Page 1 of Hellfire to Come (Infernal Regions for the Unprepared #5)

Chapter One

brOOKLYN

All I needed was to take one more breath.

“A breath is the genesis of existence,” I murmured, detached, as my thumb traced slow, aimless circles over my knee, somehow anchoring me to a reality I could scarcely recognize. It felt as though I would unravel completely, dissipate into oblivion, the moment that minimal contact ceased.

How did everything go so wrong, so fast? If I thought I was unprepared for the things that happened until this very moment, I sure as all hells was unprepared for the new inferno barreling toward me, ready to destroy me once and for all.

I needed to turn the helplessness I felt into anger so I could think, so I could go kill everyone who dared take my friend. Instead, here I was, like a tumbleweed rolling aimlessly through time and space with no certain destination in mind while shivers raked my frame at the most random intervals.

The tremor I felt in my bones was not fear, however, it was the echo of a soul on the brink of disintegration, haunted by the certainty that stillness meant vanishing. Because what good was I to anyone if all they did was pay for being near me.

So, with each breath, I tried to believe: believe in the lie that breath is a sacred link to my friend, a living thread connecting soul to soul, self to the universe.

I rubbed at the soiled fabric of my pants again, each stroke a futile prayer to know that Alice was okay.

That she was not broken the way I was. The way they broke me.

“Breath is life,” I commanded myself, hollow and stern, exhaling sharply until my breath clung to the mirror before me in a fragile fog.

I’d stared into that mirror for days, after each empty-handed search for my friend, willing it to tell me where she was.

Instead of answering, the mist warped my reflection into something grotesque, demonic, a visual echo of the emptiness clawing at my insides. A true picture of what I was.

Failure. Useless. Helpless.

A monster, just like those hurting Alice while I stared at myself doing nothing.

I could not find myself in the distorted reflection, nor could I find Alice anywhere in the city. The tether was severed, no matter how hard I reached or pleaded for a sign that she was near. So how could breath claim to be a bridge when I felt marooned?

If breath truly belonged to life, why did each inhale feel like erosion, like another layer of my being was flaking and drifting away, brittle as dried leaves crushed under a brutal heel?

And yet, all that remained of me was that motion. That breath was the only connection to my friend. Just one more, I urged myself. Perhaps, if I could summon another inhale, another fleeting act of will, I might wake, return to the moment before my world shattered.

“Let it be a dream,” I pleaded. A nightmare, more truthfully. But still… a dream.

Because I couldn’t look reality in the eye.

I couldn’t accept that she’d just recovered from my brutal attack only to be thrown to the wolves who were ready to rip her to pieces, not without it tearing the last shred of sanity from my grasp.

I couldn’t accept that Alice was gone, taken, ripped away because someone among us was a disgrace, a traitor.

Because if I admitted that truth, I’d have to admit the rawest one of all: I failed her.

As a guardian. As a friend. As a supposed protector of those I swore to keep safe.

Worse still…

I failed her as family.

And Alice was my family. She and Dominic were the only real family I had left.

That truth dropped inside me like lead into water, dragging with it my soul toward the gaping, cursed earth beneath me, eager to swallow my hollow shell whole.

She wasn’t just another person with some invested interest in me.

She was real. The one who saw me at my most pathetic—stripped of power, dignity, even hope—and didn’t flinch.

She stood there when I was a mindless monster, believing in me when I didn’t believe in myself.

She never turned away from me. Not once.

She risked her fragile mortal flesh so she could stand by my side with no questions asked regardless of her safety because, as she said, “that’s what friends do. ”

She meant more to me than Veronica ever did. Just one more revelation stabbing like a nail in the coffin the Council was custom building for me. And what good did that do her? What good did I do her?

All the power I carried, all the damned gifts bestowed upon me from bloodlines…what were they worth if I couldn’t even shield her from the very monsters hunting my own dreams? Monsters that now walked freely while she paid with her human life for my mistakes.

Alice is not a human, the voice hissed in the back of my skull, sharp, sudden, enough to jolt my heart like a defibrillator.

No. She wasn’t human.

And that’s why she was taken. Why she was suffering somewhere beyond my reach. And all I could do was sit there, staring at a reflection that barely looked alive, while the universe ground on in a cruel, indifferent silence.

“Brooklyn?”

A whisper, almost lost in the hush between heartbeats was followed by the softest knock, a ghost’s caress against the polished wood.

The voice as well was just a fracture in the silence, a desperate murmur from the only soul who dared reach for mine through the thundering of chaos within my being.

My mate’s low voice trembled, not from anger, but from knowing.

Knowing that the fortress I’d built from grief and guilt wasn’t made of stone but of glass, and still, he knocked, aching to be let in even though recognizing the price he would need to pay may be steep.

Dominic wasn’t merely asking to cross a door’s boundary, however.

No, he was begging to step into the wreckage I had become, into the shadows and sorrow I wore like rusted armor, jagged and cruel.

Armor I forged from despair, lined with the blades of my own guilt, and I knew, if he stepped too close, it would make him bleed.

And I… I was terrified of what he’d find inside.

