Ashes (Fire Within Series Book 3)

by Ella M. Lee

  Would I have been trapped there if you hadn’t woken up? I asked.

  I don’t know, he said. Perhaps, unless Ryan could find a way to get you out. It is possible I would have eventually emerged on my own, once the poison was gone. How long that might have taken, I have no idea. Days, weeks, years…

  I shuddered, and he shifted so that he could put an arm around me, drawing me close.

  Is everything okay now? Really? You’re completely fine? I asked.

  Yes. His tone was confident and reassuring. I repaired the damage to my sanctum. Irina healed me. I’m relieved that you were all smart enough to track me down.

  That was Dan, I said. It’s like you can read each other’s minds from anywhere. You knew to activate that tracker, and he knew you would.

  Daniel is incredible, he said. I never doubted him for a second. When I first saw visions of you… I thought that perhaps the two of you would end up together. I had resigned myself to that, actually. I was even pushing for it in the very beginning. I thought I could be happy with that. In truth, I likely would have been jealous. But yesterday, I was fairly certain I was going to die, and the only reason I could even consider leaving you was knowing that you had Daniel. Knowing he would love you and keep you safe.

  He ran a hand over my face gently. Tears slipped down my cheeks, his fingers hot against my damp skin.

  Don’t cry, lamb, he said. I simply need you to know how much I love you both, and how much I love that you love each other. There is no one else I could possibly share you with than Daniel, and I’m happy that you have one another.

  Daniel’s place in my heart is different from yours, I said. I don’t want to live without either of you, and I’m really hoping neither of you will have any more near-death experiences. I’m starting to think I’m bad luck for you.

  Hush, he said. We’ll all be fine. Powerful commanders are always at risk, but that’s why we surround ourselves with amazing people. Like you, my dearest Fiona.

  I leaned against him, and he held me as though he wanted nothing else. I didn’t mind; I was his, and he was mine.

  “Don’t you have a lab to manage and minions to order around?” I asked after another few minutes.

  “I don’t care.”

  I pulled back to look at him. I had never heard those words from him before. Nicolas always cared. He kept to strict schedules, was involved in all planning and research, and dedicated his entire life to making sure his group ran successfully. He attentively addressed every issue that crossed his path without fail.

  He smiled and kissed my forehead. “You are my main concern today.”

  “Jasmine came all the way here to help you,” I said. “You don’t care?”

  He shrugged. “I care, but I saw Jasmine last month. I do not need to rush to her side.”

  “You did?” I asked.

  He gave me a bemused look. “We had lunch at the beginning of December. It was on my calendar.”

  “You didn’t mention it.”

  “Because it was on my calendar.” Now his tone had wandered into sounding bemused too.

  I rolled my eyes. Nicolas’s calendar was a chaotic grid of overlapping colored blocks, half in Chinese and occasionally in French when he was writing quick notes to himself. I didn’t know how he found anything on it, and I never bothered to try. I certainly wasn’t combing it for the details of his personal appointments, and he should know that.

  Idiot.

  He frowned. “Would you mind clarifying your thoughts for me? I need some help figuring out your emotions right now.”

  I sighed. “Same.”

  I didn’t know what to say. Too much had happened in the past few days, and I couldn’t get a grip on a place to start. Should I begin with “tell me more about all those people you killed back in Smoke?” Or perhaps “why am I okay with loving you despite your bloody past?” Or “what do I do about my spoiled, aggravating brother rising from the dead and trying to murder us?” Or “how do I handle your extremely smart and beautiful friend showing up to help fix all your problems when I can’t?”

  None of those sounded easy—or even possible—so I said the first thing that came to mind.

  “You call Jasmine ma cherie.”

  The corners of his lips quirked into a small smile. “Yes, I do. I’ve called her that since we met. It’s my pet name for her, because she is dear to me.”

  His smile spread wider, catlike and amused. He ran his hand over my hair, along my neck, down my arm, and ended by twining his fingers in mine.

