Page 163 of Ashes of Honor

“We can hate him later.” His voice cracked. “Right now, you have to get away from the area. You’re fueling him. Feeding his anger and rage. He’s a bomb waiting to explode with you here.”

Another scream shattered the air, raw and feral. Alexiares.

“I’m not … that’s not me. I?—”

It wasn’t me. I wasn’t angry anymore. Right now, I was numb.

“She’s not gone!” His words tore through the chaos, ragged and wild. “Let me go! Get off me or I swear to God I’ll fucking kill you too!”

Millie was there, her arms wrapped around him, trying to hold him back. “Alexi, stop! She’s?—”

“She’s not dead!” He broke, strength returning as he turned on her, a knife to her throat. Millie stood tall. Her body was beaten, battered, and bruised, hair tangled, lip busted—but she stood there, meeting his eye as he held her life in her hands, because she understood.

“Mywifeis not fucking dead,” he growled.

I couldn’t move. Alexiares’s pain crashed into me, a tidal wave of splintered emotion that left me drowning. “I can’t—” I whispered, my knees buckling.

“I know,” he said. “I know, Reina. But you have to keep going. Wehaveto keep going.”

How?was what I wanted to ask him. Ronan had won. Amaia had secured our freedom, but my father had still won. Amaia was gone. There was no happy ending for her. The life she wanted, the dreams she had, none of it mattered.

“I wish he died a more painful death,” I said, the words tumbling out unbidden. They tasted tangier than blood. “I hope he and Seth burn in hell forever.”

Hunter’s grip tightened. “I do too.”

Alexiares

The world crumbled beneath my feet. Literally, figuratively—it was all the same damn thing. Ash and charred flesh rained down around me, the sky an angry haze of smoke and flame. Fire seared along my arms, water seeped into the fractured asphalt, and the earth itself shuddered beneath me. The tremors echoed through my bones, unstable, fractured. Like me.

Yes. They would all suffer like me.

“No,” the word tore from my throat as a broken whisper. “She’s still in there …” I reached toward the end of the street, where the capitol building no longer rose in the distance.

Hands grabbed at me. Riley and Abel shouted words I did not care to hear over the roaring promise of death to them all roaring in my ears. I twisted violently, throwing Abel off first, then Riley.

“Get off me!” I howled, my voice cracking at the disgusting pitying stare on Millie’s face as she watched from steps away. “My wife!” I pointed at nothing, because she existed nowhere. “My … my fucking wife.”

I’d never said it out loud before—those words.My wife. The memory of our wedding day. The way she looked at me, soft and knowing, as we stood together on the same beach where I had first let her in. The warmth in those beautiful eyes as she whispered, “I want to be yours in every way that matters before we go.”

I hadn’t understood then. The glimpse of happiness that would be taken away. How I wouldn’t have the chance to put up a fight.

“She planned this,” I choked out as I stumbled to my knees. “She knew. She fucking knew, and she didn’t tell me. Didn’t warn me.”

“Alexi—” Riley’s voice was tight.

“She’snotgone!” I screamed, slamming my fists into the ground. The street cracked beneath me, fire erupting in jagged lines as an injured Covert soldier slipped into the pit I’d raised from hell. “She is not.”

The ground heaved from a secondary blast, a thunderous rumble tearing through the air as old gas lines exploded in the distance. My head whipped up at the sound. “No,” I breathed, my chest tightening as panic surged.

I was running before I realized it, my body acting on instinct, desperation driving me forward.

“Alexiares!” Riley’s voice rang out behind me. His footsteps pounded against the fractured pavement.

I didn’t stop. I couldn’t. I didn’t stop. I couldn’t. The world narrowed to a single thought, a single hope. My surroundings were a blur, the screams, the fire, the choking haze of ash. I vaulted over wreckage, my boots skidding on loose debris, ducking under twisted beams and through jagged gaps in the rubble. Pain clawed at my side, the metallic taste of blood sharp on my tongue, but I shoved it down.

We reached the crater where the capitol used to stand. The area was scorched black, smoke curling upward from the ruins. A hole gaped in the earth. It was wide. Endless—as if the world had swallowed her whole.

Riley stopped beside me, his chest heaving. Barely able to utter a whisper. “She’s gone.”

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