Because if he tried to play hero right now, she might actually stab him.With air, if she had to.She’d figure it out.
“The book remembers,”the echo said again, its voice carrying the dry, scraping quality of old pages dragged across stone, each syllable arriving just slightly after it should have, like sound chasing an echo that no longer existed.
Myanin rolled her eyes with the full, unrestrained commitment the moment deserved.“Yes, we’ve established that.Twice.Which means you’re either building toward a point, or you’ve got an extremely limited vocabulary.I’m genuinely hoping for the first option, but I’m prepared for the second.”
The air shifted, not with a dramatic snap, not with the sharp crack of something breaking, but with the subtle, disquieting wrongness of something changing beneath the surface.She felt it before she saw it: the ground softening under her boots, the texture transitioning from cracked stone to something thinner, lighter, almost fragile.
Parchment.
Her stomach turned over.Okay.That’s not concerning at all.
“Don't antagonize it.”Shade’s voice had dropped lower.
She kept her gaze fixed forward and did not look at him.“I’m not antagonizing it.I’m establishing dominance.”
“You’re arguing with a sentient prison built on blood magic.”
“Details.”
The echo took one slow, measured step forward.
Myanin didn’t move.Didn’t shift her weight, didn’t brace, didn’t give it an inch of reaction to feed on.
“The book remembers,” it repeated, and this time the words came softer, the kind of soft that didn’t reassure but preceded something terrible, the way a storm stilled trees, animals, and clouds, just before it unleashed all of hell on it.
And then the world broke open.“Dammit, I hate it when I’m right,” Myanin muttered.
“Then you must not hate too often,” Shade offered helpfully.Because apparently he wanted to be throat punched more than he wanted to breathe.
One moment, gray nothing surrounded her on every side.The next, the air became something physical and punishing, blinding heat wrapped itself around her body like a fist closing tight, squeezing, forcing itself into every breath she drew.The scent hit before anything else: iron, ash, and the specific, stomach-hollowing smell of something burning that should never have been burning.The kind of scent that crawled inside your mind and stayed there long after the moment passed.
The first breath tore through her throat, and she choked on it, pressing her lips together hard before the sound could follow.“No.”The word came out before she could stop it: raw, involuntary, scraped from somewhere she didn’t intend to open.
The ground beneath her feet was no longer parchment.It was a rug.One she recognized immediately as it met the soles of her boots.
Her pulse spiked so fast it hurt.“No.”She said it again, louder, as if volume could change the architecture of wherever the book was dragging her.“Absolutely not.We are not doing this.”Hadn’t she suffered enough?No.Probably not, but she’d accepted the consequences of her actions.Was it enough?Should they have been harsher?Everything she thought she believed, Myanin was now questioning.
“Recognize this?”The echo’s voice no longer came from one direction; it had spread itself through the heat, woven into the air around her, sourceless and everywhere at once.“One of your finest moments, I think.”
Myanin turned.Flames crawled along the edges of the space, licking up walls that hadn’t existed moments before, the stone they climbed the same charred, familiar black.The sky above had gone wrong, low and heavy, the kind of dark that didn’t live outside fire but inside it, smoke having replaced the air entirely.Her lungs burned.The heat pressed against her skin with an intimacy that felt deliberate and invasive, like it had been waiting specifically for her.
And in the center of all of it, a figure lay motionless on the scorched carpet.The breath locked in her chest.
“Don’t,” she said sharply, the word landing in the air like a drawn weapon.“You don’t get to?—”
“The book remembers,” the voice breathed from the walls, from the fire, from the spaces between seconds.
The muscles in Myanin’s jaw pulled tight.“I remember,” she snapped.“I was there.I don’t need a replay, I don’t need the dramatic recreation, and I certainly don’t need whatever lesson you think you’re teaching me.”
The figure didn’t move.Didn’t breathe.
She knew who it was before she took a single step closer.Knew it the way a person knows a wound before they look at it, not from sight, but from the precise location of the ache.The knowledge settled into her chest like a stone dropped into still water, familiar and cold and impossibly unwelcome.Of all the wrongs she’d done in her life, and therewerea lot, this shamed her the most.
Of course it would be this.Of all the things tucked inside the long, complicated archive of her life, of course the book had reached in and pulled out this one.Because the universe apparently possessed a sick sense of humor and was into degradation kink.
Shade materialized at the edge of her vision, close enough that she felt the solid, deliberate weight of his presence, that quality he had of occupying space as though he’d decided to and committed to it fully.He wasn’t looking at the figure on the ground.He wasn’t looking at the flames.
He was watching her face with the focused, unblinking attention of someone trying to search their memory for something that’s just out of their reach in their mind.
