“He told me to stay with Danika.”
“She has her mother. But she needs you to save her father, and I need you to save my friend. I know I have no right asking this after the way I’ve behaved, but you have to go. Only Sypher can finish this war and bring Dante home.”
“She’s right,” Nav added. “I’m good, but you aretheSypher. We can only do so much from here. You know that.”
“They’re right, Sypher,” Ghost added. “You have to go.”
Groaning, King grimaced. “Mellie’s right. Go. Take Jingles with you.”
“And Ghost,” Melissa added as the man gaped at his old lady.
“Me? Why?”
“Because you will make sure they both come back home alive.”
Chapter Forty-Three
Dante
The instant the plane shuddered to an even keel, a feral energy erupted within me. My seat belt snapped open like a broken promise and I was on my feet, the stale recycled air thick in my nostrils, a metallic tang clinging to the back of my throat.
“Sit down, Dante,” Sin purred, the silken sound a cruel contrast to the icy glint in his eyes—eyes that held the cold knowledge that he’d won the first round. He treated me like a recalcitrant flea, a mere inconvenience.
“Fuck you, Sin,” I snarled, my words a weak physical blow in the suffocating silence of the cabin. My shoes thudded on the polished hardwood floor, a rhythmic drumbeat of childish defiance against the smirking Rowen, his face a mask of chilling amusement. “You won’t win this pathetic game of yours. You know it.”
Sin’s attention, a tangible thing, snapped to mine like a predator’s jaws. His smile, however, was slow, deliberate, a predatory unveiling of white teeth.
“Yes, Dante. Enlighten me. Your futile struggle... amuses me.”
The subtle shift in his voice, a low tremor of barely controlled power, sent a shiver down my spine. This wasn’t amusement; it was a calculated enjoyment of my torment.
“You’re the goddamn Devil, Sin,” I spat, the taste of bile rising in my mouth. The cabin, once a sterile box, felt suddenly claustrophobic, the pressure building against my chest like a physical weight.
“There would be no need for games if—” His voice was a caress, laced with steel. “If Mr. Franks had honored his debt. Now, be a good boy and sit down.”
His unspoken threat vibrated, a physical pressure against my chest, a rancid taste of fear blooming on my tongue. It hung in the air, thick and suffocating, a miasma of stale sweat and terror, the recycled breath of a thousand trapped souls clinging to the edges of sanity.
I knew better than to test him. Every cell in my body screamed it; I was playing Russian roulette with my own damn life.
Sinclair relished his games.
He was the goddamn architect of agony, the maestro of misery. The more screams he orchestrated, the more his cruel heart swelled with perverse satisfaction. The sickening sweetness of his power... how could I have ever, in my naïve youth, aspired to be him? The memory was a bitter pill, a festering wound.
And yet... the chilling grip of his command held me captive. My legs felt like lead and my throat choked with the unspoken. The silence roared.
I sat.
The coarse weave of the chair scratched against my skin, a brutal counterpoint to the silky-smooth veneer of his sadistic control. The metallic tang of blood—my own, a trickle from a split lip I hadn’t even noticed—filled the suffocating stillness, and it was at that moment I realized he’d broken me long ago and now I simply obeyed.
The rest of the flight was a tomb of silence, heavy and suffocating.
The stale air tasted of recycled anxieties, clinging to the back of my throat like a shroud. My gaze, glued to the smudged window, tracked the receding lights of Nebraska, shrinking into insignificant pinpricks against the vast, indifferent black.
There was nothing to say. Sin, his usual icy mask impenetrable, wouldn’t have deigned to respond, anyway. And Rowen... Rowen, lost in his damn book, a goddamn literary gourmand, was already miles away. He inhaled those pages, the way a starving man might devour a banquet; a ravenous hunger for knowledge that burned brighter than any earthly passion.
Professor Rowen Shay, they called him. Head of the History Department at NYU. The irony choked me. I imagined the esteemed professor, his colleagues praising his erudite pronouncements, utterly unaware of the blood-soaked reality that clung to him like a second skin. Unaware of the underworld he patrolled, its shadows clinging to him in the sterile hush of first class. Sin’s choice of security wasn’t random. It was a chilling testament to Rowen’s capacity for darkness, a darkness I tasted in the metallic tang of fear that coated my tongue.
The hum of the engines throbbed, a relentless pulse against the deafening silence of my soul. Nebraska slipped away, swallowed by the night and with it, any hope of escape.
