Page 18 of The Last One Standing (Rogue X Ara #4)

ROGUE

B odies littered the hallway in my wake.

My heart raced. Flames licked up my arms and spread beneath my skin, illuminating me from the inside. I couldn’t shift in here—I wouldn’t fit—but Goddess be damned, I wanted to.

When I tracked her scent to where she had been kept, chains hung from the filthy stone wall, rusted and stained. At the base of the wall, though, were footprints.

Bare footprints.

Painted in smears of old blood.

Another deep inhale, and something fractured in my psyche at the scent, tinged with rot.

Bones sat at the base of the opposite wall.

Visions looped in my head, frantic and debilitating, chasing each other like rats in a burning cage. Ara, bleeding and cold. My wings rotting in front of her.

I breathed too quickly. Too shallow. It wasn’t air I needed. It was her scent, her voice, something, anything to prove she hadn’t been reduced to bones and rot, too.

“No!” My roar ricocheted down the tunnel.

I ripped the chains from the wall. Metal clanged, stone crumbled, and my bones exploded into fractured pieces as I slung the shackles at them.

I surged forward and sprinted deeper into the darkness, driven by something rawer than instinct, my heart pounding so violently, I could hear nothing else.

Heartbreak and roaring and pounding footsteps.

Rage had been my only companion these past months, but it was now that it consumed me—and I let it.

Reveled in it.

Needed it.

I would leave nothing left of this place. I flung open every door, sent every room up in flames, destroyed every device and chain. I killed every guard, punishment for the horror they condoned, if not took part in.

There are others here, Guardian said. The healer. Another shifter. The shielder who cost you ? —

A door down the hall burst open, and from it stepped a guard, nearly too large to fit through the doorway. For a half second, I contemplated whether he might not be entirely human, but then he grinned and sealed his fate.

He unsheathed his broadsword, the metallic ring piercing through the cacophony like a taunt. I didn’t slow as he lifted the sword and steadied his feet.

It didn’t matter. He was already dead.

He just didn’t know it yet.

When he swung, I caught the blade with a scale-covered palm, and his eyes widened—the exact moment we both knew he was a dead man walking. Flames licked up the blade to devour his arms, and he screamed, dropping the sword. It clattered to the ground.

I stepped over it as the metal turned molten, seeping across the stone, and shoved him into the wall with my arm against his throat.

“A Fae woman with silver eyes,” I ground out. “Where is she?”

His bloodshot eyes darted around, searching for answers that weren’t there as he sputtered words through sobs. He wanted to answer me, wanted to have seen her, if only that would allow him his life.

But he hadn’t—not that it would have saved him.

Any man who smiled in a place like this, who defended a place like this, didn’t deserve to breathe another breath.

And he wouldn’t.

It wasn’t the fire that killed this man. It was the smoke—black smoke I urged to fill his Goddess-forsaken lungs. Then, I dropped him, and he fell to the ground, no better than the rest of his dead comrades. I left him there, clutching his throat and choking on the punishment he’d never be free of.

None of them had seen her.

Not a single one.

“How?” I shouted. “How?”

I slammed my fist into a nearby door, shattering it before I took off again. I sprinted down every hallway, around every corner head first, my chest tight—growing tighter. Sweat rolled down my skin, lungs burning.

I’d guess these tunnels had been freezing before my arrival, but they were sweltering now.

Glowing red light poured over my surroundings, my footsteps leaving pools of melted stone, but I couldn’t control it. It took everything I had to withhold the shift as my anger and hurt hinged on panic.

An explosion built within my skin, and I was running out of time before I had to return to the surface to let it out. I shut my eyes and clenched my fists, talons slicing into my palms. My muscles strained against too-tight skin, a diminishing barrier between my Fae and dragon form.

Minutes.

I had minutes, maybe less before I would combust and bring this damn dungeon down around me.

Snapping my eyes open, I turned down the next hall, intending to burst out the nearest exit, but stopped dead in my tracks.

A hope like I’d never know filled my chest and propelled me forward toward the light at the end of the tunnel, to the two silhouettes against the stark white of winter daylight.

I sprinted toward them. I didn’t take a single second to think, because nothing could’ve stopped me.

Nothing.

She was right there, mere feet away.

Right there.

Ara.

Ara was alive and right there.

Just seconds away.

A growl built in my throat as they stepped over the threshold, and she moved out of sight, but I slowed when I reached the steps—the only rational decision I was willing to make. With my heart thumping in my throat, I climbed the stairs one at a time until I laid eyes on them, on her.

