me I used to fuck this woman. That she might try to trick me into fucking her again.

Whatever hold on me she had, though, it was more than that. The thought of being away from her was like a hand wrapping around my throat and slowly squeezing.

“Daddy! You’re home!”

Maybe her scent was already making me weak, because the small voice pierced some kind of veil over my mind. I saw a flash of a face, small and dark-haired with her mother’s violet eyes.

And for a second, I was free.

“Seraphina?” I turned, searching the darkness for my daughter.

She was there, her brother a golden shadow behind her.

The last time I had seen them, they were four. In that strange age between toddler and small child.

In my daze, I wasn’t even sure how old they were. Still small, but so much bigger.

The weight of everything I had given up, and the reason I’d done it, crashed down on my head.

I hit my knees, the marble floor biting into my skin. I didn’t care. I held out my arms to my children.

Seraphina ran to me, but Tristan held her back. “No! He’s bad now.”

“Tristan!” Aurora’s voice was choked.

“He’s right,” I said. I shouldn’t be here, shouldn’t be around any of them. I—

Seraphina broke free of her brother and slammed into me. I caught her against my chest. I shook like a man breaking a fever.

I was here for a reason… some reason…

But when I reached for it so I could warn Aurora about the treachery of the Nameless—treachery he was going to force me to carry out—it disappeared into shadow. All there was room for in my mind was my family.

Years of darkness, of fire, of blood. I hadn’t broken.

This one taste of love, though? It threatened to shatter me where I knelt.

Aurora put a hand on my shoulder, and I looked up at her. She wore the same shadowed worry I saw in Tristan’s eyes as he hovered right outside my reach, ready to pounce on me if I so much as looked at his sister the wrong way.

My son. So protective. Pride welled inside me.

Then Tristan’s resolve broke, as it always did, and he was hugging me, too.

“Are you back?” Seraphina asked. “Did Mommy save you? She always said she would save you!”

Aurora tried to speak, but she pressed her fingers over her mouth as if she couldn’t find the words.

Deep in the recesses of my mind, the shadows surged.

My family was enough to bring me out of the darkness for a short time, but not forever. It would take powerful magic to do that.

“No,” I whispered to Seraphina. “You were just like a ray of light, pushing back the shadow for a moment.”

My daughter pulled back, and there was… something about her. Some kind of feeling of power, but I wasn’t sure what it was. As soon as I tried to sense it, it was gone.

I kissed them both on the forehead, feeling the darkness swirling back over me. I fought it back. I couldn’t succumb to it. Not yet. “I don’t have much time. I love you. Don’t forget.”

I didn’t hear what Aurora said as she hugged them, but Seraphina teared up and started to cry. Tristan led her down the hall and out of sight. I wanted to howl at how much it tore me apart to watch them go, not knowing if I would ever see them again.

At least this time, I had gotten to say goodbye.

By the time she turned back to me, I could barely see for as hard as I was fighting the shadows. I took Aurora in my arms and kissed her. It was a hard, desperate kiss. I didn’t know if my fingers bruised her—I was trying to be gentle, but it had been so long.

These days, my hands didn’t know how to hold on to the things I loved. They only knew how to hurt. How to kill.

I pulled away from her abruptly, unwilling to taint her with all of the blood that stained my hands. Even if they were technically clean at the moment, they never would be, never could be again.

“Dane,” her eyes were huge. Her voice was choked. “Don’t leave me again.”

There was too much to say, and time had run through my fingers like sand.

So I said the most important thing I could before the shadows closed over me, burning away my heart and my true memories…