Mona Lisa Craving

EPILOGUE

KNOWLEDGE IS A funny 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.

Maybe it was knowing why I reacted so violently to loss that bolstered that most vulnerable part of me—my psyche. I did not fall into a numbing decline as my men feared I would. I just simply grieved, mourning not only the loss of the baby, but the loss of the babe’s father also.

Quentin was accepted by a young Queen, Mona Maretta. A brave acquisition. Or perhaps bravery had nothing to do with it. Maybe she had simply coveted his perfect male beauty.

Dante had disappeared. Gone, I thought, but not quite as gone as everyone might have wished. When I returned home the next day, Lord Thorane called me with the news that Dante had slaughtered all of Mona Teresa’s warriors. Not just the six that had accompanied her to High Court, but the other twenty-four men that had remained behind in her territory. Dante had appeared there the next day like a wrathful god, taking his vengeance out on the rest of her men. Just the warriors this time, sparing the housestaff, showing more mercy than they realized. None of her guards, though, were left alive. He’d cut them down, one by one, eviscerating them, breaking their legs or chopping them off so they could not run away. Then he had proceeded to calmly tear them apart, limb by bloody limb, or had sliced them to pieces until they had begged to die. In the end, all that remained was blood and ashes, scattered empty clothes, and echoing cries.

Upon returning home, seeing the terrible carnage, and hearing her housestaff’s frightful tales, Mona Teresa had flown immediately back to High Court, seeking their protection from “the madman,” as she called Dante. Her frenzied cry for justice, however, fell on flat ears. We were Monère, after all. Children of the moon. Creatures of supernatural power. If you were not strong enough to survive, then you did not deserve to—that was the rule under which we all existed. All but the Queens, that is. Only the precious Ladies of Light were afforded greater protection by the Court. Protection, yes, but not retribution.

Mona Teresa, by her actions, however unknowing they had been—and that was suspect—had caused the loss of Dante’s unborn child and injured another Queen. A Queen who was the High Prince of Hell’s chosen and acknowledged mate. She was lucky, she was told, that only Dante had sought reprisal.

Oddly enough, Dante’s actions, reminiscent though they were of the slaughter of my own people long ago, didn’t frighten me. Maybe it was the anguish in his eyes when I was losing the baby. The protective gentleness with which he had cradled me in his lap and called me beloved. Whatever he had done to me in the past, the curse I had laid upon him and his line was as equally awful. They cancelled each other out; that was my hope, at least. And life, each life was different. I had to believe that. We’d messed this one up a little, but not irrevocably. Not yet. We still had a second chance to right the wrongs of the past. Or at least not repeat them.

Was the curse lifted from Dante? I don’t know. Had that life we created together, however brief, been enough to break it? If so, that would mean that when Dante died this time, he would not return again. And I found that thought oddly painful.

Nolan and Hannah flew back home with me, having decided to stay in my service.

Why, you might ask, as I did?

“Because of the way he looked at you. And the way you looked at him. He will return to you,” Hannah said. And their presence was a double guarantee of that. As his mother put it, “With us here, where else does he have to go?”

Maybe I’d gone a bit crazy, because the thought of him coming back to us didn’t frighten me the way it should have.

My mind said one thing, but my heart said another. And what my heart said was, Yes, come back to me. Come back soon.