  “You are jealous,” he said.

  “A little, yes.” There was no point in lying to someone who could read minds.

  “I think I rather like this bit of possessiveness from you.”

  I planted my hands on his chest and shoved. He didn’t budge—he was too well trained for that—but he caught my wrists as I made to pull away. Gently, he brought my knuckles to his lips and kissed them. I avoided his gaze.

  “You let her touch you too,” I said, knowing I sounded pouty.

  I should have kept my mouth shut, but I was the type of anxious person who would ruminate over that forever if I didn’t tell Nicolas how I felt. I glanced at him and found his expression sad and distraught.

  He sighed. “Jasmine’s job was to take care of me after Smoke’s experiments. They would leave me a mess—burned, lacerated, bleeding, shaking, injured, in unbearable pain, barely able to breathe, completely broken. She would pick up the pieces. She would hold me and comfort me and heal me even though she wasn’t supposed to. I once watched my former commander beat her because she had given me water without his permission. She was kind beyond words, and because of that, she has always had my complete trust. For a long time, she was the only person I allowed to touch me freely.”

  Heat crept into my cheeks. I was ashamed. I knew how hard Nicolas’s captivity had been on him. He had never given me any exact details, but he’d alluded to it being terrible. I hated myself for being jealous of a bond formed fifteen years ago, when Nicolas needed it more than anything else, when it had literally saved his life.

  It was immature to be upset over this. Who was I to barge into his life and dictate how he should treat the woman who had been so close to him for so long? It was remarkable that the two of them weren’t together, given their obvious connection.

  Nicolas took my chin in his hand and tugged until I was looking at him again. “I promised that I wouldn’t hide my past from you anymore, so here it is,” he said. “I wanted to be with Jasmine quite a bit in those weeks after she rescued me, and she wanted to be with me. Despite that, I rejected her. Jasmine had committed herself to Verdant, and I had committed myself to Water. We were about to embark on very different paths, thousands of miles apart. She is sweet and kind, and I had no intention of subjecting her to the person I was back then.”

  I searched his eyes for details or emotion, afraid I would find longing or regret or pain, but there was none of that behind their beautiful golden glow.

  “You were… protecting her?” I asked.

  “From myself, yes,” he said. “I was a mess. I would only have hurt her. I owed both Jasmine and Ryan better than that. I am alive and sane because of them.”

  I crossed my arms over my chest. “And later? When you were better?”

  “Jazz and I were both very different by then,” he said. “I had no interest in trying to reconstruct my feelings for her, and she never brought the topic up again. We were both well settled into our lives. The two of us are happier apart, supporting each other as friends, working on our own goals.”

  “What are her goals?” I asked, curious how this woman had ended up making her life in Verdant when two of the men she loved most were in Water.

  “Jazz has an interesting job,” Nicolas said. “She rescues people from clans they don’t belong with. She takes people out of sticky situations and moves them to better ones. That often means taking them into Verdant, but sometimes other clans if she finds a better f
it. Jasmine likes helping people, and she’s very good at it. I was simply the very first person she helped.”

  I froze, shocked. It was rarely easy to switch clans—if possible at all—and it sounded like Jasmine took on the harder cases.

  Great. She’s beautiful, smart, nice, and the world’s best humanitarian. I felt more pitiful by the second.

  “Come here, lamb,” he said, frowning and opening his arms to me. “This is all so far in the past. It hardly matters now because I found you. I wouldn’t trade you for anything. Not the opportunities I had then, or any of the ones I have now.”

  “Really?” I asked, letting myself relax against him. “I don’t get it. Why me?”

  I was prepared for him to launch into one of his perfect, sweeping romantic speeches, but he simply tipped my chin up and kissed me deeply.

  “After yesterday, that question is an insult to us both,” he said. “I don’t want you wasting energy worrying about this. I need you focused on helping Dan sort out our new messes. I promise that I will be thinking about you all day, and I’m looking forward to coming home to you tonight.”

