The twenty feet that separated us might as well have been a chasm. On one side stood power, order, and the future. On the other knelt the past, a bleeding, broken thing mired in the filth of its own making. The floodlights bleached all the color from the scene, rendering it a stark tableau of black and white, of victor and vanquished.
Dante’s gaze never left my face. I could see the frantic calculations behind his eyes, the desperate search for an angle, a weakness, a c***k in my composure he could pry open. He had always been a master of finding the hairline fractures in a person’s soul.
He chose his first move. It was pathetic, and predictable. He let his head fall forward, his shoulders slumping, a caricature of a penitent man.
“Elara,” he rasped again, this time infusing the curse w
