Chapter 162

"My God," I murmured, unable to raise my voice.

I was too weak even to hold enough oxygen to keep my feet grounded.

"Do you remember when you said the kidnapping was a dinner? It was literal."

"How did you...?"

He shook his head.

"This isn’t the time for that," he cut in.

"You give me this information and expect me not to want to know more?" I asked, deteriorating inside. "All of this... I don’t understand."

"It’s simple, Gray. We want revenge. They took a lot from us. They created wounds, both internal and external, that you’ll never feel even a fraction of. We saw things that you couldn’t bear to live with in your mind."

I swallowed hard.

My heart was pumping fear through my veins. The nausea spun inside me with the thought that lives were taken to satisfy unimaginable atrocities by people who considered themselves human.

"You fight against human trafficking?"

"It’s impossible to fight a network so well-defined, spread across the corners of the world. We fight to quench our thirst. It’s not altruism. We don’t do it to stop them from continuing their atrocities. We just want to put an end to what happened four years ago. We want to eliminate everyone who broke our hope."

The wound that the stab of his words caused would be hard to heal.

Dante wasn’t against human trafficking. He only wanted revenge on those who had wronged him.

It was a selfish act.

A human reason with macabre decisions.

Both he and Asher, Vance, Cole, and Jaxon, just wanted their peace of mind.

"Is it you against them?"

"Some people help us too. Francis Torman is one of them. He lost his son in the kidnapping. There are other Oppositions as well."

My head was throbbing. The ability to reason had been reduced to the few neurons that hadn’t hidden themselves by weakness in dealing with all of this.

"The people you killed, were they part of the trafficking?"

"Since you arrived, we’ve been killing more people than we should, and not all of them belong to trafficking."

My jaw tightened.

"Why? This isn’t revenge, Dante! It’s madness!"

"Preserving our identity comes above all," he stated. "Especially the guys'. You’ve been running around, bargaining at every corner, thinking you knew who we were. Of course, we had to eliminate whoever it was. You should be grateful, damn it. You’d never be able to walk down the street without someone hunting you."

I looked down nervously.

"I didn’t ask for this."

"And you think we asked for it?"

I shook my head, rubbing my face, still absorbing all the information.

"Killing innocents... This is so wrong."

My cry tried to escape as certain pieces fell into place, and the wave of anger fermented my blood. It couldn’t be. My God? Could it be?

His hands were dirty. Cruel. Murderous. His mind held no remorse. It was a pit of sovereignty and blind justice. Dante looked at the world like a chess game, eliminating pawns and crossing paths until they led him to checkmate.

My heart thundered, every cell of me hyper-aware of who that man I had fallen for might be.

"Damn it, Dante. You did this to me!" I exclaimed. It hurt to feel anger. It was venomous to me. It was painful to feel rage. All my bones cracked like they were being twisted by the feeling that was destroying me. "You killed my parents! You murdered them when they had nothing..."

"Your parents weren’t a mistake."

He stood up. Every cell radiating intense heat, his shadows humming songs that terrified. His face was steel. His anger was palpable.

And I feared him.

"Your parents had a copy of the updated map we want. There’s a new Section in this city. We don’t know exactly what it is, but the last people we need to finish this off are part of it."

"You killed my parents for a map?"

"I killed your parents because they wanted to see my death first."

There was a note of silence.

A moment when I recapped everything I knew about my life. About my family.

About how, when, in what situation that could be real.

Because it couldn’t be.

"You’re lying," I said, shaking my head enough times for me to believe myself. "My parents were doctors. They saved lives. You’re mistaken."

A slight tremor at the corner of his lip sent chills down my neck.

"Your parents were the ones who paid the most to feed off me. They were the ones who insisted on organizing the damn kidnapping because they wanted more tender meat. Some child to consume the rot growing inside them. I didn’t mistake it. I know their faces from my worst nightmare."

I shook my head, trying to avoid shedding tears. It was blood that would fall from my eyes. It was a living and hungry pain that would crush my heart, all at once.

I had to grip the chair to keep from falling. I was dizzy, wondering if I had been drugged again. But now, by words. By a reality that wasn’t the one I imagined.

"They wouldn’t do that."

"They did."

"They wouldn’t be capable of it!" I shouted, drinking my tears. I never imagined I would have so much to cry about. "They loved me! They wouldn’t do this! They... My God, Dante. This is inhuman. Completely sick. They were never like this. They… I found refuge in my own body, curling up."

I didn’t know what to feel. What to think exactly. It was corrosive. It seemed capable of killing me. I would kill myself.

If Dante kept talking, I would lose my life.

"It can’t be possible," I moaned in pain. "They wouldn’t do something like this…"

Dante didn’t bother denying. He watched me suffer, tearing down the image I had of those who loved me more than anything.

"The world is much worse than you think. You’ll never be able to guess who the real people are."

But not my parents.

It couldn’t be them.

Never.

But I believed Dante’s word.

I cried for realizing that all of his hatred was because of an even greater hatred my parents had for his humanity.

"I loved them," I lamented. "I cry for them. I suffer for no longer having them in my life. I don’t forgive you, Dante. You’re not a god."

You don’t judge. Even if...

It was hard. Damn, it was atrocious. It was disgusting. Macabre. How could I defend two people who had committed such an inhumane crime? But I fed on the thought of my parents giving me my first violin, kissing my cheek before I went to sleep, baking my favorite cake just because I asked.

They had always been my greatest happiness.

They gave me life.

So much, so much life.

"And I don’t regret it, Gray." His eyes were still on me. "I’d do it again, over and over, without any hesitation."

I tried not to open my wound anymore.

Dante would get what he deserved. I knew that.