Another strike from the demons follows, then another, each one designed not to overpower me, but to unbalance me. To fracture my focus. To pull my fire back toward the wild, emotional state it once answered so easily. I fight it, teeth clenched, trying to remember my breath and form and restraint, but the battlefield shifts, bodies moving between us, magic colliding in uneven bursts.
I lose sight of Damian for a moment that stretches too long.
A demon breaks through the line, slamming into me with a force that knocks the air from my lungs. My fire flares instinctively, surging higher than I intend, heat roaring up my spine as my control slips. I feel it then—the edge of myself I’ve been holding back, the part that could burn everything to ash if I let it.
The fear isn’t of the demons, but of what I might become if I lose myself now.
Another corrupted blast tears toward me, darker than the last, aimed straight at my chest. I can’t counter it in time. My fire stutters, unstable, collapsing inward instead of surging forward.
And then Damian is there.
He doesn’t block it with magic.
He takes it.
The impact hits him at full force, a brutal collision that sends him crashing to the ground hard enough to fracture stone. I feel it through the bond like something tearing open inside my ribs, pain and shock and terror flooding through me all at once.
“No!”
The sound that leaves me isn’t a word. It’s a rupture from deep within my being.
Something breaks open in me then, a clarity so sharp it steals my breath away. The truth slams into me with devastating force: losing him would destroy me far more completely than any prophecy, any fate, any destiny ever could.
I don’t think. There is no time to think. All I do is command.
My fire answers instantly, no longer flaring outward in wild arcs, but collapsing inward, compressing into something dense and blindingly bright. It moves through the valley like a living force, erasing the corrupted flames on contact, burning clean through demon after demon without spreading beyond what I choose.
The battlefield goes quiet in stages.
It’s not peaceful, but stunned.
The remaining demons retreat, not in disorder, but in recognition, slipping back into shadow as if marking something they cannot yet overcome. When the last of them vanishes, the valley exhales, smoke and ash settling over scorched ground and broken stone.
For a moment, it feels…safer.
Not healed. Not whole. Just held long enough to exhale.
I drop to my knees beside Damian before anyone can stop me, hands shaking as I press them to his chest, to his side, to anywhere I can feel warmth beneath the blood. He’s breathing…barely…his skin too pale, his pulse erratic beneath my fingers.
I try to heal him with trembling hands, and the fire responds sluggishly, thin and weak, drained by the fight, by the force it took to end it. Panic rises sharp and fast like a blade cutting through my throat, tears blurring my vision as I fight to summon more, to give him anything I have left.
“Please…” I whisper, the word tearing out of me, raw and broken. “Please stay. Don’t leave me.”
Around us, the valley stands silent, the other alphas wounded but alive, wolves staring not in reverence now, but in awe, edged with fear. They’ve survived.
But I don’t care about any of that.
All I care about is the man bleeding beneath my hands, and the terrifying truth burning steadily in my chest:
It was never destiny pulling me toward him. It was free will.
And I am not ready to lose him.
Closing my eyes as a sob rips through my chest, my head drops, and I’m instantly sprung into what feels like anothertimeline, or another dimension, fire blazing all around me as cloaked figures scatter across the valley, filling up every corner.
Something about it doesn’t feel scary, but rather, familiar, as if I know the faces of those I cannot see in the dark, covered by tanned hoods of their cloaks. There’s recognition where there should be fear, and not even the hot licking flames surrounding me scare me.
I glance to my left and notice a woman standing there with flames surrounding her, but she isn’t burning. She’s like me, except her hair is longer and straighter than mine, her frame taller. Glancing to my right, then, I see another woman with flames engulfing her, but she’s a petite girl with a short bob of straight hair.
