Page 12 of Hellfire to Come (Infernal Regions for the Unprepared #5)

Chapter Twelve

DOMINIC

Rowan’s weight pressed into my shoulders like penance.

He was light now. Too light. As if whatever Frederic had done to him had burned away everything solid, everything human in my friend.

I shifted him carefully across my back, muscles straining, but I didn’t complain.

Couldn’t. Not when the only sound behind us was the slow, groaning collapse of a place that had nearly devoured the people who counted on me to protect them.

The others moved ahead, Brooklyn clutching Alice to her side, her steps rigid with purpose. The wolf padded behind them, limping slightly, its muzzle still stained red. Chester and Echo scouted the path, flanking the tunnel like a pair of tired sentries. All of us were barely breathing.

But breathing nonetheless.

I should have felt relief. But it didn’t come.

Instead, it sat heavy in my chest like smoke after a fire.

The kind that seeps into your lungs and settles there, unshakable.

Rowan hadn’t stirred once since collapsing.

Not even when his head bounced against my spine.

His magic was silent. Too silent. Like someone had locked the doors from the inside and thrown away the key.

And Alice… She hadn’t moved since we left the mansion.

Her body sagged into Brooklyn’s grip like an overfilled vessel trying to remember how to hold its own weight.

Her skin was too warm. Her pulse too fast. And I could feel it, something still tangled inside her, like residual wires buzzing from Frederic’s last attempt to tell me fuck you.

The bastard hadn’t needed to chase us.

We delivered ourselves on a silver platter like he knew we would.

Whatever that fucker touched, he left poison in his wake.

And Brooklyn, gods, my mate, walked like she was made of steel, but I knew the truth.

I knew the way her shoulder dipped just slightly when she carried too much weight in her soul.

I saw the tremor in her fingers when she thought no one was watching.

She was holding on by threads. Rage. Love.

Sheer willpower. The female was a force to be reckoned with.

But even steel bends when it’s heated enough.

I was afraid for all of them.

Beneath that fear, older and quieter, something else stirred—something I hadn’t dare speak aloud.

Couldn’t.

That presence back in the mansion. The one that didn’t follow. Didn’t attack. Only watched.

It hadn’t felt foreign.

It had felt... familiar.

Not in the way an enemy feels familiar after too many battles. No. This had been intimate. Intrinsic. Like the echo of a dream I once lived or a shadow that had grown up alongside my own. Its attention had been sharp, specific, like it knew me. Like it belonged to me.

Or worse, like I belonged to it.

I swallowed hard, the weight of Rowan shifting as I adjusted my grip.

We broke through the tunnel mouth just as the car came into view, hidden beneath thickets and trees, half-sunken into the dirt like it had been holding its breath for our return.

Brooklyn opened the back door and helped Alice inside, cradling her head with gentler hands than I’d seen her use in all the time I’d known her.

I laid Rowan in the back as well, watching his chest rise in tiny, stuttering motions. It was a miracle he was still alive.

Chester started the engine. Echo sat up front, scanning the woods with that permanent scowl I’d noticed she wore when she was too focused. Brooklyn climbed into the back with me, and the wolf settled at our feet, growling low at nothing.

My mate grabbed my fingers, squeezing tight like she was too afraid to say anything until we were far away from here.

And me…

I kept staring at the tree line.

Because the feeling hadn’t left.

That presence… it wasn’t in the mansion anymore. It was here. Lingering. Just out of reach. Just out of sight.

And it wanted something.

From me.

The vehicle shuddered as Chester coaxed it into motion, tires crunching over gravel and moss-slick roots, the engine growling low like it too resented returning to the world of the living.

Inside, the silence was unbearable, not the peaceful kind that soothed, but the taut, breathless hush that followed calamity and preceded grief.

The air was thick with exhaustion, with blood and sweat and the stench of something ancient we had disturbed.

I couldn’t take my eyes off Rowan.

He lay as though carved from marble, pale and unmoving, lips tinged a worrying shade of gray.

The faint rise and fall of his chest was the only thing keeping me from believing we were already too late.

He had been my brother in arms, my confidant when I trusted no one else.

