“Then we’ll take her back to my town house. Shelly, can you replicate the sleep spell that they used?”

“Th-The sleep spell?” she stammered, suddenly nervous. She wrung her hands together, her eyes darting from me to the naturi watching us. “Yes, I can duplicate it. It’s an easy enough spell.”

“It’s your lucky night,” I sneered at Cynnia. Reaching down, I grabbed the chain linking her manacles together and jerked her to feet. “You’re going to live awhile longer. And the longer you live depends on how useful you prove to be. Lie to me and you’ll wish I killed you now.”

Mira, you don’t have to be so cruel. She’s terrified as it is, Danaus chastised, following close on my heels.

I laughed. You haven’t even begun to see cruel.

Danaus parked my car and sat with his hands gripping the steering wheel. I sat in the backseat with Cynnia, splitting my attention between my captive and Danaus, who was growing angrier by the minute. The long silent drive had given him ample time to stew about what had happened on the island.

“We need to talk,” he bit out, still staring straight ahead. It was clear to even Cynnia that he was talking to me. I looked up and met his blue gaze in the rearview mirror. This wasn’t going to be pretty. I opened my mouth to argue that we still needed to see to Cynnia when he snapped, “Now!” There was no avoiding this confrontation.

“Shelly, take Cynnia inside. Get her something to eat and drink,” Danaus directed in a hard voice that left no room for argument, but that didn’t stop me from hissing at the back of his head. I didn’t want the naturi to feel as if she were suddenly a guest in my house when she was really a prisoner.

While Shelly escorted Cynnia inside to the comfort of my home, Danaus and I walked across the street to one of the many small parks that dotted the city. For the first time in more than month, I didn’t glance over my shoulder, looking for a naturi ready to put a knife in my back. For a brief time they were gone and my city was safe again. I just had to deal with Danaus’s anger over what I had convinced him to do.

“You lied to me!” he snarled. “You were so desperate to convince me that nightwalkers aren’t evil, and you lied to me. You destroyed their souls.”

“Don’t put this all on me. You knew what was happening. You could have stopped at any time, but you didn’t because we were desperate,” I argued, taking a couple steps away from the hunter. We were both still armed. I didn’t want to be the one to throw the first punch, but I would be ready if it came to that.

“You said we wouldn’t destroy their souls. The goal was to kill them!” he ranted, pacing away from me and back again.

“I didn’t want to. I tried. Couldn’t you tell? You were in my brain. You’ve got the power to control me. Can’t you tell that I tried?” A sickening feeling grew in the pit of my stomach as I replayed in my head that brief moment of panicked indecision. I had been left with an ugly choice of destroying the naturi souls or the chance that Danaus would destroy me if I fought him. Or worse still, he could have withdrawn his powers before killing our opponents, leaving us both weak and vulnerable.

But Danaus was right in his outrage. The decision to destroy their souls was growing too easy. There had been too little hesitation on my part when my attempt to burn their hearts failed, and no hesitation to reach out into Savannah and kill all those within my domain.

“This has to stop!” he proclaimed.

“I know,” I said in a wavering voice. I closed my eyes and sucked in a deep shuddering breath. “But what if there’s more that we can do if we only learn to control this?”

“Control this?” Danaus stepped forward and grabbed both of my shoulders. “There’s no controlling this, Mira! It’s a curse from Hell. I’m trying to save my soul, not damn myself further.”

“You’re not going to Hell because of what you are,” I snapped, knocking his hands off me and walking away from him.

“Prove it.”

I couldn’t, but that didn’t matter. I believed you didn’t get marked for Hell when you were born. You were marked for the choices you made, and we had made some really bad decisions so far.

“We had no choice,” I said in a low steady voice, desperate to convince myself as much as I was trying to convince him. “If we hadn’t done what we did, we would be dead right now. No one would be able to stop Rowe at Machu Picchu in a few nights, and the naturi would be walking free once again.”

“We shouldn’t have gone there in the first place!” he shouted, pointing back toward the south and the marshlands. “We knew it was a trap and we nearly got ourselves killed in the process. To make matters worse, we’re paving our way to our own private section of Hell with convenient phrases like ‘we had no choice.’”

“Don’t talk to me about choices,” I snarled, standing on the tips of my toes so I could clearly look him in the eye. “You didn’t have to go. You’re not the one that made a promise to Amanda to protect her. I did, and I was not about to abandon her to the naturi because it was inconvenient to our plans.”

“You left me with no choice. If I had let you go without me, you would have gotten yourself killed and then we’d all be screwed!”

“I refuse to regret what we did tonight!” I screamed at him, the last of my composure cracking like an eggshell under his boot. “You don’t know what it’s like being held by them. Night after night, the endless pain and torture. And then never knowing if anyone is going to come for you, wondering if anyone even knows how to find you. Until you’re no longer sure why you are even trying to survive.”

Bloody tears streaked down my face, but I couldn’t bring myself to wipe them away. Rage and old feelings of complete helplessness boiled up inside of me, leaving me clenching my shaking fists at my sides. I hated myself for losing my composure in front of Danaus. I hated him for seeing me in this moment of weakness when I needed to always be strong in front of him, in front of all the others who looked to me for some kind of direction in this moving disaster.

To my surprise, Danaus wrapped his arms around me and pulled me against his chest, breaking down the last of the walls that surrounded the memories of my captivity with the naturi. In all the long years, I had never allowed myself to cry. Not when Jabari saved me on that distant mountain or during the long centuries that passed. But now I buried my face in his strong chest and let the tears slip unchecked from my clenched eyes. I opened my fists and held onto his sides when my legs no longer wanted to support me under the weight of the memories that danced through my mind. Too many nights spent under the knife with Nerian, too many blank spaces in my mind that either I couldn’t or didn’t want to remember—the horrible things that happened to me.

“I hate them,” I groaned past the fist-sized lump in my throat. “I hate them all so much. I hate them for what they did to me. I hate them for what they are doing to my people.”

Danaus said nothing as I stood trembling in his arms. He didn’t have to. He had held Nerian captive for roughly a week, and the naturi had been happy to regale him with stories of all that he’d done to me. The hunter knew how long I had been held and how I was tortured. The hunter knew more of my horrible past than any other living creature on the planet, had even seen the scars carved into my back. With Danaus, there was no hiding for me.

After several minutes I finally stepped out of his warm embrace and walked a few feet away from him as I wiped the tears from my face. I could smell his scent on me now, the scent of sea and the sun. Clean and clear and peaceful. Some of the weight that I had been carrying for more than five hundred years finally lifted from my shoulders and the ball of anger in my chest had diminished somewhat.