Page 220 of A Fate in Flames

The confession struck me like a blow.

“I knew the moment you stepped foot into my realm,” he continued.“Zaheera’s scent clung to you like rot.Like the stench of old betrayal.”

He tilted my face up, fingers firm as they demanded my attention.

“Did you really believe you were playing me?”

Dalkhan’s lips curved into something that wasn’t quite a smile.

“I let you think I was blind to it.”His fingers slid into my hair, tangling gently.“BecauseIneeded you to find the stone.”

The weight of everything crashed down on me like a tidal wave.Every step that had led me here—every nightmare that had carved itself into my sleep.The terrible, inescapable truth of what I had been about to do to him.

“Tonight… I… I—”

The words were thick with shame.I couldn’t even recognise my own voice, so small and fragile.

Dalkhan’s expression sharpened like he had been waiting for this moment, waiting for me to unravel.

“I know.”He leaned closer, breath ghosting across my skin.“But you won’t.”

My eyes drifted over to the small wooden table in the corner—to the bowl sitting innocently on it.

I was being suffocated, pressed down on from all sides.His fingers whispered over my collarbone before he settled his thumb above my erratic pulse.

“You believed it would bind mysoul.That this stone would take me from you.”

I gripped the sheets tightly, as though it could anchor me, but the truth was already sinking in.Slipping into the cracks I had been too afraid to see.

“It was never my soul the stone was meant to imprison.”His words fell like drops of poison.“It was my power.”

The stone—that pulsing, shifting thing I had carried—it had always been a part of him.

The dark swirls that moved within its depths.They were him.

Every time it trembled in my hands.Every time it turned frantic, warning me.It washim.

When I had placed it against my chest, and it had hummed in response…

It washim.

I tried to scramble backward, to put distance between us, but his iron grip held me captive in the circle of his arms.

He seized my face in his hands, eyes burning as they bore into mine.

“Now, little flame.”His voice turned deadly.“Where.Is.The.Stone?”