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The guardian throws its arms up, stumbling beneath the force of it.

I don’t stop.

I pour everything I can’t fucking roar into the flames.

The blast catches another guardian coming in from the side, fire rolling across its shoulder and up the long sweep of one horn. It recoils, giving me exactly the opening I need.

I cut the flames, then launch.

My paws hit the first guardian high in the chest and take it straight to the ground. Its skull cracks against the stone beneath us as my jaws close around its throat.

One wrench, and black blood floods my mouth.

I rip away and spit scorched flesh into the dirt.

The third guardian is already coming.

My head swings toward it, and Hellfire burns between my teeth.

Who the fuck needs a roar?

Across the clearing, Echo’s voice cuts through the chaos, urgent in a way that yanks my attention straight off the guardian currently trying to gut me. She’s pressed against a boulder near the cavern’s inner wall, closer to the extraction site than any of us should let her get, her face twisted with the effort of listening to something that clearly isn’t good.

“Wait…” Her hand slams flat against the stone. “Something’s wrong with this. It’s not what we thought.”

Sentinel reaches her first, blade still dripping, wings folding tight against his spine as he drops beside her.

“The hellfire and the Grace.” Echo’s eyes are wide, fixed on nothing, tracking sound instead of sight. “They’re not being separated. They’re still fused, threaded through each other exactly like before, but there’s something wrapped around both of them now, holding them together like…” She breaks off, hunting for the word. “Like a cage built to keep two things from tearing each other apart.”

Sentinel’s face goes pale in a way I’ve only seen once before. “The Hellwarden binding.”

Understanding lands in my chest like a physical blow as I run over to them.

Malgrave never meant to rip the fusion out of me raw. He couldn’t. Without me acting as the living anchor holding two powers in balance, the fused mess of Heaven and Hell tearing loose all at once could have detonated with the same force that’s leveled cities before, the same catastrophic wreckage Sentinel described back at church when he talked about Atlantis, about Pompeii. So he bound it first. Wrapped the fusion in something strong enough to keep hellfire and Holy Grace from destroying each other the instant they left my body, stable enough to move, controllable enough to steal.

Every piece Malgrave has spent weeks assembling clicks into place at once, and none of it makes me feel any less like I’ve been gutted.

Echo’s expression shifts from horror to something worse. “He’s already done it.” Her voice cracks around the words. “Most of it’s gone. I can feel where the connection thins out, stretching somewhere I can’t follow anymore.”

Sentinel’s jaw tightens. “Where.”

Echo looks at him, then at me, and whatever she sees on my face has her reaching for my hand before she even answers.

“Hell,” Sentinel says quietly, before she has to. “He’s sent it to Hell.”

The ground under my paws might as well fall away.

But Echo’s fingers tighten in my fur, grounding me before the panic can take root, and when she speaks again, there’s something steadier underneath the fear. “It’s not finished.” She presses her palm flat against my chest, right over the place where my hellhound still burns, where the last thread of that fusion still lives because I’m still its anchor, still connected no matter how far Malgrave has dragged the rest of it. “You’re still holding a piece of it. The transfer isn’t done.”

Around us, the fight rages on. Guardians, bones, and Conclave steel clashing under a sky gone thick with smoke, and somewhere beneath it all, the cavern hums with a power that wants to finish what it started.

We are late.

But we are not too late.

Not yet.

Chapter Twenty-Five