Page 44 of Lost in Fire

She turns back to face me. “But why? Why didn’t he know about me?”

“Because I never told him.” I shake my head. “When my clan found out about us, they sentenced me to death.” I don’t go into all the details of how I chose execution over betraying him. It seems unnecessary now. “Except I didn’t die. Cassia saved me.” Cassia… who Ember has only ever known as a fond relative who visits occasionally.

Ember looks like her world just turned upside down. Because it did. And it’s about to get worse.

“So…” There’s steel in her voice now. “So you let him think you were dead. For my whole life.”

“To protect you.” The justification sounds hollow even to me. “If he’d known about you, he would have tried to contact us. Tried to find you. And that attention would have gotten you killed.”

“So instead, you decided to lie to both of us.” She moves closer, and her magic flares automatically—defensive fury given form. The air around her shimmers with heat that smells of copper and ozone. “You decided what was best for everyone without asking what we wanted.”

“I was trying to—”

“To control everything.” She cuts me off with a gesture that scatters sparks across the carpet. “You decided he couldn’t handle the truth. You decided I was better off without him. You decided isolation was safer than honesty.”

“It was safer!” The words explode from me with accumulated fear. “Do you have any idea what they do to hybrid children, Ember? What the enhanced protocols are designed to find and eliminate?”

She goes very still. “What enhanced protocols?”

I’ve said too much. Revealed the current danger when I meant to focus on the historical justification. But there’s no taking it back now.

“New genetic verification techniques.” I force my voice to remain steady. “The extremist factions have developed scanners that can identify mixed heritage in our oldest clan lines, seven generations removed. They’re implementing them systematically, starting with young adults under twenty-five.”

“Young adults like me.”

“Yes.”

“And when they find mixed heritage?”

I can’t bring myself to say it directly. Can’t voice the protocols that turn discovery into elimination. “For the ancient clans like ours… There are consequences.”

“What kind of consequences?”

“The permanent kind.”

She sinks back onto the couch as understanding crashes over her. All the careful isolation. The homeschooling. The lack of friends her age. The constant deflections about our family history.

“I’m a target,” she says quietly.

“You’re the target.” The admission feels like confessing to murder. “Your mixed heritage makes you exactly what they’re hunting for. And if they discover that the Shadowhand herself has been hiding a hybrid daughter…”

“The Shadowhand?” Her eyes narrow. “You’rethe Shadowhand?”

Another secret exposed. Another wall crumbling.

“I am.”

The silence stretches between us, heavy with revelations and accumulated lies. When Ember speaks again, her voice carries a calm that’s somehow more terrifying than fury.

“You’re the Shadowhand. The most vocal purist in the Ivory League. The one advocating for the elimination of mixed bloodlines.”

“Yes.”

“While hiding your own mixed-blood daughter.”

“Yes.”

“And my father doesn’t know any of this.”

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