King, Devil, Angel

We are back with the immortals!

I think this will be our last chapter from their perspective.

I hope you enjoy!!

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He stared down at her, her petal lips mouthing the words of the book she was reading.

An old copy of Frankenstein fluttering in her small hands.

Her head is resting in his lap, her legs stretched out across the couch beside him.

Twirling one of her curls between his fingers, he watches as she sinks further into the story.

There is a lightness in his chest.

The moment was perfect.

Closest to Heaven he'd ever come.

A sigh falls from her lips as she turns a page.

She was so much like him.

Loved books the same way he did.

Like they were people rather than pages.

Her eyes drifting along the words as she starts a new chapter.

Lips pressing together as a frown forms between her brows.

"Who do you think the monster really was?" Her sweet voice pulls him from his thoughts.

Dante furrows his eyebrows as she stares up at him inquisitively.

"Frankenstein or his creation?" She supplies, a smile curling along the edge of her lips.

He hums, trailing a finger along the exposed skin of her shoulder.

His brilliant little bird, so brimming with curiosity.

"Why must it be one or the other?" Dante murmurs.

Her straight teeth press into the flesh of her bottom lip.

Gemstone eyes glazing over as she thinks.

"One was cruel in creating life, the other cruel in destroying it." He counts the freckles on her cheeks.

Enid blinks up at him.

A strange expression slipping across her features.

Something akin to wrath sharpening her gaze.

Her mouth curving into a sneer he had never seen grace her face before.

"You're wrong." Her voice is warped, like a scratch on a record.

He watches, mute, as she slips from his lap.

Suddenly standing before him, rage seeming to curl along the ends of her hair.

Her glare deepens, burns into him.

Fire erupting along his arms, chest.

But he cannot look down.

Cannot look away from her.

All he can do is watch as she burns him alive.

"You're the monster." Her words echo around him, bouncing against the walls.

Growing louder and louder until he can feel blood trickling from his ears.

Her face suddenly shifts again.

The fire extinguishing.

A ringing in his ears as he watches her crumble.

Despair crossing her face.

Tears falling from her eyes, dousing the last of the flames at her feet.

Dripping onto the floorboards, rising in puddles up to his knees.

Threatening to drown him.

"Dante, you have to save me-" He desperately reaches for her, but she slips away.

"Enid? Enid!" He screams into the darkness.

But she is gone.

His eyes peel open to see Alexander standing above him.

Concerned eyes studying him.

His usually golden skin pale, charcoal black permeating the skin of his eyelids.

None of them had slept for more than a few minutes at a time.

Dante sighs, running a hand down his face.

The salty taste of her tears rich on his tongue.

"Another nightmare?" Alex sits down on the chair across from the couch.

The fire crackles behind him, the smell of burning wood mixing with the scent of old books.

He sits up on the couch, staring down at his lap.

Where her head had once laid.

"Yeah." His voice is rough, exhausted.

The nightmares were his mind's new form of torturing him.

Always starting with a memory of her, a moment he cherished.

Her in his office, peering at notes over his shoulder.

In his class, her hand raised with a clever question between her teeth.

Walking across campus, autumn leaves crunching beneath her boots.

In their library, her head on his lap.

Every room in the estate was inextricably woven with memories of her.

The scene would play out in ethereal shades, her colors vivid.

He would sink into the memories, seeking a reprieve from the ache of her absence.

Just a moment.

Just a moment with her and then he would get back to searching.

But then, the memory would shift.

Distorting and bending into a terrifying fiction.

Sometimes she attacked him, sometimes she screamed.

But the worst was when she cried.

You're the monster.

He shudders as the words bite along his spine.

She was right.

This fictionalized version of her.

He was a monster.

Dante wanted to repent.

Wanted to carve his heart out of his chest and lay it in her palms.

"It's been two and a half weeks." He watches the embers flicker in the fireplace.

They had nearly gotten to her.

Just minutes earlier and she would be here now, safe in their arms.

But Flynt had stolen her.

The constant pressure of guilt tightens in his chest.

His family's feud had taken too much.

First their parents.

Although he hadn't been close to his mother or father, it had still changed his life immensely.

Flynt had always been a threat.

A concern that trailed just a bit too close for comfort.

He had thought they had finally finished with him years ago, when he had sent a bullet through the man's chest.

But the bastard was like a cat.

Dante just hoped he only had two lives rather than nine.

And now he had taken the center of his universe.

His heart.

His soul.

Dante was nothing without her.

"We're going to find her." Alexander places a hand on his shoulder.

Looking into the exhausted eyes of his best friend, he hopes he's right.

He has to be right.

"I have news." Theodore is staring down at the paper in his hands as he enters the library.

Alexander sits up quickly, holding out a hand for the page.

Theodore's lips are pressed into a thin line, but there is a small light in his eyes.

A small flicker in the vast darkness.

Alex studies him carefully, worry and excitement clutching at his throat.

None of them had smiled since she left.

Looking down at the paper, he cannot keep the gasp from ripping from his lips.

Dante lurches to his side.