  “Yeah, me too,” I said. I took a deep breath, trying to shake off my mild annoyance. “How come you don’t call me ma cherie?”

  He smiled. “I don’t reuse nicknames. You would prefer something in French, then?”

  “Not necessarily. What is ‘lamb’ in French?”

  “Agneau,” he said, and despite his attempt to make the word sound sultry and sweet, it sounded a little strange. He grimaced. “Not so good. I will think up something to please you.”

  “I can think of other ways you could please me,” I said, running my fingers up the smooth slope of his neck.

  I was wistfully imagining all the things I wanted him to do to me—how I wanted him to hold me and touch me and run his lips over me, how I wanted to feel him inside me, pressing into me.

  A pleased shiver ran through him. “Truly?” he asked.

  I smiled. “Truly.”

  “I am very relieved to hear that. I wouldn’t blame you if you chose differently.”

  “I know,” I said. “I choose you. I’m still sorting out what I feel, and I still want to talk to you about it when we have time, but I want you. Really, I do. You are worth having. You are worth understanding.”

  He squeezed me tighter. “I will answer any of your questions. I will tell you whatever you want to know. Please… read my journal.”

  A pang of guilt shot through me. He had already given me insight into himself in the form of his journal from right after leaving Smoke, but it was sitting in my bedroom, untouched in its box.

  “I will, I promise,” I said. “I’m sorry. You trusted me with that, and I didn’t give it the seriousness it deserved.”

  He waved an elegant hand. “You couldn’t have known its meaning, especially when I wasn’t clear. It’s all right.”

  I sighed. I didn’t know if I believed him, but his positivity always inspired my own. So much had happened recently. Struggling through one thing after another was easier with his love and support, because I trusted Nicolas to get us through anything.

  Chapter 2

  Nicolas had enemies, which meant we all had enemies. Luckily, we were more than equipped to deal with them. Nicolas had assembled some of the best magicians in Water in his group. Even though half of those people technically belonged to Daniel after his promotion to commander, we still acted as one team behind the scenes.

  The mere thought of how competent the twelve of us were brought a smile to my face and eased the tangled knot of anxiety that often bloomed inside me.

  Especially lately, with all of us under pressure and Derek Douglass around to make himself a problem. I had hated him from the moment I saw him, back when I’d been Nicolas’s captive and Derek had offered to buy me. It was my good fortune that Nicolas had no interest in selling me, because Derek was everything I’d always thought Water commanders were—selfish and cruel and crazy.

  He’d bothered Nicolas in the past, but the mystery was: Why was he bothering Nicolas now? Most people annoyed Nicolas once and learned to never do it again. Just in the past few months, Derek hired my Flame group to assassinate Nicolas, antagonized Nicolas over me, conspired with a couple of members of Meteor about assassinating Nicolas, and we suspected he’d hired yet another Meteor Clan group to kidnap Nicolas and poison him.

  If this was the case, Derek seemed to have a death wish, and I could tell Nicolas would be happy to oblige the very next chance he got.

  If only we could track him down and verify what we knew, but that was proving difficult even for our team, whose intelligence was normally infallible.

  Especially when we had a man who could see the future.

  Now we had another potential player in the mix: Smoke Clan. Nicolas suspected that Smoke was behind the poison Mark had tried to use on him. We’d know more details soon enough, with Nicolas setting up a lab and preparing to study it.

  I was praying for a simple explanation and a simple resolution. We had real work to do, Nicolas’s true work: creating a new magical clan. Shatterfall. Everything else was a distraction, and I desperately wanted it gone.

  Easier said than done.

  It was afternoon. I was alone in my group’s huge meeting room on the thirty-sixth floor of the clan house. I could have been in my apartment just down the hall—or Nicolas’s or Daniel’s—but I liked the formality of this space. It had the huge windows and bright sunlight of the rest of the building, but none of the temptation to hide in bed and never get up again. The couches and chairs here were comfortable, but the huge whiteboard and magical stasis lockers and rows of boring books helped me focus.

