Chapter 96 Dante Lets The Monster Out

• The local mafia dinner was a theater staged with excess: crystal glasses too fragile, chandeliers that seemed on the verge of melting over the tablecloths, men who spoke as if power were a perfume they needed to spread through the air. A façade of civility for a species that did not possess it.
• Dante entered the room with me without looking at me, his jaw rigid and his steps silent. Since Ethan’s video, there had been a fracture in his behavior, a dangerous edge like that of a wounded animal that has not yet decided whom to attack. I knew the wound was fear. And fear, in Dante Salvatore, always ended up transformed into violence.
• Verona slipped in behind us, always one step back, always observing. It was the first time I had seen Dante like this since the night in Berlin, when he nearly tore a traitor’s throat out for speaking my name.