Page 104 of The World Undone

I reached through my bond, desperately trying to feel Darius, to communicate, to see what was going on, but it was clogged. Blocked. I mentally screamed to him, but my voice withered into nothing, swallowed by a void.

I reached for his arm, tentative and slow. “Dariu?—”

He erupted in flames—hot and angry. They spread through the room, taking out the protectors on his side of the room in a single breath.

Jarrod’s eyes widened, his face somehow growing even paler as he backed away from us. With a quick glance in my direction, he muttered a hurried “until we meet again, Miss Bentley,” before he teleported from the room, leaving the others to fend for themselves.

The dozen or so protectors who’d survived the first wave scrambled and clamored over each other as fire spread through the room. Everything caught, until the entire suite was engulfed.

Screams echoed through the room, a harmony from hell.

“Go!” I shoved Ro back through the tunnel as heat licked at my face.

Stubborn as always, he resisted. “I’m not leaving you.”

“This is my power. I’m immune to it,” I gritted out, as heat flared along my back, both a caress and scorch. Smoke curled through the air and the crackle of flames was punctuated by the loud coughing coming from those still alive, their voices no longer capable of screaming. “You’re not. Go back to Haley.”

“No. Max?—”

I knew that stubborn set of his jaw, that particular angle of his eyes.

Ro, please. Just this once. Just go.

“I’ll come to you. As soon as—” I glanced at Darius. Pure, unadulterated rage emanated from every last inch of him, unlike anything I’d ever seen before. Truthfully, even if I could protect Ro from the fire, something told me he wasn’t safe from the man standing next to me. None of us were. “Please go. Please just go.”

Ro hesitated another moment, his mouth tight as he witnessed the destruction behind me—destruction I was trying like hell not to look back at right now. With a frustrated groan, his eyes met mine. “Five minutes, Max. That’s all you have before I come back.”

And then he left.

Satisfied, I exhaled, choking on smoke when I took another breath.

Once I was certain Ro was far enough back, that he was safe from Darius’s inferno, I turned around.

Every last protector was gone, nothing more than bones and ash on a floor that was disintegrating and collapsing to the room below us.

Still, the fire only blazed harder, catching through the suite, to whatever lay beyond that, leaving destruction and pain in its wake.

Elizabeth was the only one still standing.

Rather than run, she simply watched me, expression vacant.

Without uttering a word, she walked into the fresh wave of hellfire ripping from Darius—silent and stoic until the last beat of her heart.

And then we were alone.

Why didn’t she go after Jarrod? Why didn’t she teleport?

“Darius,” I yelled, trying to reach him through the chaos.

My foot caught on a crack in the floor that opened into a huge hole. I heaved myself up before I fell through completely.

“Darius,” I tried again.

He either didn’t hear me or didn’t want to respond.

Fire snaked through the tunnel now, the walls crumbling with a fresh blast of flames.

I tried to call it back, to pull the fire from him like we’d practiced so many times, but I couldn’t.

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