Page 13 of Hellfire to Come
“She’s not just surviving,” I whispered, a lump growing in my throat. “She’s preparing for war.”
I swallowed thickly, forcing the panic down.
No tears. No spiraling.
Not now. Not yet.
Because Alice didn’t need my grief. She needed my rage. She needed me focused. Ready to kill for her if it came to that. And I was. Dear gods, I was.
She’d always been my roots, pulling me back to the earth when I wanted to drift off and follow the breeze. Always patient, always understanding, even when I was a walking nightmare of trauma and venom. She stayed. She saw me. Not the chaos. Not the blood.
Me.
And now she was in their hands.
And I was supposed to stay calm.
The guilt and fear tried to swallow me whole again, drown me in the misery of my thoughts but I fought it with everything in me. If I succumb to it, the Council will win.
Let them keep her long enough to make their last mistake. Let them think they’d broken something precious.
I would burn their empire down brick by brick just to put her back together.
“Brooklyn,” Dominic said, softly, “We’re close.”
I nodded once.
“Then we go in, fast. Quiet. Anyone in our way…” I paused, tasting the venom on my own tongue. “…dies screaming.”
Echo smiled. “Now that’s the Brooklyn I know.”
I turned toward the windshield, the road stretching into darkness.
The Council thought they knew who they’d taken.
They thought I would break.
They didn’t realize they’d just unleashed the weapon they created.
And when I finally got to Alice…
I wasn’t just bringing her home.
I was leaving Hell behind me.
The road narrowed into gravel, then dirt. Trees closed in on either side of us, their branches, gnarled and skeletal, scraping at the sky. Dominic turned off the lights and slowed down. The deeper we went, the quieter it became. No birdsong, no wind, no life. Just the rumble of tires over stones and the soft, ominous whimper of the wolf.
There were predators lurking near; nothing dared breathe.
Then, like a wound splitting open in the earth, the forest gave way.
We pulled to a stop at the edge of a clearing, half-shrouded in mist and shadow. And there it stood.
A mansion.
The mansion stood like a bastardized echo of my old life; A distorted version of the place I’d once called home.
The cages beneath it still counted, I supposed.
