Mona Lisa Craving

SIXTEEN

I STARED AT the cup of water and the white pill laid out beside it on the desk before me. I was in my room. Alone. Aquila was downstairs, struggling with the secret I had burdened him with. I was sorry for that. I knew full well the weight of it. It was enough to crush even the most valiant heart.

He hadn’t looked at me when he left, and I couldn’t blame him. I could hardly look at myself either. Killing, taking an enemy’s life in the heat of battle, was one thing. Taking the life of your unborn child…that was another completely different act. I wondered if he’d ever forgive me. I wondered if I’d ever forgive myself.

Energy slid over me, a light familiar feel. A part of my mind processed it, remembered when and where I had just recently felt it. The privacy charm. Though I couldn’t see the intruder, I knew who had my arms pinned and secured behind the chair I sat in. The hands were too big to be Hannah’s.

“Do you have a death wish?” a cool and dangerous voice asked.

“Dante,” I whispered, though I could have shouted it and no one would have heard me. “Hannah told you.”

He didn’t answer me; his presence here in my room was already an answer. His energy signature—what all Monère sensed in one another, how we usually knew when another was near—was spiky, vibrant with strong emotion despite the coolness of his tone.

The feel of warm metal closing about my wrists, locking with a click, was almost anticlimactic. As soon as his hands left me, I pulled, holding back none of my greater strength. To my shock, the restraints held.

“They are not silver chains or demon chains,” Dante said. “They are something that will hold even a demon…something my mother tells me you are becoming.”

He turned me to face him then, and I saw that the calmness of his voice was terribly deceptive. The naked fury I glimpsed on his face, making it almost masklike in its ferocity, made me gasp and lean involuntarily back from him.

Danger! Danger! my body shouted. No need. I could see it clearly enough. His eyes glittered with primitive anger, hardening his otherworldly eyes to shards of pale ice. Sharp enough to cut me to pieces. The amulet he wore about his neck sparkled as if it blazed beneath the sun—a privacy charm. How he had come upon me unawares. A different one, I realized, than the one Hannah wore. The orange of this stone was speckled with black instead of being completely clear.

“Did you take it yet?” he demanded in a voice harder than even the stone he wore around his neck.

“Wh-what?”

“The pills,” Dante spat out. I recoiled from him, almost toppling over my chair in my effort to get away. It teetered precariously for a moment on two legs, before he set it back down gently. And that gentle, deliberate maneuver, that one point of calmness in the face of the incipient violence threatening to spew over me, unnerved me even more than if he had slammed the chair back down, expressing some of the anger harshly carved on his face.

He leaned that face down into mine, and repeated slowly, calmly, dangerously, “Did you take the pills?”

I shook my head wildly, my teeth chattering beyond my control. I had never felt such awful, overwhelming fear before. “No, I d-didn’t take them yet.”

“Is this it?” he demanded, looking down at the opened packet. I had taken out one pill and laid it on the desk. The other still resided in its little plastic window.

“Yes, just the two pills.”

“Do not lie to me,” he said in a low and terrible voice that trembled with violence barely leashed. “Not now. Not when I’m like this.” It was part threat, part plea, as if he was asking my help to keep him in control.

It only served to spike my fear higher.

“I’m not lying, I promise you. It was just two pills, you can read the instructions. One to take now, the second one twelve hours later.”

“Mona Lisa.” He closed his eyes and said my name in a swirling mix of agony and hatred. As if it meant both redemption and despair to him.

Those pale blue eyes opened again, focused on me, and I felt something wash over me as they drew me into their cold and furious depths. His eyes turned completely silver, and didn’t just gleam brightly at me. They began to actually glow.

“Sleep,” he said.

His words traveled from the surface of my ears down into the vortex of me, penetrating deep inside like an echoing, expanding wave sweeping to the center of my being. And I was unable to resist his command, though I tried. My eyelids lowered as if a heavy weight bore them down. And I slept.

When I came to awareness again, it was on a silent scream. Pain throbbed my neck, and I tried to put a hand there, expecting to find it hacked open, with a fountain of blood gushing from it, as in my dream. A dream that had been mine, and yet not mine. But I couldn’t move. My hands were restrained behind my back, secured to the bed I was lying on.

