He was the fire

Selina’s POV

There is a particular kind of silence that settles not like peace, but like warning—a silence so deep, so calculated, so absent of breath or motion, that it hums against your bones as if the world is holding itself still, waiting for something to detonate.

It had been three days since Lucas last appeared in my world.

Three days without his voice in my ear, his name in my notifications, or his shadow stretching long across the edges of everything I tried to rebuild without him.

Three days of calm.

But it didn’t feel like calm.

It felt like the ocean before a tidal wave—still on the surface, deceptive in its quiet, but impossibly dense with pressure beneath.

And deep inside, beneath the armor I wear so flawlessly no one questions its integrity, I felt it gathering.

Not fear.

Not panic.

Just… tension.

A familiar one. One that wore his scent and moved like his wolf in the dark.

Vera stood across from me in the sun-drenched conference lounge, her fingers moving with silent precision across her sleek tablet, her expression as composed as always—but her eyes kept flicking to mine with a caution I recognized.

Because even she could sense it: something was off.

“We’ve run the protocols,” she said without being prompted, as if reading the question I hadn’t asked aloud. “No surveillance. No digital traces. Nothing from Grant’s network. Lucas hasn’t reached out to anyone, not even his inner circle.”

I nodded slowly, swirling the untouched glass of wine in my hand—an expensive vintage meant to taste like celebration but now coating my tongue with something sour and metallic.

Too quiet. Too perfect.

The kind of quiet that only comes before something deliberately violent.

“He saw them,” I said, my voice steady but lower than it had been moments before. “Jonathan. The child.”

Vera paused, then nodded. “He did.”

“He believes the lie.”

“Yes.”

“And yet…”

“He’s Lucas,” she finished for me.

That said everything.

Lucas Blackwood wasn’t a man who accepted what was handed to him unless he was too tired, too broken, or too strategic to argue.

And he was never tired. Never broken. Always calculating.

That night, after Damon had been tucked into bed—his soft breaths barely audible over the quiet hum of the city beyond the penthouse windows—and Jonathan had left with a kiss on the cheek and a look that said he still didn’t know the full truth, I stood in the center of my kitchen and stared at the glass in my hand like it might offer answers I couldn’t speak aloud.

I should have felt safe. The decoy had worked. Jonathan’s son had played his part.

And Lucas had walked away without so much as a question.

But the unease that had started as a whisper behind my sternum now pressed against my ribs like a caged thing, pacing, waiting for a door to swing open.

I moved to the floor-to-ceiling windows, the wine untouched, my reflection staring back at me with sharp eyes and a mouth too tight to smile.

I wasn’t made for peace.

I didn’t trust it.

Not when it came so easily from a man like Lucas.

The message came through at 11:47 PM.

A quiet chime on a locked channel.

Vera.

Just one line.

“Lucas met with Harlow. Archives. No request logged.”

Everything inside me went still.

Because Harlow was a name that belonged to a part of my history no one was supposed to access.

The Archives were where sealed records lived—medical, private, and classified.

If Lucas had gone there, it wasn’t for closure. It was for confirmation.

Which meant… He hadn’t believed the lie. Not completely. Not enough, and now he was searching again.

I didn’t move; I felt like pacing back and forth, but I couldn't.

I didn’t answer her text; I just stood there, one hand still gripping the stem of a crystal glass, the other curling so tightly into my side that my nails dug half-moons into my skin.

I felt the storm shift.

He was quiet—but it wasn’t surrender.

It was strategy. Lucas was watching, circling, and waiting.

And I had underestimated him.

The next morning, I stared across the city as the sun broke through steel clouds, lighting up the skyline in bruised gold, and I thought about the past—not the violence or the betrayal or the rejection, but the stillness that came after.

The days when my name no longer belonged to anyone but myself. The nights when I held my son close and whispered stories I’d made up from nothing, because the truth was too cruel to share.

And now, here we were again—only this time, I wasn’t the one being hunted.

I was the one who had built a castle of lies to protect something pure, something soft, something innocent.

But castles can burn.

And Lucas? Lucas didn’t bring matches. He was the fire.