  My phone chimed, alerting me to a message from Daniel.

  Meeting canceled tonight. Nicolas is tied up and I can’t get Farhad back yet. Reschedule for tomorrow.

  I sighed. By this time, everyone in our group knew what had happened the day before. Nicolas insisted on documentation, and the report had been collected and sent out an hour ago. I hadn’t read it yet; I wasn’t prepared to revisit what I had felt while rescuing Nicolas.

  My phone chimed again. Another message from Dan.

  Meet me at Teng’s place in 30 minutes.

  I sighed again. Being a lieutenant meant you got almost nothing done in one sitting because you were too busy being constantly interrupted by your commander. I had a list as long as my arm of things to do to prepare for Shatterfall and research our new threats, and I wouldn’t get through even one of them in the next thirty minutes.

  It was hard to keep focused even in an empty room. My mind was still reeling from seeing my brother, Mark, whom I had thought died at the hands of Meteor Clan eight years ago.

  Except no.

  Mark was alive. Mark was a Meteor commander. Mark had abducted Nicolas and tried to kill him. He’d been hired for reasons unknown to administer poison to Nicolas and wait for him to die.

  I had no idea what the hell was going on, and I was pretty ashamed of that.

  Shouldn’t I have known my brother was alive? Shouldn’t I have felt it somehow, as his sibling? Shouldn’t I have noticed it in my intense study of his clan? I was one of the magical world’s foremost outside experts on Meteor, yet I’d had no idea my own flesh and blood was hiding there.

  Why hadn’t he ever reached out to me? And why, why, why had he seemed unsurprised to see me standing over Nicolas, wielding Water magic?

  When I read Teng’s background check on Mark, it was like reading the life of a stranger. Each word made me angrier and angrier.

  His name wasn’t even Mark Ember anymore. Mark Ember’s life had indeed ended on that night in December eight years ago when he had faked his death. With the quick help of an old friend of Sylvio’s in Meteor, we had correlated the entrance of someone calling himself “Mark Mikhailov” into Meteor shortly after. A blurry picture confirmed him to be my brother under a new name.

  While I had been mourning his death and hunting d
own every scrap of information I could on his murderers, he had been rising through Meteor. While I had been spending my first couple of years settling into Flame, he had been working on getting promoted to lieutenant and then getting promoted to commander after that.

  Most Meteor commanders were self-interested and vain, caring for little beyond fucking around with mortals. According to Teng’s report, Mark was different, but not by much. His interests lay in taking jobs that amused and excited him. He and his small group were mercenaries who only took on the most compelling tasks from both their own clan and others. It seemed a lot like he was a thrill-seeker.

  That, at least, explained why he may have targeted Nicolas. He was fearless, and he had gotten paid to murder my boyfriend.

  I was livid.

  Not only that, but he had been very ready to kill me. If Nicolas hadn’t managed to get a shield up, I would have been dead from one of Mark’s attacks. It was jarring to stand before a person I had grown up with—a person I had helped raise—and watch him coldly throw magic that would have cut me in half. That only increased my ire toward him.

  Now our groups were on lockdown, deeply entrenched in piecing together the sequence of events. We had a lot of suspicions about Mark, Derek, and Nicolas’s abduction, but there were so many small pieces that didn’t make sense yet. That frustrated and infuriated me. I was used to being able to see the whole picture. My magical talent in Flame had been connecting the dots to form concrete images and intents of situations. It hadn’t carried over to Water in the same way, but I was confident my years of research could help me.

  More information would be great. I was waiting on Nicolas’s results with the poison, on Teng’s additional data about Mark and Meteor, and on information Irina could get from her connections among other clans.

  Until then, I was sitting here, annoyed, trying to figure out how to make myself useful.

  I sighed a third time—that was all the frustration I was allowing myself—and then went to cancel tonight’s meeting and set up a new time for tomorrow.