I blinked, disoriented, ripped from the past and thrown back into the present. Had I dreamed of my death before, from that other lifetime? I couldn’t remember. And was thankful for that.

Hours had past. It was daylight now, with the sun at its highest point in the sky, just past noon. I turned my head and became aware of the fact that I was in a cheap motel room. And that Dante lay beside me, asleep. He was adrift in peaceful slumber, gentle in repose. And I realized that I wasn’t afraid of him like this. In sleep he was relaxed, free of all strain, all burdens of the past. He had an interesting face: not perfect, not stunningly handsome, not blindingly beautiful. An interesting face, as I said. Strong, aggressively molded with a sharp beak of a nose and a square, firm jaw. The lips, though, were soft and full—generous lips. It was a face of character. And so it should be, having lived so many lifetimes.

Dante. I whispered his name deep inside me, and felt sadness stir in me. Have I made us enemies once more?

As if my mind had touched him, or my emotions, he blinked his eyes open. He smiled when he saw me, a sweet, unburdened smile.

“Mona Lisa,” he said in a voice that was still half caught up in dreams. Then reality and remembrance came crashing back into those eyes and I watched them cool, harden against me…and wanted to cry as fear renewed itself in me.

He could have killed me, came the sudden realization. At any time, he could have killed me had he wanted to…with his privacy charm, his forceful, compelling eyes. I hadn’t known that it was possible for one Monère to compel another Monère like that. That a nondemon could wield that much power.

“Dante,” I said softly. “What are you doing?”

He sat up, totally alert now, his face so different from its softness in repose. It wasn’t any one detail but the entirety of it—the forcefulness of his nature, his ruthless will—that shaped and changed his features, making them harsh, unrelenting.

“I’m protecting my child.”

“It might not even be yours. Chances are that it’s not. It usually takes longer than two days for a pregnancy test to work; it needs eight days at least, usually. And that’s how I found out, Dante, through a human pregnancy test.”

He didn’t look at me, but a muscle jumped in his jaw. Then he turned his head, and his eyes captured mine…no other word for it. Nothing else to define the sensation of being held by those pale eyes—as if you could not look away, even if your life depended on it.

“There is nothing more guaranteed to rouse my ire than if someone harms or threatens one of my family,” he said in a very gentle voice that sent chills skittering down my spine. Barrabus’s death by my hand flashed again through my mind.

“Save your breath,” he said. “Nothing you say will convince me that the child growing in you is not mine.”

“You…” I wet lips that were suddenly dry. “You can’t think to hold me prisoner for nine months.”

He braced his hands around me and leaned his face down into mine, dominating my vision, my world, for a moment. “There is nothing I cannot do,” he said softly.

It was fear that he was right, fear at what he was determined to do—was doing—and my helplessness before his will that made me lash out at him suddenly, viciously.

“If that is true, then why don’t you break your curse and save your dying bloodline?”

His face grew even harder, if that was possible. Became rock-like. A charged stillness fell with just the sound of our harsh breathing. Then he moved.

He did nothing more than draw back away from me, but I flinched.

He turned away from me, the muscles in his back and shoulders knotted tight. “You do not have to fear me striking you,” he said.

“Just cutting off my head, right?” I said with a half-hysterical sob.

He turned, glanced sharply at me. “You remember?”

“Not really.”

I remember killing your father. I remember the feel of my own death by your hand, but I don’t remember how it was done. I said none of this to him, though.

“Please, Dante. What you are doing will stir not just my men, but everyone that Halcyon can rally from High Court and all the other surrounding territories to hunt you down. And not just you, but your mother, father, and brother. Please don’t do this.”

“My mother was aware of that possibility when she came and told me of the new life you carry. My family will have gone by now. They will be safe.”

“Dante, not just Monère will be hunting us. Eventually demon dead will be tracking us also. I’m Halcyon’s chosen mate. Didn’t your father and mother tell you that?”

He growled, a silent emanation felt more from the vibration of his energy spiking rather than from any real audible resonance. It was even more frightening than simple sound would have been.