So, I did what cowards do. I retreated further into the hollow shape of myself, sinking into the chair as if it might swallow me whole. I feigned absence, as though I were still out there, wandering the world for a friend I’d already lost to the night.

But Dominic knew. Sometimes I thought he knew me better than I knew myself.

He could hear my heartbeat, a mournful echo trembling beneath ribs heavy with grief, the same way I could feel his, a quiet drum of love and defiance through the silence we both drowned in.

“Let me in, my love, it’s been days where you suffer alone.

” His voice cracked beneath the weight of desperation, fragile as butterfly wings, trembling with the ache of a man begging to hold together in me what was already unraveling.

“You don’t need to carry this guilt, Brooklyn.

Let me help you search. We’ll find her faster together. ”

But we both knew the truth. I didn’t want help. Not anymore. I had opened my soul, piece by fragile piece, to the idea that I could lean on others. That maybe, just maybe, I didn’t have to fight this battle alone. And look where that tender foolishness led me.

Look what it cost.

I’d learned the hard way that trust is a currency too often forged and too easily broken. I betrayed my own instincts when I chose to trust.

Now, Alice, the one person apart from Dominic I couldn’t afford to lose, might pay the price for my hope.

A single misstep of faith, and it may have signed her death warrant.

“Go away, Dominic.” My voice cracked like a brittle shell beneath an unassuming foot, and I tore myself from the mirror’s accusing gaze. I paced the room in jagged, restless strides, every stomp a battle cry against the ache in my chest. “I’m not fit for company.”

“I don’t need company,” he replied immediately, calm and unwavering. “I need you.”

A bitter laugh escaped me, hollow and sharp. “We all need things, Dominic. But want doesn’t shape reality. It just burns in our bones when the world denies us the simplest of things.”

The silence that followed was agonizing.

I heard him shift, his boot rasping across the wooden floor as he recoiled from my cruelty.

The stories he’d shared with me about losing his family, the grotesque way the Council punished everything he held dear hung between us.

Guilt swelled in my throat, but I swallowed it like poison.

“You think driving us away is helping Alice?” His voice trembled, not with anger but with pain. “You think pushing me away is what she would want?”

There was a muffled thump as his fist met the wall beside the door, a muted echo of the storm within him. My instincts flared, snapping my head toward the sound. I wanted to snarl, to fight, to retreat deeper into the grief that cloaked me, but he kept going.

“We all love her. We all want her back.”

I stormed to the door, my hand wrapping around the knob with a fury that turned my knuckles white. “Then tell me who betrayed us. Give me that truth, Dominic, and I swear there will never be another door between us again.”

The moment the door flew open, he was there.

No hesitation. No anger. Just arms, warm, trembling, pulling me close, anchoring me against the chaos.

His face burrowed into the curve of my neck, and I realized I was clutching him, not to push him away, but because I needed something—I needed him—to stop me from breaking into a million pieces.

He said nothing, just held me, breathing me in like I was oxygen and he’d been drowning.

My chest ached and my hands tightened on his arms as if I could hold the world together that way. My lower lip quivered, my eyes stung so I blinked as fast as I could to stop the moisture gathering there.

“I’m sorry, my love,” he murmured, voice low and rough as shattered stone. “I failed you. I failed her. But we will find her.”

His nose grazed the column of my neck, stopping beneath my ear. “Just... don’t shut me out. Don’t leave me outside while you bleed alone.”

He shuddered, breathing in my presence like it was the only thing keeping him from falling apart.

“I couldn’t bear it, Brooklyn.”

“She’s gone, Dominic.” All the fight left me and I sagged in his arms. “I turned the city inside out and I can’t find her.”

“We will look together again.” Tightening his hold, my mate shifted slightly and picked me up. “Two sets of eyes are better than one.”

“You don’t think I can be objective?” Scoffing at the insult, I debated jumping away from him, but it felt so good to feel the warmth of his body that I decided against it.

He started walking down the hall, but I couldn’t care less where he was taking me as long as I could steal the heat from him.

I didn’t realize how cold I was until that very moment.

“You?” He glanced down at me with a slight curl on one side of his lips that looked so sad I felt a pang under my ribs.

“Objective when it comes to those you care about?” His hair had grown longer than he usually wore it, so it tumbled around his face when he shook his head.

“Never. Objective is not a word I would associate with you in this situation, my love.”

“You’re an ass.” I thumped his chest with the back of my hand, and we both stiffened.

“You sound like Alice,” Dominic muttered as he resumed walking after faltering for a second.

A lump formed in my throat the size of a fist, and I had to swallow it before I could speak. “Where are you taking me?” Ignoring the comment was in our best interest at that moment.

“I need you to see something.” The offhanded way he said it shot adrenalin through my veins and I braced in his arms as if he would deliver a physical blow.

“See something?” My voice broke from the strong thrumming of my heart in my throat.

“See someone, I should say.”

There was not enough time to interrogate him further before he took the stairs two at a time and rushed us downstairs toward the kitchen.

I hoped with everything in me that I could kill whoever it was. There was a mountain of wrath inside me and it needed an outlet.

I prayed Dominic would deliver it.