TORTURED ME, TO AWAKEN AS AN SSS DRAGON

Chapter 4

"Do you have any idea what you put me through?"

Gianna's voice cracked on the last word. She was sitting in the plastic chair beside his bed, gripping both of his hands like she could keep him alive through pressure alone, and her eyes were swollen from a night of crying that clearly hadn't stopped just because he'd woken up. Morning light came through the hospital window in pale strips, catching the gray in her hair that Dante didn't remember seeing before.

"Mamma, I'm okay."

"You are not okay. You were dead. The doctors told me your heart stopped twice on the operating table. Twice, Dante. I sat in that hallway for six hours and nobody could tell me if my son was going to open his eyes again." Her grip tightened until his knuckles ached. "And then I find out you ran toward those things? You ran toward D-rank Blightbearers with no power, no weapon, no nothing?"

"I had a reason."

"Your reason is sitting on that couch and she's just as stupid as you are." Gianna shot a look at Lucia, who was sprawled across the small hospital couch with her legs hanging off the armrest and dark circles under her eyes that made her look ten years older. "Both of my children. Both of them decided to fight monsters on a highway. I raised idiots."

"Mamma, please." Dante shifted in the bed and the pain in his side flared hot enough to make his jaw clench. "Can you start a little softer? I just came back from the dead. Maybe open with something nice. Like, welcome back, son. We missed you."

"I will slap you in this hospital bed, Dante Moretti."

Lucia snorted from the couch without opening her eyes. "Let her get it out. She's been saving this speech for three days. I already got mine at two in the morning."

"You deserved yours," Gianna fired back.

"I know I did." Lucia finally sat up, pulling her knees to her chest. The frustration on her face was layered over something deeper, something exhausted and unsettled that hadn't gone away with sleep. She looked at Dante and the corner of her mouth twitched, but it wasn't a smile. "If Mamma doesn't kill you, the Awakened Organization will. You know that, right? A normal person doesn't do what you did out there."

"What do you mean?"

"I mean the voice, Dante. The way you were talking during the fight. You sounded like a zombie priest reading last rites over a grave you just dug yourself." She ran both hands through her hair and gripped it at the roots. "I thought I was having a heart attack. I thought my brother died and something else climbed into his body."

Gianna's face went white. Not slowly, not in stages. The color just left, like someone had pulled a plug, and her hands released Dante's and folded into her lap where they twisted against each other.

"Mamma?" Lucia caught it. "What is it?"

"Nothing."

"That's not a nothing face."

"I said it's nothing, Lucia." Gianna's voice was sharp enough to end the question, but the fear underneath it wasn't hidden. It sat behind her eyes like something old and familiar, a fear she had carried before, for someone else. Dante watched her and understood with a cold certainty that she wasn't just afraid of the awakening. She was afraid of history repeating. Whatever their father had been, whatever the word special actually meant when she sealed it behind that wall of silence, it was connected to this. To what happened on that road.

"I'm a priest," Dante said quietly. He kept his voice level, the way he kept it level for bullies and examiners and everyone else who needed to believe he was less than what he was. "The healing kind. Spiritual class. Nothing dangerous."

"A spiritual class," Gianna repeated, and something in her shoulders released just a fraction. She wanted to believe it. She needed to.

"That's what the system registered. I can show you the panel if you want."

"No." She shook her head. "No, I trust you." But her hands were still twisting in her lap.

Lucia swung her legs off the couch and sat up straight, and the shift in her posture was sudden enough that both Dante and Gianna looked at her.

"Fallen Sun messaged me."

The words landed in the room like a stone dropped into still water.

"They want to do a formal assessment. Combat trials, aptitude measurement, the whole thing." She paused, and her eyes moved to Dante. "They also said that if my brother awakened during the breach, I should bring him along. They're recruiting anyone who survived a rift event with active power."

"Absolutely not." Gianna didn't hesitate. "He just woke up. He's still recovering. He's still a child."

"Mamma, I'm eighteen."

"You are my little crybaby who used to sleep with the hallway light on because he was scared of the dark. You are not walking into a guild assessment four days after nearly dying."

"Three days," Lucia corrected.

"Not helping, Lucia."

Something shifted in Lucia's face then. The frustration drained out and what replaced it was heavier. She wasn't joking anymore. She was watching Dante with an intensity that made the air between them feel tight, and when she spoke, her voice was lower. Careful. Like she was choosing every word the way you choose where to step on cracked ice.

"Dante, what I saw on that street wasn't you."

He met her eyes. "What are you talking about?"

"Your eyes turned gold. Not yellow, not amber. Gold, like something was burning behind them. And your voice changed. You weren't speaking like a scared kid who just awakened for the first time. You were speaking like you'd done it a thousand times before. Like those creatures were nothing. Like everything was nothing." She swallowed. "Priests don't talk like that. Priests heal. They support. They don't stand in the middle of a road and erase D-rank monsters like they're swatting flies off a table."

"I don't remember most of it."

"That's not what I'm asking." Her voice didn't rise, but it got harder. "I'm asking if you're really a priest, Dante. Because what I saw out there, that thing wearing your face and laughing with your mouth, that wasn't a healer. That was something else."

The words landed like stones dropped into his chest.

He looked at her and his face did something it almost never did. It went cold. Not angry, not defensive. Just flat, like a door closing from the inside, and for one second his eyes held the same emptiness they'd held on that road when they were gold and looking through creatures instead of at them.

"I'm a priest, Lu."

She stared at him. He stared back. And in that silence, he could feel it. The distance. The thin crack running through the space between them that hadn't been there before, that had opened the moment she saw golden light pour from his eyes and heard a voice that wasn't his come from his throat.

She knew her brother. She knew what he sounded like when he lied to bullies. She knew the way his jaw set when he was pretending something didn't hurt. And she knew, with the certainty of someone who had loved him her entire life, that whatever climbed out of his dying body on that road was not the boy who picked her up from school every afternoon.

"Okay," she said softly. But it wasn't agreement. It was retreat.

Gianna stood, smoothing her skirt with hands that still trembled. "We should let him rest. The doctors said he needs another night of observation before they'll discuss discharge."

"Yeah." Lucia unfolded herself from the couch. She crossed to the bed and pressed her lips against Dante's forehead, quick and firm, and when she pulled back her eyes were bright with something she refused to let fall. "Get some sleep, okay?"

"Okay."

They left. The door clicked shut, and the room was just machines and fading light and the sound of his own breathing.

Dante raised his hand. Two fingers pressed together.

The panel opened, blue light washing over his face in the dimming room. SSS rank. Fallen Priest. Numbers that read like errors in a system that wasn't built to hold what he had become.

He read it once. Twice. Let the impossible truth settle into his chest like a second heartbeat.

His sister had looked at him like she didn't recognize him.

And she was right.