“Dead now. I didn’t kill him, if that’s what you’re asking. One of his other experiments backfired.” I meet his gaze steadily, refusing to flinch from the heat or the anger.
He takes a step back. The distance doesn’t help—the cell is too small, and he fills every inch of it. But it’s telling. He’s retreating from his own reaction, trying to regain the restraint that keeps slipping.
“Why tell me this?” Rough. Scraped raw. “I didn’t ask for your history.”
“You asked who caged me. I answered.” I tilt my head, studying him the way he’s been studying me. “You’re not what I expected.”
“And what did you expect?”
“A monster.” The word lands in the space between us. “I watched you execute a man this morning. Watched him turn to ash while three hundred people looked on. I expected the same cold precision in here.”
“And instead?”
Instead, you’re barely holding yourself in check. Instead, every time I mention my scars, you look like you want to burn the world down. Instead, you’re standing in this cellinterrogating me personally when you could have delegated to any of a dozen subordinates, and we both know it’s not because you care about the intelligence. I don’t say any of that. Can’t say it. Saying it would be suicide.
“Instead, you haven’t hurt me.” I offer a safer truth. “I’ve been interrogated before. This isn’t how it usually goes.”
The silence that follows stretches long enough to become unbearable. He’s looking at me with an expression I can’t read—anger and confusion and something darker, something that makes my pulse race and my magic press harder against its dampening walls.
Then he turns and leaves without another word.
The door slams behind him. The lock engages with a heavy clunk. I’m alone again in the cell, the heat from him fading slowly from the air, my heart pounding against my ribs for reasons I refuse to examine.
Hours pass.Or maybe minutes. Time means nothing in the Ash Cells.
I lie on the stone bench and stare at the ceiling and try to make sense of what happened.
The interrogation should have been simple. Answer questions, prove value, survive another day. I’ve done it a hundred times before. The script is familiar—captor asks, captive responds, both parties weigh their positions and adjust accordingly.
But nothing about Izan Sulien fits the script.
My grandmother might have known—she knew things about our bloodline that she never had time to teach me beforeshe died. Secrets passed down through generations of Vireth witches, lost when the cells claimed us one by one.
I’m the last. The only Vireth witch left in Pyraeth, maybe in the realm. Whatever knowledge my bloodline held about dragons and fire and the way power bends around certain kinds of resonance—it died with the others.
All I have left is instinct. And my instincts are screaming contradictions.
But—
That’s the problem. Thebut. The fracture in the logic that I can’t seem to seal.
I should be mapping escape routes, reading guard rotations, preparing to run the moment an opportunity presents itself.
Instead, I’m lying in the dark replaying the sound of his voice when he asked who had caged me. Replaying the heat that flooded the cell when I answered. Replaying the expression on his face when he looked at my scars—not disgust, not cold assessment, but something that looked disturbingly close to protectiveness.
He’s the Enforcer of the Cinder Flight.He doesn’t protect prisoners. He uses them or he kills them.
But he looked at my scars and asked who made them.
But his composure fractured when I told him.
But he left abruptly, slamming the door, as if staying another moment would break him in ways he couldn’t afford.
I press my palms against my face and breathe. In through the nose. Out through the mouth. The way my grandmother taught me when the cells got too small and the dampening got too heavy.
You’re tired.You’re scared. You’re reading things into his behavior that aren’t there.
Maybe. Probably.