I can help you retrieve that which you have lost. Meet my demands and I'll set the bird free.

AA.

"Armad Almalfi?" Alexander furrows his eyebrows.

The scarred, Slavic man had been on the side of their enemy for years.

And he knew they had just formed a more binding partnership.

Why would he help them?

Theodore nods, sitting down on the couch across from them.

He pulls his glasses from his face, rubbing the bridge of his nose tiredly.

"That appeared just outside our gates a few minutes ago. Security footage shows it was a delivery person who dropped it off. It came with this, there is one phone number preprogrammed into it." He pulls a slim phone out of his pocket.

Setting it on the table between them.

Alexander inhales sharply.

"How can we trust this? For all we know this is part of his and Flynt's plan." Dante reads over the short message again.

A grim expression on his face.

Hope warring with suspicion.

Theodore reaches across, flipping the page over and pointing to a small message scrawled across the bottom.

It's opener, out there, in the wide, open air.

He can see her, sitting across from him on the first day of class.

A shy smile on her nervous face as she told them her favorite book.

Dante feels the oxygen rush from his body.

He would never forget the swirling cursive of her handwriting.

"That's a quote from Oh, the Places You'll Go. She must have persuaded him to help her." His eyes shine with wonder.

A smile stretching across his face for the first time in weeks.

Theodore watches as his two closest friends stare down at the letter in wonder.

His excitement had already burned into determination when he had made the same realization minutes before.

Their clever, clever girl.

He thinks of the first time she beat him at chess.

A small smirk not unlike his own growing on her beautiful face.

Victory warming the expanse of her freckled cheeks.

Brilliant.

They had been grappling at unsuccessful leads for days.

Had pulled every tiny detail out of the girl, Emilia, and her boyfriend about their encounter with Flynt.

Stormed multiple of his homes, his apartment in the city.

Nothing led them any closer to finding where Flynt was keeping her.

She haunted him each day and night.

The phantom of her laughter around a corner.

Her scent wafting through a room.

The little that he slept was plagued with endless nightmares of her running from him.

Always just a step ahead.

He felt as though he were losing his mind as she slipped further and further away.

But she had done it.

Had found a way to help them.

Placing his glasses back on his face, he grabs the telephone from the coffee table.

"Shall we call him?" He watches as Alexander traces a finger across her writing lovingly.

Locking eyes with each other, the men share a moment of anticipation.

This could be it.

These endless days of searching for her finally over.

"What the hell are you waiting for? Dial it!" Dante reaches over and grabs the phone from his hand.

The idea of going even one more second without her was unbearable.

When Alexander looks back on the hours that followed, his memories are hazy.

He remembers the call, Almalfi's demand that they wire money to one of his accounts.

That they have a plane waiting for him so he can escape the country.

Escape Flynt's wrath if they were to fail in killing him.

He doesn't remember who arranged those things, nor how much the man had asked for.

Cannot recall how much time passed before a text message came through with Flynt's address.

Time stretching infinitely as he restlessly paced the room, staring fixedly at the phone.

Desperate for the message to arrive.

And then- there was a flurry of action.

Climbing into a helicopter, meeting Theodore's steadfast gaze as their estate disappeared below them.

He cannot remember whether the sky was cloudy or if he had buckled himself in.

Their time in the air melted into a matter of seconds in his mind.

All he could think of was her.

Trapped and waiting.

How he would do anything to free her.

He has no recollection of landing, of storming the gates of Flynt's home.

No reminiscence of the gothic arches, the unearthly gargoyles that watched their ascent.

His mind recalls the familiar pressure of a gun in his hands, two others holstered at his sides.

A distant memory of Theodore's soft command.

Dante, right. Alex, take left. Aim to kill.

The faces of the guards at the door evade him.

But the sensations live in his mind in vivid color.

Fury, molten and twisting in his stomach.

Cruel humor at the fear in their eyes.

The relaxation of his shoulders as he pulled the trigger.

Sounds of bodies hitting the floor as they entered the entrance hall.

Theodore sneering down at their cries as he held his gun out, beginning to climb the stairs.

He can't recall what floor she was on.

Nor how many people they had to kill before they made it there.

He can't remember what the door looked like nor which of them was the one to break it down.

All he can remember is her face.

How he had nearly fallen to his knees at the sight of it.

Just seeing her breathed life back into him.

"Enid." Her name was more than a prayer as it slipped from his lips.

She had stared up at him, her eyes haunted.

When he looks back on that night, it is only this moment that he can recall in its entirety.

Her sweet, angelic face.

Alight in the silver of moonlight.

And the growing pool of blood on the sheets.

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That's probably the biggest cliffhanger I've ever written, but we are very quickly approaching the end so I felt it was warranted.

This chapter was so hard to write.

Letting go of this story is one of the most difficult things I've done.

I'm sure it'll probably only get even harder as I write these last few chapters.

Unless I end up having to break next chapter into two, my plan has two more chapters and then the epilogue.

What an insane journey it has been.

Comments fill my heart with joy.

All my love, Sappho ☾