Page 63 of Hellfire to Come
“What?” the Atua was talking erratically, as if the language was a foreign thing his tongue couldn’t quite catch.
“Alice,” he croaked. “When they took her. I tried to find her. I really did. But I couldn’t trace her magic. And when I realized what he’d done to her…” He grabbed fistfuls of hair and started yanking on it. “I…” He trailed off, jaw trembling, eyes darting everywhere but at me.
Dominic stepped forward, and I instinctively raised a hand. “Don’t.”
“He’s lying,” Dominic growled. “I can smell it on him.”
“No,” Samir whispered, wiping his mouth with the back of a trembling hand, dark strands of hair dangling from between his fingers. “I’m not lying. I couldn’t find her. But that’s not... that’s not what I meant.” His shoulders sagged. “I’m the reason they found us. I told them where we’d be.”
The words were so quiet, they barely registered. But when they did, all the blood left in my body drained to my feet and a loud buzzing started in my ears.
My breath caught.
“What did you just say?” my blood rushed through my veins back up making my whole body tingle and it thundered in my ears.
His hands twitched at his sides. “I told the Council. Or... Frederic, at least. About the location where we would attack. About the safe house, too.”
“You what?” Dominic roared, stepping forward like a storm given form.
I slammed a hand into his chest before he could move another inch. “Don’t,” I hissed. “Let him finish.”
Samir’s face crumpled. “I didn’t think they’d take her!” he cried. “He said if I gave them the location, he’d spare you. That’s what he said. You were the one they wanted. You’re the threat. The human was never part of the deal.”
“You sold us out to save me?” My voice cracked with disbelief.
His eyes met mine, and there it was, raw, pitiful, all-consuming guilt. “Yes,” he rasped. “You were going to die, Brooklyn. I couldn’t…I made a promise…I couldn’t let that happen. I thought…”
“You thought wrong.” Dominic’s voice was deadly quiet now. “And you endangered all of us. You betrayed Alice. Rowan. You nearly cost me everything, you dumb motherfucker. Brooklyn almost died to help Alice.”
Samir looked at me again, like there was some absolution he still believed he might receive.
I shook my head. “You don’t get to say it was out of loyalty. You don’t get to make that call. You chose to trade blood for your own peace of mind so you can keep believing the delusional reality that you are some kind of a savior to me. Disgusting.”
He took a step toward me.
“Don’t,” I said. “Don’t you dare come closer.” With strength I didn’t know I had I pushed down the bile raising up my esophagus.
The weight of Samir’s confession didn’t hit me like a blow. It didn’t shatter me or set my blood roaring with vengeance. Instead, it settled, cold, dense, inevitable…like winter fog rolling in after a sleepless night.
The silence that followed his words was suffocating. I felt it in my teeth, in my lungs, in the hollows behind my ribs where breath once lived freely. I waited for the fury to come. For the instinct to rip him apart for what he had done. For the betrayal he had carved like a brand into the fragile trust we’d once built.
But it didn’t come.
What came instead was worse.
Resignation.
Somehow, on a level I hadn’t wanted to acknowledge, I’d known. I’d felt the rot spreading under the surface every time Samir averted his eyes, every time he offered silence when we needed truth. I had told myself because I needed to believe it, that he was still different from the Council that had tried to own me, use me, destroy me. That maybe he was the one who had seen past the monsters they painted us to be.
But that belief had always hung by a thread.
Now it snapped, quietly, without ceremony.
I stared at him, and it was like staring at a ruin long since collapsed; Something that had already crumbled, only now Icould see it for what it truly was. He didn’t look back. Not fully. His eyes were rimmed red, not from tears but from lack of sleep, from whatever devils he’d been wrestling in the dark.
His hand twitched at his side. A nervous tick. His shoulders had slumped inward, like his spine couldn’t bear the weight of what he’d done. He was barely holding himself together, as if his very breath was stitched by guilt and unraveling by the second.
“I never meant for it to be her,” he said again, his voice fraying. “I was trying to save you.”
