I trusted Emberline. Surety settled inside me deep, like a lodestone I could build something on.These weren’t just words; this was the truth. Nico might love her, but I couldtrusther. She would never betray me like my father; she would never hurt me like I’d been hurt in the Fossa.
I’d never known anything like this before.
This cold, sure knowledge I would stake my life on.
A rough laugh scraped out of me, and I pushed away from the counter. After being sold out by everyone, I’d finally found someone who had my back. Three someones, actually, if I counted my brother—which I did—and Nico, who was truthful about his feelings, even when he knew it might be the last thing he said.
I huffed out a bitter laugh.Ballsy move, even for him.
The bond flared again—Emberline, moving faster now—and something inside me surged in answer.Mine.
But Ember wasn’t mine. She belonged to no one but herself, as wholly as I’d ever seen anyone belong to themselves. Proud and defiant and completely her own person, and I would damn myself before I’d ever dim that light of hers down a single watt.
She deserved more than a brute who couldn’t get through a day without losing his temper.
My wife deserved a male who kept his godsdamned promises, no matter how hard that was.
Who backed up his words with actions.
She deserved someone who strove to be the very best version of himself, whatever that might look like now. I squeezed my eyes shut and instantly regretted it, the darkness instantly dragging me back into the past.
Back to the Fossa.
Stone under my spine. Iron at my wrists. The stink of spilled blood soaked deep into the walls. I could still feel the straps cutting into me, holding me down while I fought like a wild animal.
If I’d known what was coming, I could have fought harder. Would have stolen a soldier’s knife and ended myself long before that night in the bowels of the prison.
The Overseer stripped me of my dignity and my choice. “Hold him down,” he’d laughed. “Let’s see if this one is strong enough.”
The witch obeyed.
She’d set an old clay pot beside my head, the surface flaking, something foul and oily leaking out around the top.
Her withered hands were stained with something that wasn’t ink. More like centuries of magic had turned the skin black as coal. She didn’t care about me, the prisoner strapped to the table. To her, I was only a vessel.
A container to be cracked open and filled, then stitched back together to see if the seams held.
Or if they burst apart.
“Open him up.” Her cackle was the sort of mad sound I’d heard trickle out of the cells in the dead of night, full ofmadness and malice. They cut me apart. Flayed me to the bone as if I was nothing more than meat on a hook. I screamed until my throat shredded, the witch tracing runes on my skin, on my insides, against my bones with her blackened, cursed hands.
She whispered in a language that scraped through my memories; when she plunged her hand deep into my chest and squeezed my heart in her fist, somethinganswered. The creature did not enter me gently. The ifrit—a desert being forged of fire, violence, and pride—clawed its way in, a living storm forced into too-small flesh, flooding my veins with heat that should have burned me to ash on that table.
But I didn’t die. And when I opened his eyes again, the world was cloaked in flame.
The ifrit claimed me that night.
I became a prisoner in my own body, awake, but trapped inside my head as some cruel, howling being stretched my skin around itself like a disguise. Fire bloomed from my hands, from my mouth, from every crack in my ruined flesh as the witch fled the boiling cataclysm.
Soldiers burned, despite their armor. I smelled them cooking alive.
And I couldn’t stop myself.
I was a ghost in a body that no longer belonged to me.
I slammed backinto the present, back into the shitty kitchen.
Sucked in a breath of acrid smoke.