“You are my mate. You carry my child.” He crawled over me, lay the entire length of his long body over mine, bracing himself on his arms. That one thoughtful gesture amidst the dominating one—sparing me the pain his full weight would have caused me with my hands handcuffed behind me the way they were—brought those annoying tears welling back up in my eyes. They overflowed, spilled down my cheeks.

His harsh face softened, and a surprisingly gentle finger brushed away the wetness. “Don’t cry, dulcaeta.”

It was a word my inner stirring consciousness half-remembered. An endearment. It made my breath hitch. “Dante, please. Let me go.”

His face hovered over mine, his eyes grave, inscrutable. “I will. If you promise to do nothing to harm the child you carry.”

“What if doing nothing is the greatest harm?”

“How can allowing life to grow be harmful?”

“A part of me is becoming demon dead, Dante.”

He rolled off me to lie on the bed, his eyes staring up into the ceiling. “My mother told me. So?”

“So?” I repeated, incredulously. “I’m becoming Damanôen. Demon living. It’s changing me, Dante. I’m growing fangs in human form and drinking blood. If it’s changing me, how can it not change what is growing inside of me?”

“So you wish to kill our baby before it has even a chance to live? To end its life when you do not even know if it will be affected, as you fear.”

I tried to roll over to face him, but the restraints would not allow it. Scooting back up toward the headboard, I sat up instead. “Dante, you of all people…you know what it’s like to be cursed. If my child is different, not just part human, part Monère—that’s bad enough—but part demon as well, it will be looked upon as a freak, a monster, a curse. Something to be hunted down and killed as anything different, anything perceived as a threat would be. That’s just how our world is.”

“You are determined to view it as a curse. But what if it’s not? What if it ends a curse, instead?”

“What do you mean?”

“You said that fate crossed out paths once more for a second chance. What if that second chance is this child that we have made together? Creating new life to balance the lives taken in the past. Mona Lisa.” His blue eyes deepened. “Please, do not kill our child. Let it live.”

The poignancy in those eyes, and the possibility of his words hammered like a giant spike into my heart. Broke a sob from me. Oh God. I didn’t know what to do. What was true, what was not. I didn’t know what was best for the baby.

Would a baby—our baby—truly undo Dante’s curse? Would fate be so warped as to play our lives this way in this second twining? Of course it would, something in me whispered.

I trembled. Said in a tremulous voice, “Dante, whatever my sins in the past, I will gladly pay for them. But I don’t want my baby to have to pay for the mistakes that we made. To bear the burden of our past deeds.”

Sitting up, he reached a hand out to me and laid a rough, callused palm gently over my stomach. “Of all the things in the past I have done, this one thing, making fresh, innocent life with you…how could that ever be a mistake?”

I didn’t know what to say or do or feel anymore.

As the silence spun out, he drew his hand away and rose to his feet, his expression closing down once more. “Come, we must be on our way. Do you need to use the toilet before we go?”

To my hot embarrassment, I did.

No matter how much I begged and pleaded and then threatened, he would not undo the cuffs. I ended up using the toilet and then standing, a painful flush sweeping over my entire body, as he wiped me down afterward.

“You cannot expect to keep me like this for the next nine months!” I said, utterly appalled and humiliated.

“I will do whatever I have to do to give our baby a chance. You can stop this at anytime, Mona Lisa. Think about what I’ve said.”

As if I could do anything else, I thought as he led me out into the bright sun. Even wearing a baseball hat, sunglasses, and light jacket, the warm solar rays must have pained him. If they did, he gave no indication of it.

Part of me wanted to lie, to give him the promise he’d asked of me—that I would not abort the life growing in me. But I could not bring myself to do that, to lie to him. I’d hurt him so much already—brought a curse down upon him and his family—how could I hurt him anymore?

How can you think about harming his child then? a voice inside me whispered.

I don’t know that it is his child, I argued back.

Part of you believes it is his.

Hard to argue with yourself.

Now who’s acting like the crazy one?

Go away! I told the bothersome voice as Dante seated me in the front passenger seat. Slumping back against the soft leather, I shut my eyes, blocking out the sight of him. Wishing it were as easy to ban him from my thoughts.

Think about what I have said, he had asked.

I did, as the miles rolled by.

I did.