I stilled, suddenly awestruck. There she was: my reason for living, my little storm, my mate, my Ara. The one I’d been hunting for months.

She was alive, and I was suddenly on the verge of combustion. My breaths turned ragged, hands trembling as I took the final step onto the ground behind them.

Her voice was soft but overwhelmingly tired as she said, “I just wanted to see the sky.”

My heart sank. I darted forward, but not fast enough.

Never fast enough.

Never enough.

“One last time.” She moved quickly—too quickly—then a glint of silver, a weapon unsheathed from Adonis’s hip.

“No!” I screamed, but it was too late.

Her arm swiped across her front. I reached her just as she stumbled and swayed, falling back into my arms without breaking eye contact with Adonis.

He blanched, seemingly oblivious to my presence as Ara’s hand released the dagger. Our eyes followed it as it fell to the ground where it hit the snow, red splattering around it.

My fire suffocated in an instant, smothered by ice.

“No!” Adonis screamed.

“No,” I whispered under my breath, too choked to speak, to breathe. “No.”

Other voices erupted then. A woman gasped. Another shouted. It all blurred into nothingness.

Because I saw her. A bruise mottled her cheek, her eye swollen, and blue lips cracked. She’d lost her curves, leaving nothing but skin and bone to carry her heart.

The worst sight, though, the one that seared into memory, filling my skull with deafening screams, was the blood that poured down her tattered dress.

When her head fell back, eyes fluttering, it revealed the slice across her throat.

I sank to my knees, numb and shaking, cradling her in my arms, my vision blurred. “I was here, little storm. I was here. ”

When her gaze met mine, eyes glossy, her brows furrowed, a word forming on her lips. She tried to speak, but no sound came. She faintly shook her head. A drop of blood slid down from her mouth.

I traced my fingers over her cold cheek, and her eyes fluttered closed.

They didn’t open again.

“I love you,” I whispered, “I love you, I love you, I love you.”

She hadn’t heard the words.

She hadn’t heard me.

I love you.

I love you.

I love you.

I couldn’t stop saying them, thinking them, breathing them. My heart outside my body was dead. How was I still alive? Why was I still alive?

If I had moved when I first arrived, if I hadn’t paused?—

Seconds would’ve saved her life.

I did this.

I killed her.

My hesitation killed her.

Wyverns roared in the distance, a symphony of devastation. Forests went up in flames. The air heated until sweat rolled down my skin, and the ground turned to mud.

Swords clashed. Bodies moved around us.

A twig snapped under retreating footsteps.

Suddenly, the ice in my veins turned to something much more useful: a roaring inferno of rage.

I didn’t look up as I kissed her forehead, lingering for a moment. When I inhaled, wishing for her scent, even that was wrong—gone. As gently as I could, I laid her on the ground and smoothed her hair away from her face before I stood.

It hurt to look away from Ara when all I wanted was to hold her, to lie down and die beside her.

I forced my gaze to meet my brother’s, my own flesh and blood. His human guards fought Fae in a blur of movement—where any of them had come from, I didn’t know, and I didn’t care.

Vile magic grazed the edges of my mind, disgusting and dark, but I ground my teeth, imagining Ara’s face: grinning, teasing, giggling, sleeping…dying.

He pushed harder, stabbing my mind. Stars sparked in my vision as pain ricocheted through my skull, but he couldn’t get in, and we both realized that at the same moment.

I stalked forward, and his smile turned manic, his nostrils flared and eyes wide. He lifted a crossbow, iron-tipped arrow already docked and aimed.

I stared into his eyes, jaw clenched hard enough to crack my teeth, flames licking up my arms. He triggered his arrow, and I didn’t bother side-stepping. I barely slowed as it sunk into my shoulder with a shluk.

Ara is dead.

He stumbled back a few steps, fumbling with another arrow as I pulled out the one embedded in my muscle. I dropped it to the ground, and my shift ripped from my skin, filling the area with black smoke. Another arrow whizzed through the air before it grazed my side.

I felt nothing. It meant nothing. I meant nothing, because Ara was dead.

With a deafening roar, fire erupted from my lungs.

I charred a chunk of the forest, but Adonis remained, his clothing reduced to ash. He sprinted for the dungeon door, but I lunged and clamped my maw around his leg with a satisfying crunch, the taste of copper filling my mouth.

His scream wasn’t nearly satisfying enough, because Ara was dead.

Her laugh.

Her smile.

Her heart.

The only light in a very dark, undeserving world.

Dead.