My foot slipped on a sudden slope and I was falling, weightless, breath torn from my lungs as the world pitched sideways. I landed hard, shoulder-first, pain flaring white-hot before my head hit stone and sound fractured.
The world blurred.
Light stuttered.
Everything slowed to nothing but ringing in my ears and the dull throb of blood behind my eyes. I couldn’t tell if I was breathing. Couldn’t tell how long I’d been lying there.
Then footsteps.
Slow. Unhurried. Each one closer than the last.
I felt him before I saw him, his presence pressing in, folding over mine like a shadow that had learned how to move.
He knelt beside me, and the last of the light disappeared behind his silhouette.
“So,” Jasper said quietly, almost like he pitied me, “we’ve reached the part where pretending ends.”
I tried to move. My body didn’t respond.
His hand rested against my temple, not rough, not kind, just… certain.
“I wanted to do this with patience,” he said. “With understanding. But you’re still clinging to something that doesn’t exist anymore. You’re still fighting the truth.”
My vision dimmed. The edges of everything darkened.
“You need the higher Flame,” he whispered. “It’s more powerful. It’ll burn the false self away.”
The last thing I felt was the cold of the concrete beneath me, and the weight of certainty settling deep in my gut—
This wasn’t over.
It had only changed shape.
CHAPTER FIFTY-FIVE
THE BUNKER WASempty.
That truth hit me sideways, hard and wrong, like my mind tripped over it and refused to catch itself. Concrete walls closed in tight. Low ceilings pressed down heavy. Old machinery hummed somewhere beneath our boots, a vibration so constant it felt like a pulse that didn’t belong to anything still breathin’. The air was damp and sour, thick with old metal and rot, like the place had been sealed shut with its sins still alive inside it.
Symbols were carved deep into the floor. Not scratched. Not rushed. Cut slow and deliberate. Circles layered inside circles. Lines scored so deep they swallowed shadow. Whoever made’em had taken their time, like they wanted the bunker to remember exactly what it was meant for.
But Lark wasn’t there.
“Clear,” Thunder called from the far tunnel, his voice comin’ back thin and bent, like the walls themselves were twistin’ it.
“Clear,” Mystic answered from the other side.
I didn’t say a damn word.
My eyes were already on the floor.
Blood.
Not enough to follow clean. Not a trail a man could trust. Just enough to make my chest cave in on itself. Dark smears where somebody went down hard. A wide scuffed arc where a body had been dragged, weight pullin’ against resistance. Drops leading nowhere, already dryin’ into the concrete like the bunker was tryin’ to swallow the evidence of what it had done.
“Fuck,” I breathed.
I crouched, fingers hoverin’ just above the stain. Touching it would make this real in a way I wasn’t sure I’d survive. My pulse roared in my ears, loud enough to drown out the sound, loud enough that Devil’s voice faded to background noise.