We had bled on the same soil, fought through the same nightmares.

And now… he was fading in my arms like breath in winter.

I hadn’t lied to Brooklyn when I told her he didn’t betray us.

He would never do that, there was no doubt in my mind.

I wanted to scream. To demand something of the world, of the gods, of whoever or whatever might be listening.

But I did nothing.

I held his wrist between my fingers as if the thread of life pulsing there might not slip away if I gripped it tightly enough.

Beside me, Brooklyn leaned against the door, Alice curled in her lap, looking fragile and half-formed. Her fingers ran absent-mindedly through Alice’s hair, the way someone might touch a ghost to make sure it’s real. Her face was calm but it was the calm of someone bracing for impact.

“She’s burning up,” she whispered again.

I shifted to see Alice more clearly. Her skin gleamed with sweat, her cheeks flushed with a sickly pink that did not look healthy.

Her lips parted with shallow, rapid breaths.

Whatever magic Frederic had seeded into her, it hadn’t been purged.

It still writhed beneath her surface, coiled and venomous.

We’d escaped the mansion, but the battle wasn’t over.

I only hoped Samir would know what to do.

Brooklyn didn’t cry. She never had. But I saw the tremble in her lower lip before she locked her jaw and hid it behind clenched teeth. I knew her pain like I knew my own. And it broke me in places I hadn’t realized were still soft.

“She’s strong,” I said quietly, more for myself than for her. “She will fight it and win.”

“She shouldn’t have had to be strong, Dominic,” Brooklyn said, and in those six words was a lifetime of fury and sorrow. “She should’ve never been in this position to begin with.”

The trees blurred past the window, shadows and sun slicing in ribbons through the branches. But my mind wasn’t in the car. It wasn’t even in the forest. It was back in that crumbling house of horrors. And I had no idea what to tell my mate. Why did my thoughts linger back in that crypt of terror?

Back with the thing that watched us leave.

Its presence lingered in my marrow. Not like a memory. Not like fear.

Like blood.

It felt carved into me. Known. Intimate in the way a name is intimate when whispered against skin. It wasn’t Frederic. It was something other. Something buried deep under all the magic and curse of that place.

A voice I couldn’t hear, but could almost feel, whispering from the dark.

Find me.

See me…

I pressed my palm against the side of my skull, trying to scrub the sensation out of my brain.

Brooklyn glanced at me then. “You feel it too.”

I nodded, not trusting myself to speak. She didn’t press. She never did when I looked like this, like something was crawling just beneath the surface of my skin and trying to rip its way free.

The car bounced, tires slamming into a rut. Alice whimpered in her sleep. Rowan remained still.

“I don’t think it was just watching us,” I said finally. “I think it knew me. And not in the way enemies do.”

Brooklyn tilted her head, the hard line of her jaw tight with thought.

“I didn’t feel fear, not even for you,” I admitted. “I should have. But I didn’t. It felt… familiar. Like something that used to be mine.”

She stared at me then, really stared, and for a second, I thought I saw something flicker across her face. Recognition. Dread. Possibility.

And then she looked away.

We were all carrying things we hadn’t named yet. Burdens without language.

The trees began to thin. I recognized the ridge that crested before our hidden road. The safe house was close, another hour, maybe less. I should have felt relief. But all I felt was the weight of what came next.

Getting them safe wasn’t enough.

Alice needed more than safety. She needed purging, cleansing, healing from magic none of us fully understood.

And Rowan… gods, I didn’t know if he’d ever come back.

And then there was Brooklyn. My mate. My fire-forged soul.

She looked so calm. So fierce.

And yet I could feel the tremble in her spirit. The way she wanted to scream and couldn’t. The way her rage was already planning ten different ways to destroy the man who’d hurt her family.

And I…

I was haunted by something that felt like me.

We were leaving one battlefield only to enter another. A slower one. A quieter one. But no less deadly.

As the car turned down the concealed path toward the safe house, I leaned back, closing my eyes for just a breath.

I did not sleep.

I listened to the echo of that familiar darkness still whispering inside me hoping to recognize it.

I waited for it to speak again.