at his shirt, I smacked my arms against my sides as quickly as I could to snuff out the flames. They vanished, but they left my skin pink and prickling with a fresher pain.
Omen took one last swipe at the singed fabric around his neck and held the lantern out—to check my arms, I realized. To see how much damage I’d done to myself. He wouldn’t have bothered with that if he was sure I’d be kaput within the next few hours anyway, right?
“Look,” he said, his tone oddly less growly than before I’d set him on fire, “I’m not happy about this either. But you’ve just proven exactly why I can’t completely ignore the Highest’s warnings.”
“So you decided to haul me off to some desolate cave?”
“I need time to think and decide what to do without your fan club interfering.”
He meant the trio of shadowkind men he’d brought into this realm to help with his mission, who’d ended up more entwined in my life than I’d expected to let anyone get these days, let alone a bunch of monsters. But sweet Snap with his eerie demonic powers, sly Ruse with his incubus passion, and stoic Thorn with the haunted weight of his warrior angel past had made me feel like I was getting the better end of the bargain.
What did they make of all this? We’d barely had time to process Omen’s announcement that I was the supposedly fearsome being named Ruby that the Highest had spent decades searching for—and that it’d been their shadowkind lackeys and not vengeful mortal hunters who’d killed my parents and sent my fae guardian on the run with me—before Omen had grabbed me.
My trio had been obsessive about ensuring my safety even when I wasn’t doing anything riskier than walking down a street. Left without any idea where their boss had taken me or what might be happening to me there, they’d be frantic.
Unless they decided that if the Highest of the shadowkind were terrified of me, they were better off free of me too.
I wet my lips, my fingers curling into the coarse sheet that covered the mattress. My first urge was to keep snarking at the hellhound shifter, but that hadn’t been what had gotten through to him before. The time he’d let down his guard the most—the time he’d let himself indulge in that act of searing intimacy with me after swearing it would never happen—it’d been after I let go of the fight and simply been open and honest with him.
Back then, I’d told him I wasn’t scared of him. I’d told him I knew he cared about me. Maybe we knew things now we hadn’t back then, but I could summon some of that faith again.
Inhaling slowly, I forced my own temper to settle. “Do you really think I’m some huge threat to all existence?” I asked, holding Omen’s gaze. “That I’d destroy all the beings I’ve been risking my neck trying to save? That I could cause mass destruction on the scale the Highest are talking about?”
“I don’t know.” He considered me. “You warned me before. The fire inside you frightened you. Are you sure you couldn’t burn the realms down?”
At that question, I couldn’t help thinking back to the moments when we’d squabbled and the raging inferno had surged in my chest. Just remembering it called up a waft of that blaze. I didn’t like being trapped here—I didn’t like being betrayed by someone I’d been starting to care about. Somewhere in the depths of my being, a little prickling voice whispered, Burn. Burn it all. Burn the fuckers to the ground.
My lungs constricted. I willed that desire away, but the heady heat lingered, nibbling at the edges of my chest.
Was I totally confident that I could control it? No. Let’s be real—just a few minutes ago, I’d scalded myself with that power without meaning to.
Could I say it definitely wasn’t as big and bad as the Highest claimed? I didn’t want to think it was. But there’d been moments when I’d been able to picture leveling entire cities. Just how fiercely could those flames fly if I gave them free rein, if I let them build and build—?
The nibbling turned into a scorching gnawing. I dragged in another breath, dampening the inner fire as well as I could.
Omen was still studying me. The taut slant of his mouth suggested he’d been able to read a fair bit of my inner struggle. The fact that I