Chapter 73 Dante
We had been searching for too long.
That was the first warning sign.
Neutral territory doesn’t hide things forever. It rots them to the surface. But hour after hour passed, and all we found were ghosts — abandoned grain silos with birds nesting in the rafters, rail yards swallowed by weeds, factories stripped down to concrete bones. We cracked open storm drains. We followed old service tunnels. We tore through forgotten bunkers left over from wars humans pretended never happened.
Nothing.
No heat.
No shadow.
No trace of her.
The longer it went on, the tighter my chest became — not panic yet, not rage, but pressure. Like something massive was trying to breathe inside a space too small to hold it.
Lucian noticed before I did.
“You’re overheating,” he said, low and measured, the way he spoke when he didn’t want to provoke me.
“I’m fine.”
A lie. We both knew it.
The forest around us was too quiet. Not even birds. Just the sound of our boots and the distant wind threading through dead leaves. The kind of quiet that presses against the skull.
I stopped walking without realizing I’d done it.
The heat spiked.
Not outward — inward.
My fire folded in on itself, compressing, condensing, the way a star collapses before it goes supernova.
That was the second warning sign.
Lucian turned sharply. “Dante—”
It hit me all at once.
Guilt.
Not abstract. Not manageable.
Concrete. Crushing.
I drove her away.
I let her walk out thinking she wasn’t enough.
I wasn’t there when Renee took her.
I failed the one thing I was built to protect.
My vision blurred at the edges.
The fire surged.
I tried to pull it back.
I failed.
It ripped out of me.
The forest ignited in a heartbeat.
Flame tore through the underbrush like a living thing, leaping from tree to tree, racing up trunks, devouring dead leaves and dry bark in an instant. The ground split beneath my feet with a sound like thunder cracking bone. Roots shrieked as they burned. Sap boiled. The air itself screamed.
Lucian reacted instantly.
Water slammed into the inferno from every direction — walls of mist, pressurized arcs ripping through flame, vapor exploding outward in blinding white clouds. He threw his body between the fire and Amara without hesitation, water coiling around them like armor.
“GET BACK!” he shouted at her.
Steam roared.
Ash filled the air.
I didn’t stop.
I couldn’t.
The fire wasn’t obeying anymore — it wasn’t even listening. It was grief given teeth. Rage without language. Every thought fed it.
She trusted me.
She walked away because of me.
She’s alone because I wasn’t enough.
Trees collapsed, burning through at the base and crashing down in showers of sparks. The sky above us glowed orange, smoke boiling upward in a column that could be seen for miles.
Lucian screamed my name again, his voice distorted through steam and heat.
I didn’t hear him.
I only felt the burn.
When it finally ended, it wasn’t because I controlled it.
It was because there was nothing left close enough to burn.
The fire exhausted itself.
So did I.
I dropped to my knees in the scorched clearing, hands braced against blackened earth. Smoke poured from my lungs with every breath, my chest seizing, my vision tunneling. Heat still crawled under my skin, but it was hollow now — like embers after a funeral pyre.
I tasted iron.
Water hit me hard — Lucian’s doing — dousing my shoulders, my back, cooling my overheated core before it cooked me from the inside out. I didn’t fight it. I didn’t have the strength.
My arms shook violently.
I couldn’t lift my head.
Lucian didn’t ease into it.
He grabbed the back of my jacket and hauled me upright just enough to force me to look at him.
“What the fuck was that?” he roared.
I coughed, smoke spilling from my mouth. “I—”
“No,” he snapped. “You don’t get to ‘I’ right now.”
Amara stood a few feet away, wrapped in water and steam, eyes wide, face pale. She didn’t say a word.
Lucian shoved me back down onto my heels.
“You lose control like that again,” he said, voice shaking with restrained fury, “and you don’t just risk Seraphine — you kill her.”
The words hit harder than the fire ever could.
“I know,” I rasped.
“You don’t act like it,” he shot back. “You think grief gives you permission to become a weapon?”
I dragged a hand down my face, leaving soot smeared across my skin. “I couldn’t stop it.”
“That’s the problem.”
Silence fell — broken only by the crackle of dying embers and the hiss of water evaporating off scorched ground.
Lucian exhaled slowly, forcing himself back under control. “You don’t get to fall apart,” he said more quietly. “Not now. Not when she’s alive and needs you focused.”
My head snapped up.
“Alive?” I croaked.
He watched my face closely. “You felt something.”
So had he.
I closed my eyes.
Past the exhaustion. Past the pain.
There.
A thread.
Faint. Fragile.
But unmistakable.
Heat — not wild, not flaring — contained. Held close. Controlled.
Her.
My breath shuddered out of me like a prayer.
“She pulled it in,” I whispered. “She’s hiding it.”
Lucian nodded once. “Good. That means she’s thinking.”
I pushed myself to my feet, legs unsteady but holding. The destruction around us loomed — acres of burned forest, smoking and ruined — a testament to how close I’d come to destroying everything.
Including her.
“I won’t do that again,” I said.
Lucian’s gaze was sharp. “You don’t get another ‘again.’”
I nodded.
The trail flickered again — not stronger, but clearer now that the fire had burned through my panic.
Underground.
Old infrastructure.
She was keeping others warm.
Teaching them.
Surviving.
My chest tightened — not with rage this time, but something dangerously close to awe.
“Let’s move,” I said.
Lucian fell into step beside me without argument.
Amara followed, jaw set, eyes fierce.
This time, I didn’t let the fire lead me.
I followed her instead.
And I would not lose her again.