“At least come in for your things,” she said, her voice soft.
“I’ll buy new things.”
“Please. Let’s talk about this.”
“There’s nothing to talk about.”
It was too much, too fast. He was slipping away, and she hadn’t even processed what had just happened and who he was. She needed a moment, dammit.
“Then my blood will be on your hands again,” she said. “I give myself a seventy percent chance of collapsing on my way up the stairs, tumbling all the way down, breaking half my bones and cracking my skull, and you won’t be there to heal me, so I’ll die for the second time today in a puddle of my own blood. What a tragic end to the day’s story of survival.”
He kept glaring, but there was a hint of something else behind the anger and fear.
It might have been hope.
“Please?” She raised a shaky hand to her face, sagging against the gate. It really wasn’t fair to use his weakness against him, but desperate times demanded desperate measures.
* * *
Dante washed his blades in the sink, dried them with clean towels, then washed and dried them again before returning them to their sheaths.
He was pacing when Alessa left to bathe, and he was pacing when she peered around the screen before getting dressed.
He was a ghiotte.
A person considered barely human.
Demon-touched, selfish, and cruel to the core.
She was supposed to fear him. Hate him. It should have changed everything.
But it didn’t.
A ghiotte had taken her hands in that alley, not knowing if he’d survive his desperate gamble to save her. A ghiotte had risked his pride and safety to wrap a ridiculous scarf around his head and hug her when she needed it more than anything in the world.
From the day they’d met, Dante had tried to convince her he was cruel, unkind, and cold, but his actions made his words ring hollow. He was a ghiotte, but he was still Dante. And he hadn’t chosen his fate any more than she had.
She found him trying to scrub her blood from his white linen shirt. At the sound of her footsteps behind him, Dante threw the shirt into the sink and braced his hands on the counter.
“I promise I won’t tell,” she said, with the steady calm of a person soothing a growling dog. “But I have to know something.”
He didn’t turn around.
“The stories say ghiotte are demons disguised as men.” She swallowed. “Is it true? Are you … something else? Underneath?”
“Are you asking if I have horns?”
That was exactly what she was asking, but it seemed best to neither confirm nor deny it.
“No,” he sighed. “No horns. No tail. No claws. This is me.”
The breath whooshed out of her. Not a monster, at least no more than she was. In that instant, she made up her mind.
“No one else has to know.”
Dante looked irritated rather than grateful. “Someone already does. Why do you think I was threatening him? It’s bad enough he knows I’m in the city. All the money in the world won’t keep him quiet if he finds out I’m in the Cittadella. It’s one thing to have your runaway ghiotte wandering free, another to let him sleep on the Finestra’s couch.”
“Then we’ll make sure he doesn’t find out. Dante, please. You can’t go. Not now, when I finally know how much we have in common—”
“Common?” Dante spat out. “What do we have in common?”
“A lot. For one, we both understand what it’s like to be hated and feared. We both have gifts we didn’t ask for.”
“Gift,” he scoffed. “Some gift.”
“You can heal yourself. My gift only kills people.”
His fingers flexed against the porcelain. “Mine has killed plenty.”
She squeezed her eyes shut. “That’s why they killed your parents.”
“Yeah. And yours are getting paid extra for birthing the blessed Finestra. Like I said, we have nothing in common. You’re a savior. I’m an abomination. You got a castle, and I got locked in a shed by a man who tried to beat the evil out of me.”
Her stomach roiled.
No, their lives weren’t the same. Not in the obvious ways, but in the hidden, broken, jagged spaces inside them … why couldn’t he see how they were?
“I’m sorry for what happened to you. You didn’t deserve that, and neither did your parents. But…” Alessa clenched her fists, stunned at a possibility. “Maybe your power can help others.”