A part of me feared that my missing mate knew who I was.
Had I unknowingly met them in the past and they’d chosen to walk away? Run. Hide.
Maybe they’d seen how destructive my flames were and how harsh my personality was and they’d been disgusted.
Ignises were special because they wielded the flames of the soul. They were great healers, artists, Renaissance men who pushed culture forward. Sure, they were also elite soldiers because devil culture was brutal and emphasized male discipline and endurance.
Ignises were usually more. They had something to offer the world.
Yet I had nothing.
I wasn’t more.
I was fire. Incarnate.
How was I supposed to live with that?
Maybe our missing Protector would rather spend an eternity suffering than an eternity in my presence.
Maybe he’d heard the stories about the dark history that tainted the House of Malum.
I was the dark history.
It was disturbingly simple: I’d cried as a baby and engulfed my fathers in flames.
Did my missing mate know that I’d killed my biological father and all his mates? Did he know that the famous Ignis who’d led the House of Malum for centuries had been murdered by his infant son?
Did my mate think I was an unworthy Ignis?
After all, someone like me could never defend my Protectors and Revered. I was destructive.
My father was the proof.
Death by fire.
A dishonorable way to die.
What I’d done was unheard of.
My father had been an extremely powerful Ignis who’d wielded healing fire expertly with his mates by his side for centuries. Yet he’d been burned to death by a mere babe.
A horrible irony.
The worst part of it all—I’d burned my mother after I was born. Scorched the skin off her arms and breasts when I was settled on her chest.
But she’d lived.
And she hadn’t told my father or his mates.
Purposefully.
She’d performed her function. Her duty was to birth an heir for the illustrious House of Malum, and she had. Then she’d taken the money and left without a word of warning.
And I’d killed them all.
The sins of my past coalesced with the failures of my present.
The inferno ravaged me as my fever spiked.
It demanded release into the silence.
My fire wanted a freedom that my soul could never have without a soul bond.
I fell to my knees.
Sobbed out flames and begged the fire to take me.
“Breathe. Focus on my voice.” Arabella was inches away.
Scorpius’s voice was beside hers. “You are in control. You control the flames. They are you. They don’t rule you, you rule them. Concentrate, my Ignis.”
“Concentrate on me.” Orion’s lyrical voice was so sweet it hurt.
If I could let the flames consume me, I would. I’d have done so years ago. The problem was the fire didn’t want to hurt me; it wanted to hurt everyone else around me.
It always left me unscathed.
If it weren’t for my mates and their powers, my fire would murder indiscriminately.
I was a killing machine. An abomination.
With Scorpius and Orion, I was justice.
Now I was detonating.
I opened my mouth to tell my mates to step back, but purple flames shot higher into the air.
Someone swore.
This was the end.
I closed my eyes, tears of fire streaking faster down my face. Ashes and smoke surrounded me.
There was no returning from this.
I’d lost all pretenses of control.
Even if my mates tried to activate their powers, it was too late. There was an order to things. Orion had to activate his powers first for all of us to be in tandem.
It was hopeless.
Icy pain streaked across my arm, and I looked down in slow motion. A blue crystal dagger was sticking out of my bicep.
Time stood still.
Silence wrapped around me like an icy blanket.
My aching arm cramped as it froze.
Iced over.
Cold streaked through my boiling veins like an electrocution of frost. I convulsed and tipped face forward.
My head slammed into hard rock, and blood splattered across my face as my nose shattered on impact.
I breathed roughly.
Mouth half-open and plastered against the rocks, I inhaled pebbles and grime. I didn’t care.
I no longer shook with a fever. My flames were extinguished.
Breathing greedily, I replaced the taste of ashes with fresh oxygen. The raw sensation of breathing fire still burned my lungs.
The flames that were pouring from my eyes turned to water. Tears felt cool against my fevered skin.
Hands grabbed my shoulders and hoisted me up.
The world tipped and spun.
Embers fell to the ground around me.
I coughed, and smoke exploded from my lips. I’d never felt so much like the dragon crest that represented the House of Malum.
The pads of my feet were raw.
My thighs cramped as I tried to support my weight, and I tipped forward.
This time, arms wrapped under my shoulders and caught me.
The silence was loud.
My skin crawled with the wrongness of the moment.
I’d lost control.
Everyone had seen me fail. I’d embarrassed my mates.
I hadn’t protected anybody.
Something jostled in my bicep, and I got a better look at the stalk of the crystal hilt that protruded from my skin. It was irregularly shaped.
A thin hilt stuck out, and a thick, flat blade was stuck inside me. It was almost paper-thin.
Arabella’s dagger was in my arm.
“You’re okay, I’ve got you, Corvus,” Scorpius whispered as he dipped his dark head low and kept his strong arms wrapped around me protectively.
I was a dead weight, but he supported me like I wasn’t seven feet of muscles.
His pale skin contrasted with my darker bronze, and the heady scent of bergamot calmed me.
Scorpius trailed his fingers across my forehead and wiped the sweat off my brow.
I relaxed against him.
There was something intoxicating about Scorpius because he was a Protector through and through. He’d been by my side since puberty, and he always picked me up. No matter how ugly things got, Scorpius was there.
“Relax against me, don’t worry,” he said as he carried me.
I leaned harder against him as I gasped with shaky lungs.
To the rest of the world, Scorpius was cruel. He liked pain and wasn’t afraid to tear a person to shreds. He was made of sharp edges, like the blade tattooed across my throat.
Weaker men were afraid of his energy because he was strength incarnate.
I turned my head. Rested my lips against the side of his neck and whispered, “Thank you,” so quietly that only he could hear.
His fingernails dug into my side and created little pinpricks of pain.
It had always been how he showed that he cared.
Digging his nails into skin was his way of saying I love you.
I moved my head infinitesimally so he could feel me nuzzle his neck, but nobody else would be able to tell what I’d done.
That was how Scorpius and I operated.
Over the years, we’d perfected the act of creating a show of strength at all times, while leaning on each other for support in a myriad of small ways. Little stolen touches. Just enough to calm our fire but not too much to drive us mad.
Since puberty we’d walked a tightrope.
But we walked it together.
“That was wild.” A raspy female voice brought me back to the present, and I realized I had an audience.