Page 146 of Devoted

Valeria had the look of someone who’d given up, that empty, expressionless look of a female who’d seen too much and had stopped processing everything. And her fucking father… she’d saved Rocco’s life, for fuck’s sake, and he was gleefully handing her over to these monsters for execution.

The sick bastard was even going to fucking watch.

The dock lights came into view, illuminating three dozen guards and two long, black boats, riding low in the water. I squinted. The gleaming hulls were forged from sheets of metal. Rivets marked every seam along their sterns, and the scent of iron grew stronger.

“Iron prison boats,” Nico explained softly from behind me. “Amplify the nulling magic in these shackles. When they take you on board, you’ll feel sick. Sicker than you already are. Take deep breaths now, get yourself prepared.”

Ah, so maybe my brain wasn’t mushy soup after all.

Maybe this was just the effects of the iron shackles. And the pin in my shoulder.

Not that I had magic, but the guards had been thorough.

I expected that’s why we hadn’t seen Dante’s fire demon or the Emissary, and once they hauled us onto those boats… With every step, my fantasies of escape dwindled down to nothing. We weren’t getting out of this.

We would be executed in the morning.

I’d been building up to that realization ever since we’d been shoved to our knees. I’d just thought there was a way out.

A loophole.

A miracle.

But as we marched toward that reinforced boat and the metallic taste in my mouth intensified, my hopes faded away. My biggest regret—one that sat in my chest like a heavy stone—was that I hadn’t killed Giovanni sooner.

I’d had a thousand chances over the years.

So many times, I could have slid that knife between his ribs and ended him.

It wasn’t as if I didn’t know he’d sinned. I’d been a child, and he taught me to kill. A teenager, and he’d taught me to twist a businessman’s words against him and take everything he owned. As an adult, he’d planted me inside his enemy’s empire and expected me to bring it crashing down around them.

But I’d made my excuses and called him uncle.

And now fucking look at us.

Marching to our deaths. My brother possessed by a monster. My husband—and Nico—about to become Blackwood’s… slaves or something even worse.

We were all going to die, and Luca was going to die too, just more slowly than us, and…

“You always thought you were so clever.”

Giovanni’s sniveling voice stopped me mid-step. A short, stocky guard shoved me out of line, and I stumbled, missed my footing, and went down, rolling on the rocks and sand. Bones bent, muscles tore, the side of my face scraped along coral rock so rough, it might as well have been a saw blade.

Dante turned, tried to reach me, but the guards swarmed around him and pushed him forward, then Nico, keeping everyone moving toward the boats. They were still fighting as I struggled to my feet, which was awkward as fuck with your hands behind your back.

“Even as a child, you were difficult,” he said conversationally, the way he used to lecture me about missing a fact I’d memorized or messing up my footwork during training. “Of course, Enzo only saw your potential and none of your failings. And there were so very many. Failings.” He tilted his head. “You never once considered I was always ten steps ahead of you.”

Oh, I’d considered it, all right.

“The bomb that killed my mother. Did you plant it?”

If I was going to die, then I was godsdamn well going to get the truth before I did. At least let me go to my grave having gotten something out of him, even if it was as pitiful as a little honesty.

He froze, mouth opening, then closing like a fish. All the blood drained from his face.

Which was answer enough, but I wanted to hear the words from his own lying lips. Wanted to hear him say he’d killed Ottavia and sentenced us all to a lifetime without our mother while he sat at our table and drank our wine and pretended to be part of the family.

“Ottavia was an accident,” he said softly, something like regret softening his face. “She wasn’t supposed to be home. She was supposed to take you and Luca to…”